COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Democrats have been thinking a lot of late about how to be more authentic.
Since the disastrous results of last November, the party’s been brooding over why Republicans now seem to have significantly more success appealing to working-class voters, rural voters, Black and brown voters, young voters and especially young male voters — basically all voters who aren’t relatively well-off and well-educated and clustered in or close to cities, coasts or college towns. I’ve talked this year to dozens and dozens of Democratic operatives, elected officials and aspiring candidates, and it’s safe to say they’re tormented by what their brand’s become. “We’re failing across the board because fundamentally the Democratic Party is a machine that is built by a bunch of Ivy League grads to talk to a bunch of Ivy League grads,” said a Democratic consultant to whom I granted anonymity “because I don’t know how to say this in a way that won’t ruin my career.”
It’s just as clear that they also don’t know what to do about finding this elusive “authenticity,” which is why there’s been such a glut of memo-talk and press-release-ese — pols, pollsters and pundits unironically recommending the party “authentically enter conversation in non-political spaces,” “disseminate and test high-quality, meme-friendly content,” and “get out of elite circles and into real communities” like “gun shows,” “local restaurants” and the like. “You have a bunch of Democrats who are very good at speaking a whole bunch of different languages, and human isn’t one of them,” longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me.
“How do Democrats talk to normal people?” Deja Foxx, the 25-year-old activist and digital strategist who ran for Congress in the recent special election in Arizona, told me. “Well,” she said, “maybe if we ran more normal people.”
There aren’t too many places where the need to run “normal people” is more important to Democrats’ fortunes than Iowa. This traditional hub of the American political process, which has done little but become steadily more red over the past decade-plus, is exactly the type of terrain in which Democrats are not going to survive unless they can present candidates who appear less like they were engineered in some party laboratory and more like bona fide products of the particular culture of Iowa. And the state’s Democratic primary for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Republican Joni Ernst emerged over the course of this summer as a perfect case study of just what might happen if voters had a fistful of seemingly authentic candidates from which to pick. The field felt almost like an authenticity-off.
On the list: Nathan Sage, 40 — a former soldier, screen printer and mechanic and politics novice, a self-described “child of a trailer park” who said in his launch video he was “gonna kick” Ernst’s “ass”; Zach Wahls, 34 — an Eagle Scout from Iowa City who at 19 years old in 2011 defended his two mothers and his family at the state capitol in a speech that became one of the first truly viral political videos and is now a state senator and a brand-new dad who favors work boots and trucker hats bearing seed-company logos; and Jackie Norris, 55 — a former Iowa adviser for Barack Obama, a former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, a former teacher and a current school board member in Des Moines and a mother of three sons including two attending military academies.
Of the first four in, though, the one I found in this respect perhaps most compelling was 45-year-old J.D. Scholten, the “baseball-playing, monopoly-busting, beer-drinking, Bible-reading, working-class prairie populist,” as he likes to say, a state representative from Sioux City who just about beat the incendiary Steve King by barnstorming in an RV in his run for Congress in 2018 and now helps run a Substack called “You’re Probably Getting Screwed.” While the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and affiliated Washington-based associations rolled out a so-called “Organizing Summer” of “activations” at “sporting events” and on “social media platforms,” Scholten was spending interminable bus rides playing cards, chopping it up and sharing idiotic Yeti and Jeffrey Epstein reels with his fellow Sioux City Explorers of the American Association of Professional Baseball — a slice of 20-something manhood that mostly has turned its back on the Democratic Party. If this wasn’t a kind of quirky, real-world application of the D.C. jargon of “authentically” having “conversation” in “real communities” instead of “elite circles,” well, what the heck was? So I went to spend some time with Scholten in July.
But that was before a fifth candidate got into the race in August. Josh Turek, 46, was born with spina bifida. He’s a four-time wheelchair basketball Paralympian and a two-time gold medalist. He’s a state rep, too, and a state rep who initially won his seat here in his Trump-supporting city and district by knocking on door after door — sometimes by scooting up steep stoops while dragging his wheelchair with him. Turek’s entry presented a specific challenge for Scholten. Their sports-centric biographies had helped them compete in areas of the state where Democrats typically struggle to do so. And these shared experiences made them not just political pals but actual friends. Turek’s arrival, however, also complicated this Democratic battle of authenticity — by introducing a potential variable of national political interference that seemed in some ways the very antithesis thereof.
