Welcome to a Tuesday morning edition of Progress Report.
I was up late last night working on a few big stories and watching our rapid descent into totalitarianism. But why not start off the day with something more optimistic?
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On Sunday I was joined by Iowa state Rep. and Sioux City Explorers pitcher JD Scholten for a live conversation about his just-launched campaign for US Senate, rural economic populism, and what dudes are thinking. You can watch the whole conversation at the top of the newsletter.
The 45-year-old Scholten is a busy guy — he linked in from a minor league ballpark in Wisconsin a few hours before the day’s game — but that’s nothing new for the grassroots favorite. Neither is waging an underdog campaign against an entrenched incumbent who has a tendency to say idiotic things.
Scholten initially earned national recognition in 2018 by relentlessly touring western Iowa in a used Winnebago during his unexpectedly and heroically close campaign for Congress against former Rep. Steve King, the avowed white nationalist. He fell just three points shy of a shocking upset despite receiving little help from the national party, a near-miss that nonetheless led to King’s demise; Republicans isolated King in Congress and then finished him off during their 2020 primary.
Elected to the state legislature a few years later, Scholten is the only Democrat to represent deep red northwest Iowa. He attributes the success to his populist instincts and deep Iowa roots, including grandfathers who owned a seed shop and a grandmother who lived on a farm her entire life. Those insights have been key to bridging political and ideological divides, especially as the Democratic Party base has become increasingly more urban, college-educated, and socially liberal.
“Both parties have failed on things like antitrust, things that I'm absolutely passionate about,” he says. “So it’s being able to go and talk to folks, especially in these communities that have been so reliant on agriculture to say, ‘Hey, listen, I know you're being squeezed on the input side and on the market side. I know that the only ones making money off of this are huge multinational corporations.’ I get my foot in a lot of doors when it comes to that.”
Last week, Scholten launched his Senate campaign early in response to Sen. Joni Ernst’s telling a constituent worried about the cuts to Medicaid that “we’re all going to die” someday. He’s now building out the operation, which he bases on three core principles (and promises):
Fight for universal healthcare
Fix the economy so it works for everyone
Secure democracy from the special interests and the billionaires that are dictating it.
The shorthand helps him communicate what should be a pretty universally agreeable platform, accessible even to his teammates on the Explorers, who are often half his age, making less than minimum wage, and entirely disinterested in politics. Spending hours each day talking to the guys in the independent league team’s clubhouse is a kind of field research for Scholten, who returned to the mound last year after stepping away from a pitching career that saw him play in the College World Series for the powerhouse Nebraska Cornhuskers.
“What I noticed last summer after not playing professionally baseball for 17 years, my teammates are far more accepting and progressive ideas and progressive policies than my teammates were 17 years ago,” he says. “However, they're more likely to vote Republican. They're just not being talked to by our party.”
Conversations about his other life in politics often leads to this basic question: “You’re a normal dude, why are you a Democrat?”
That gives him an opening to pitch himself, and the party, as the party of working class Americans. Democrats just need to prove him right.
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