The Man Who Would Beat King

Can a Big Ag–bashing minor league baseball player take down Congress’ most ardent white nationalist? Not if Republicans get him first.

- Tim Murphy

On a Sunday evening in mid-November, J.D. Scholten stood in the Swaledale, Iowa, City Hall and spoke, as he often does, about sandwiches. Scholten, a Democratic candidate for Congress in the state’s once reliably red 4th Congressional District, was in the midst of a series of town halls he called the “Don’t Forget About Us” tour, often making several stops a day in communities with fewer than 1,000 residents. About three dozen people were packed into the building’s only room, wood-paneled space with paintings along the wall and a sagging ceiling that the 6-foot-6 Scholten could almost scrape with his perfectly bald head. Swaledale (population 158) was the smallest town he went through that day, and like most places he’d visited, it no longer had a grocery store.

“If you go from Sioux City and take the next three towns east on Highway 20,” he said, sketching a picture of the district for the crowd, “three of those have lost their grocery store in the last five years, and two of them have gained Dollar Generals.” Heads began to nod. “If you want a BLT in Correctionville, Iowa,” he continued, “you either have to grow your own tomato or drive into Sioux City to get one.”

At three stops over five hours, Scholten returned to the same themes—the rise of Dollar General, the exodus of young people, the pork monopolies, the Go- FundMes for cancer patients, the grain elevators that couldn’t stay open without immigrant workers. But there was one subject Scholten almost never brought up: Steve King, the nine-term white nationalist Republican incumbent he’s trying to unseat.