Which is why one August evening I met with the two of them in a Council Bluffs bar. Scholten tucked his 6-foot-6-inch frame into a booth toward the back of Barley’s on Broadway. Turek rolled up and slid out of his wheelchair and into the space beside him. Scholten, in a three-quarter-sleeve, baseball-style shirt and an American flag cap, ordered an Easy Eddy IPA. Turek, in a navy-blue polo and light gray slacks, did the same. “Cheers,” Turek said.
Could they, I asked, help solve the Democrats’ authenticity problem?
“I don’t know about solve,” Scholten said, “but I’ll say that I think we both come from such similar backgrounds …”
“They can’t necessarily define us as being politicians because we both have spent the majority of our life playing sports,” Turek said. “There’s an authenticity, a genuineness, that I think has been lacking in our party.”
That might be right, but there was no getting around the political truth that this race realistically could accommodate only one of them — and that Scholten was getting out just as Turek was getting in. Scholten was set to leave the bar and head to a nearby event to end his campaign and endorse Turek’s. “We can’t sit idly by while health care is ripped from millions of Americans. Understanding this, I believe that there’s no better Democrat in Iowa to talk about health care issues than my friend,” Scholten had said in a statement earlier in the day. Turek had issued a standard-issue statement of his own: “I am honored to have the support of J.D.” All of it added up to the stilted result of an uncomfortable détente that had been in the works for weeks. “I want to stress,” Scholten wrote on his Instagram, “this is a decision of my own accord.”
It’s not how many people associated with the other campaigns saw it. They detected, though they could not outright confirm, subtle meddling from afar — telltale machinations of the DSCC in Washington and a senator from New York (Minority Leader Chuck Schumer). If, in other words, a deciding factor in the makeup or even outcome of a race was still the support of party officials as much as or more than any grassroots enthusiasm of the rank-and-file, what did that say about all the talk of authenticity? Turek, Scholten and what was unfolding here — was it part of the solution, I wondered, or to some extent, too, proof of the problem? Turek nursed his beer. Scholten ordered another.
“It’s not a narrative of getting behind him for whatever reason other than I think he’s a great candidate,” Scholten said. “That’s the narrative. That’s why I’m doing this. There’s no other reason.”
“It’s a selfless act as well,” Turek said. “It’s kind of sad that people have to be so cynical about everything, that this can’t just be about friendship,” he said. “This doesn’t have to be this dog-eat-dog world where we’re all trying to eat each other and playing nefarious games.”
Things seemed simpler in the middle of the summer. Scholten was sort of running for the Senate by playing baseball for the Sioux City Explorers, the latest stop in a career that has spanned most of his adult life. “Deep canvassing,” “relational organizing,” focus-grouping — these political tactics and terms — he was in a sense doing some more organic version of all of it in the dugout, in the clubhouse and on those never-ending bus trips. He sat sweating one afternoon in the bullpen of the ballpark in Sioux City and tried to explain his unorthodox M.O.
“For the Democratic Party, we have to do a better job of connecting with people — with people who are not consistently Democratic voters,” Scholten told me. “Every single fan here tonight, I feel like I can talk politics with them, whether they’ll always vote for me or never vote for me or everywhere in between. And I feel like I’m an outlier in the Democratic Party who can do that,” he said. “And my teammates are the best way of bouncing ideas. They don’t know I talk politics with them every single day.”
“Are you phrasing things in certain ways,” I asked, “because you’re listening to how they phrase things?”
“A hundred percent,” he said, citing subjects from the cost of housing and health care to Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. “So a lot of them — the Epstein files — they come from a conspiratorial online-ness because it comes in their algorithm. I come from the idea that the rich have too much power in this country, and there’s two Americas — the rich and powerful, and the rest of us.”
“They get away with shit,” I said, “and we don’t.”
