White supremacist Rep. Steve King picked up a foe in next year’s Republican primary on Wednesday when state Sen. Randy Feenstra announced that he would challenge the incumbent in western Iowa's 4th Congressional District. Feenstra argued that Donald Trump “needs effective conservative leaders in Congress who will not only support his agenda, but actually get things done,” saying King no longer fits the bill. Rather, Feenstra declared, King’s “caustic nature has left us without a seat at the table.”
Feenstra may be right, but it’s not the first time a dissatisfied Republican legislator has risen up to take on King: In 2016, then-state Sen. Rick Bertrand did just that, but not too surprisingly, King won that battle by a convincing 65-35 margin. However, there’s reason to think that Feenstra might be a stronger opponent than his old legislative colleague was.
Bertrand entered the race less than three months before the primary and raised very little cash in that short timeframe. Feenstra is starting considerably earlier, and as the chair of the influential tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, he likely has access to far more influential donors.
Notably, Feenstra has also signed on Matt Leopold, a well-connected operative who was GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds' political director during her successful 2018 re-election bid, another indication that the senator is capable of running a serious race. In addition, the Iowa Republican Party quickly announced it would remain neutral, which could be seen as a blow to King since, as The Guardian's Ben Jacobs notes, the state party has taken quite a hostile stance toward potential Trump challengers.
King's own position, meanwhile, seems to have gotten weaker since his easy 2016 win, as evidence by the remarkably complacent campaign he ran against Democrat J.D. Scholten last year. The incumbent raised very little money and allowed Scholten, who tapped into King-hating donors from across the country, to have the airwaves to himself for weeks. King only began running his first TV ad about a week-and-a-half before Election Day―a spot that was lazily recycled from his 2014 campaign.
What King was doing rather than running ads was rubbing shoulders with international white supremacist candidates and hate groups. This included an August meeting with the far-right Austrian Freedom Party—which has historical ties to the Nazi Party—that King took during a trip to eastern Europe. Gallingly, that junket was paid for by a Holocaust memorial group.
During this same trip, King also gave an interview to a website allied with the Freedom Party where he asked what diversity brings to America "that we don't have that is worth the price?” adding, “We have a lot of diversity within the U.S. already." King also used that same interview to call Jewish philanthropist George Soros a force behind the so-called "Great Replacement," a conspiracy theory prevalent on the far-right that white Europeans are being deliberately "replaced" by people of color in a scheme fomented by Jews.
While congressional Republicans and King's donors had tolerated his racism for years with at most just minor rebukes, they finally went a bit further than usual in the days leading up to the election. Even NRCC chair Steve Stivers, who just a day after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre defended the anti-Semitic ads his committee had been running elsewhere, tweeted out a condemnation. Stivers declared that King's "recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate." He added, "We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior."
While King’s dalliances with the David Duke set might not ordinarily have turned off voters in this very conservative district, they unquestionably did him harm, perhaps because he gained a reputation as a showboater more concerned with his international standing among fascists than with the folks back home in western Iowa. We know this because, in the end, King turned back Scholten by just a 50-47 margin.
That showing was not only the weakest general election performance of King’s career, it represented a steep dropoff from Trump’s 61-34 victory in Iowa’s 4th District in 2016. Reynolds also carried the seat by a wide 59-39 margin during her successful re-election campaign for governor while King was only scraping by, another sign that plenty of otherwise reliably conservative voters had tired of King.
Still, it’s far too early to write King’s political obituary. To begin with, there’s reason to think that the district’s GOP base is still on his side. A Siena poll for the New York Times taken just before Election Day last year found that, while King had an underwater 45-46 approval rating among the district’s likely voters, he posted a very strong 78-14 score among registered Republicans. (That same survey found King leading Scholten 47-42, very close to his margin of victory days later, so it seems to have done a good job modeling the local electorate.) King also has always had a following among the area’s influential social conservatives, which could make all the difference in a primary.
King’s antics are also unlikely to alienate Trump, and a single tweet could help the incumbent shore up his support at home. King also seems to have realized early that he can’t ignore his district again and hope to stay in office: After spurning voter meetings for years, he announced shortly before Feenstra got in that he’d be holding town halls in each of the district’s 39 counties.
