Rep. Steve King, the Iowa congressman with a long history of racist and outrageous remarks, faces a serious Republican threat on Tuesday night.
The primary challenge to King is the fiercest since he was first elected to Congress in 2002, and came after he was stripped of his committee assignments in the House last year because of comments to The New York Times about white nationalism.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” he asked a reporter then.
The loss of his committee posts reduced King’s power in the House — a fact his four Republican opponents seized on in the campaign.
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“The 4th District needs a seat at the table, an effective conservative voice,” state Sen. Randy Feenstra, regarded as the leading GOP challenger, said in a debate last month.
Feenstra had a massive money advantage against King and the other candidates. He poured over $230,000 into TV ads, and outside groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads and outreach on his behalf. His campaign reported having over $120,000 in cash on hand in the latest reporting period, while King had $32,000.
In an op-ed in the Sioux City Journal in May, King called the primary “the epicenter of the battle against the swamp right now. I can face the swamp down because we’re right and they’re wrong and they know it.”
Meanwhile, during the coronavirus, more people are mail-in voting in the primary than in the last cycle. According to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office, over 59,000 absentee ballots had been received by Tuesday. A total of 39,000 people voted in the GOP primary in 2018.
King, 71, had been enormously popular in his rural highly conservative district, but that waned in recent years as some constituents became frustrated with his frequent outrageous comments.
King’s compared undocumented immigrants to “dirt” and “bird dogs,” and called for building an electrified fence at the south U.S. border.
King, who used to keep a Confederate flag on his office desk, has also repeatedly lamented the declining white birth rate, and tweeted in 2017 that, “Diversity is not our strength.”
While arguing in favor of abortion bans that do make exceptions for rape and incest last year, he said rape and incest have been essential to the survival of humanity.
While King had won his earlier general election races by an average of ten percentage points, he won his last race against Democrat J.D. Scholten in 2018 by just three points. The well-funded Scholten ran unopposed in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.