“Exactly,” he said. His teammates listen to him, Scholten said, not because he’s a Democrat, or a state rep, or a candidate for this or that office but because he’s one of them. “And so when I start saying it from my point of view, they’re like, ‘Oh yeah …’”
Sarah Stein Lubrano recently wrote a book about exactly the thing Scholten is already doing. “When people radically change their political views (for better or worse), they often do so because of relationships and friends they have. For this reason, it is not so much ideas or arguments that change our political worldview as other people,” Lubrano wrote this year in Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds. “We should talk about politics,” she wrote, “but the key challenge is not the conversation but the relationship.” Similarly, David Litt, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama in the White House, just put out a book about trying to find common political ground with his Joe Rogan-fan brother-in-law — not by pushing policy papers at him but by surfing with him. “I’ve learned so much more about politics because we were just hanging out than I would have learned if I was, like, ‘Hey, can I focus group you?’” Litt told me. “Proximity is persuasion,” he said. A politician, a pollster and a researcher earlier this year as part of a $20-million initiative released a “strategic plan” offering morsels of counsel to Democrats: “Super charge social listening,” “deep-dive qualitative ethnographic research,” and so on. It was called “Speaking with American Men.” And here was Scholten, his coffers a scant fraction of the sum of the budget of “Speaking with American Men” … speaking with American men.
Scholten is not the only Democrat trying to figure out the way to persuade voters that they’re actually real people and not automatons. But the examples are few and the varied approaches prove for most Democrats just how troublesome the challenge remains. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg mixed it up for three hours in “enemy territory” on the “bro” comedy podcast called Flagrant. Texas state representative James Talarico and California Rep. Ro Khanna clocked in two hours on Joe Rogan’s and Theo Von’s popular shows, respectively. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore shot-gunned a beer at a football tailgate. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken to trolling Trump on what used to be Twitter by explicitly parodying the odd but undeniably effective rhetoric of his political rival.
Scholten’s plan of action, though, plainly had its limits. Some of what scored him authenticity points — “I’m not a politician who plans things,” he told a reporter from the New York Times when he announced his candidacy the first week of June with next to no staff and a video that was essentially a selfie — also made it hard to stand up the sufficient scaffolding of a serious candidacy. People who work in and around politics frequently say they want more “regular” people to run, but it’s hard to be a “regular” person and do that, and then keep doing it, cycle after cycle. And Scholten, with his modest monthly income as a state legislator and low-level pro baseball player, was feeling increasingly anxious about his narrowing margin for error. More importantly, his fundraising was conspicuously thin. Sage in the second quarter brought in some $700,000, Wahls a smidge less and Scholten only $175,000, with all of them trailing Ernst. It was hard calling donors, Scholten admitted, while running wind sprints, throwing practice pitches and busing as far south as Texas and as far north as Winnipeg.
And yet his teammates vouched for his approach. One of the other pitchers told me that last year he wrote in Scholten for his vote for president. “He’s never preaching to you,” Jared Wetherbee said. “It’s not like he’s trying to push his political views. It’s just a conversation,” added Nate Gercken, another pitcher for the Explorers. “He just sounds like one of the guys talking.” I asked one of the team’s best hitters if he’d vote for Scholten if he could. “Goddamn right,” said 25-year-old Zac Vooletich from San Antonio, telling me he and Scholten share “nonsense” Yeti and Epstein memes. “He throws baseballs, he drinks beer, he’s for the working man — you know what I mean?”
After one of the games I saw in Sioux City I met up with Scholten at a cash-only dive bar called the Miles Inn (“Coldest Beer in Siouxland!”). He ordered a loose meat sandwich and a Coors Banquet.
“What’s clear to me is when Democrats lose the economic populist messaging, we lose races,” he told me. Hillary Clinton? Kamala Harris? Chuck Schumer? Nancy Pelosi? Hakeem Jeffries? “You look at Hillary, we didn’t win the economic populist message. Kamala, we didn’t,” he said. “And you look at who are the Democratic leaders, whether it’s Schumer and Pelosi or Schumer and Jeffries, they’re not Midwesterners,” he said. His implication was clear: Midwesterners in his mind can connect better on the issues that matter.
“When I first was able to vote, the majority leader in the Senate was a Democrat in South Dakota,” Scholten said. “We had a Democrat in Missouri. We had Democrats from North Dakota. And now …” He finished his sandwich and ordered another Coors.
The most authentic political origin stories tend to be the ones not conjured in some D.C. candidate workshop. And a couple days after our talk at the Miles Inn I was all the way on the other side of Iowa because Scholten was too. A couple dozen people gathered in a room in a brewery in Dubuque.
“So,” Scholten said, “who am I?”
