It's a little hard to figure how Chuck Grassley feels about chances at winning a seventh term. On the one hand, Iowa's veteran Republican senator holds a solid 49-41 lead in the HuffPo polling average on his challenger, Democrat Patty Judge, and has clocked in above the 50 percent mark in five of the 10 polls publicly released to date. On the other hand, Grassley's never won re-election with less than 64 percent of the vote, so his current standing represents a remarkable career low.
But here's one tell that suggests Grassley isn't expecting his usual walk-over: He's airing a negative ad about his opponent, something he's almost never done before. In the spot, a narrator recounts how the state budget was "in shambles" in 2009 (thanks, of course, to the Great Recession, which goes unmentioned). But, she goes on, while the "governor, auditor, and secretary of agriculture voluntarily cut their pay 10 percent," Judge "refused to cut her $103,000 salary by even a penny." The problem for Judge is that this is in fact true. At the time, Judge defended the decision by saying her salary was still lower than that of other state officials even after theirs were cut. That may well have been so, but that's a hard thing to explain to voters who earn a lot less than six figures—especially if they got laid off during that time.
And that's why Judge isn't challenging Grassley's argument. Instead, she issued a press release saying that Grassley had accepted a pay raise in 2009 and continued to draw a paycheck during the government shutdown he supported in 2013. This is good pushback, but a statement emailed to reporters won't be enough. Judge will need to find a way to neutralize Grassley and put him on the defensive, and that's going to mean running ads of her own. Unfortunately, though, she has just $228,000 in the bank compared to the incumbent's enormous $5.9 million war chest. But if Grassley's feeling like he needs to go on the offensive, then perhaps this race will become competitive enough for outside groups to come to Judge's aid and help balance out this disparity.
We can help close the gap, too. Please send $3 to Patty Judge today.