On Friday, former Iowa Lt. Gov. Patty Judge announced that she would challenge Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley. Even a few weeks ago, a campaign against the six-term senator would have looked beyond hopeless. While Iowa is a swing state that’s backed Democrats in six of the last seven presidential elections, Grassley has never won re-election with less than 60 percent of the vote. But that was before Senate Republicans joined hands to prevent Barack Obama from filling Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat.
As the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley is no minor player in this fight. Judge specifically cited Grassley’s refusal to even grant the president’s eventual nominee a hearing, saying that Grassley has “waited 36 years to become the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and now he’s refusing to do his job. That is not the Chuck Grassley that I knew 10 or 15 years ago and it’s not the thing Iowans want to see from their senator.”
While swing state and national polls show that voters generally are unhappy with the GOP’s blockade, there’s no doubt that Judge has a very tough task ahead of her. Grassley has earned respect for maintaining close ties to his constituents: Grassley makes it a point to visit all 99 of Iowa's counties every year, for example. The senator had $4.4 million in the bank at the end of 2015, while Judge will need to start from scratch. Judge also needs to deal with state Sen. Rob Hogg in the June primary first. While Hogg has been running for months with little fanfare, he still has the support of many of his colleagues (including the state Senate president and majority leader), and he’s given no indication that he plans to step out of the way for Judge.
A pair of polls were released shortly before Judge’s announcement looking at Grassley’s approval rating, and they send mixed signals. On behalf of The Des Moines Register, Selzer and Co. gave Grassley a strong 57-28 approval. While Grassley’s standing is down from the 64-22 percent rating he posted a year ago, most senators would still kill for those numbers. But PPP, polling on behalf of the liberal group Americans United for Change, paints a very different picture. They give Grassley a 47-44 score, and find that Iowans agree by a 56-40 margin that “[t]he vacant seat on the Supreme Court should be filled this year“ instead of “ left empty for the next year.” (The approval ratings question was asked first). It’s worth noting that PPP usually gives politicians lower ratings than most other pollsters. However, a December PPP survey, conducted without a client, gave Grassley a 53-33 approval rating.
It’s too early to tell if the fight over the Supreme Court has really transformed this senate race, or if Grassley will just walk to another easy win. Judge also is untested: While she won two terms as state agriculture commission in 1998 and 2002 (in Iowa, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run on the same ticket), winning a Senate seat is completely different. But there’s no doubt that this issue has introduced a lot of unpredictability to what was a backwater contest. Grassley himself hasn’t needed to face a tough race since he unseated Democratic incumbent John Culver in 1980. Some politicians are able to run great campaigns despite being decades out of practice but others, most notably ex-Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, end up making amateurish mistakes.
It’s also worth noting that no one has actually run ads against Grassley yet to tie the senator to his reviled colleagues in DC. Grassley is used to decades of positive press, and we’ll need to see how well he holds up once Democrats actually attack him. There’s also the small matter of the presidential race threatening to upend everything for the GOP. Grassley memorably introduced Donald Trump at a rally; if Trump becomes Team Red’s standard-bearer and he’s as toxic as many Republicans fear he will be, Democrats won’t need to work hard to tie link Grassley to him. Judge has a lot to prove, but the ingredients are here for a competitive race. As a result, Daily Kos Elections is changing our outlook from Safe Republican to Likely Republican.