He was born in Ames because his dad was an assistant baseball coach at Iowa State. He moved to Sioux City as a boy because his father became the head baseball coach at what was then Morningside College. He played basketball and baseball in high school and had some options after graduation but decided to go to Morningside mainly to play for his dad. He transferred as a senior to the University of Nebraska and helped the Cornhuskers get to the College World Series. He bounced around the nether, far-flung rungs of pro ball — Sioux City, Canada, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the Pacific Northwest, even a series of games in Cuba. In the winters he sometimes worked in bookstores. He moved to Seattle where he was a paralegal. And he pitched as he got older in an adult league in Minnesota, where he was caring for his dying grandmother, who urged him to move back home to tend to the family farm — and that in short is how he ended up as an almost accidental entrant into politics.
Scholten’s longshot congressional bid in Iowa’s overwhelmingly Republican 4th District in 2018 was also how his and Turek’s paths crossed. Scholten was campaigning by roving Iowa’s northwest counties in a Winnebago he christened “Sioux City Sue,” stopping only to eat, meet and greet, or sleep outside Walmarts. Turek, who was training between the Paralympics in Rio De Janeiro of 2016 and Tokyo in 2021, was intrigued. He went to see Scholten at a town hall in Harrison County, and the turnout in an area that was deep red was surprisingly good. “And I just thought, ‘Man, we’re similar in story, we’re similar in age, we’re similar in background,’ and I thought he was articulate and smart, and I thought was talking about the kitchen-table issues in a similar way,” Turek told me the first time we talked. “Maybe,” he said he thought, “this is something I could also do.”
After Scholten lost to Steve King by only three points in 2018, and then again to Randy Feenstra by significantly more in 2020, he ran for his local seat in Sioux City in the state house in 2022 and won. So, too, in a city and district Trump had won, did Turek in Council Bluffs — by six votes. During the legislative session the two of them joked that they were the “western coalition.” It was funny because it was just two guys drinking beers. But the commonalities went well past politics. They were both from small, working-class, oft-forgotten cities — distant in not just miles but vibes from the larger urban nodes of Des Moines or even Cedar Rapids as well as the more liberal academic bastion of Iowa City. And what baseball was for Scholten wheelchair basketball was for Turek. Scholten unexpectedly rejoined his hometown Explorers last summer and pitched well — a resurgence after 17 seasons away from the team that was so surprising the Baseball Hall of Fame asked for his jersey and hat. Turek, meanwhile, had been a wheelchair basketball star at Southwest Minnesota State and played professionally internationally and as a member of the national team won gold medals in Brazil and Japan before finally retiring and considering what might come next.
“There’s an understanding and an empathy to what the working-class folks are going through that I can connect with that maybe some people that have won the genetic lottery maybe don’t have the ability to do,” Turek told me. And it’s hard to argue with how he won his state house seat. Campaigning in hilly Council Bluffs, the first thing he usually heard from surprised homeowners who answered the door, he told me, was: “How in the world did you get up here?” The second: “Politicians are full of shit.” Turek’s answer? “I’m something different. And you can see by me crawling up here and talking to you.”
So this past spring Scholten had two tickets to Jack White’s concert across the Missouri River from Council Bluffs in Omaha. He asked Turek if he wanted to go. Both of them were considering Senate runs. A couple days before, they had spoken to a reporter from the Des Moines Register. Turek said he was “kicking the tires.” Scholten’s assessment: “If Schumer is still leader, I don’t know if I’m as interested.” Before the concert they sat at a sports bar and talked. “I was trying to convince him to run,” Scholten told me. “Deep in my heart,” he said, “I knew one of us should run, and it would be a huge mistake if neither one of us would.” After the show they sat on Turek’s deck and drank Redbreast whiskey. “We talked more about sports than we talked about politics,” Turek recalled. “We actually,” he said, “spent a lot of time that evening just talking about the end of a career and being able to make that transition in a healthy way.”
But by late July, Scholten was running, and so was Sage, and so was Wahls. Turek still was not. At the brewery in Dubuque, I listened to Scholten talk about how he thought about politics.
“What I’ve been able to do is focus on what I call the B’s and the S’s — the bartenders, the baristas, the barbers, the stylists and the servers — those are all people who talk to other people,” he told the small gathering. “It is shocking for me that there’s so many campaigns where candidates talk mostly to donors and consultants. We have to talk more to people, and not just Democrats — we have to talk to everybody and figure a way to welcome them into our coalition,” he said.
“Our campaign,” he said, “will be different.”
For Scholten, it started to fall apart in Lincoln.
The first Friday of August the Explorers were playing the Saltdogs at the same stadium where Scholten had pitched as a college senior. Turek had asked to come meet, and Scholten said to find him by the bullpen 45 minutes before the first pitch. He was in his baseball uniform and getting ready when Turek arrived. Turek told him he was running. “We were just talking about the campaign in an organic way of: ‘Here’s what I’m going to do, here’s kind of my schedule, here’s what I’m looking at, here’s some of the team members that I’ve got,’” Turek told me. Scholten told me a similar version: “I had a small window to have this conversation, which probably needed to be a much larger conversation. But I think, ultimately, we did a good job just cutting to the chase and just talking about what his campaign’s going to look like, and so I was just trying to ask questions to see, I guess — for lack of a better term, to see his hand,” he said. “I was just asking him to see if, oh, are you running a campaign hoping to catch fire, or do you have a campaign that’s ready to set fire” — probing the scope of Turek’s Washington-based support. “I got the impression,” Scholten told me, “that he was going to have a lot.”
Scholten wasn’t going to get out just because Turek was getting in. At least not right there and then. The next day, though, he told his two staffers what Turek had told him. They had to think. What to do? How to respond? Fight? Quit? Scorched-earth? Make-nice? That night Scholten pitched for the first time in nearly a month. The Explorers were down 8-0 when he got in. He gave up three more runs. After the lopsided loss, feeling nostalgic, he went to what had been his favorite bar in college, ordering a pint of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a shot of Johnnie Walker Red. “It was,” he said, “a complicated night.”
Scholten and his team saw, they thought, the result of the hidden hand of Schumer, the DSCC and assorted D.C. machinery. It was a hard thing to prove. Other candidates had heard from donors who’d heard from the DSCC with wink-wink whispers of a preference — but Turek wasn’t running yet so there was no actual list of donors to scour. For a relative newbie of a candidate for the Senate, Turek had a ready-made staff with some Washington cred, including a campaign manager with DSCC experience — so, though, did some staffers working for some of the other candidates. It was also in the strategic interest of the other campaigns, it should be said, to see Turek as the establishment-backed candidate — and to attempt to get voters to see him that way as well. The hardscrabble, underdog backstory; the singular, distinguishing gold medals and Team-USA, American-flag iconography; the indelible image of Turek hoisting himself up set after set of steps, wheelchair in tow, to win where Trump won, too — all of it, his opponents thought, at least to D.C. types made him more than Scholten a sort of heat-seeking missile of a messenger on Medicaid cuts and other sundry terrors of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
“They’re trying to come in and put their thumb on the scale and push people out,” said a person from one campaign. “People are sick of Washington, sick of Democrats in Washington, especially in Iowa. The brand’s in the fucking pisser. What does Washington know about picking a Senate candidate in Iowa?” said another worker from another campaign. “They say they want authenticity, but they really don’t,” an Iowa Democrat told me. Nathan Sage was willing to just say it and put his name to it. “D.C. needs to stay the hell out of it,” he told me. “We shouldn’t have D.C. having backroom deals with some of these politicians trying to make sure they got the right guy,” he said. “At the end of the day, I think they’re going to come out of this looking like shit if their guy doesn’t do it.”
Scholten’s initial instinct was that of an athlete: Compete. Compete against a friend and a teammate who wanted what he wanted. Compete against D.C. forces he now saw even more as foes. The more he thought about it, though, the more he felt the fire fade. Before long the only questions were when and how he would stop. He released a “Fair Game Plan for Farmers and Us: Main Street over Monopolies” knowing his candidacy was all but officially over because it was important to him to publicize the policy priority before he officially got out. A week after his talk with Turek in Lincoln, Scholten went to New Orleans to give a speech at the progressive Netroots Nation convention. “The senator leading our party, Chuck Schumer, looks more at home on Wall Street than in small towns and union halls. Where Democrats in D.C. are spending $20 million on focus groups to find a message to young men, I get paid a minor-league baseball salary to talk to my teammates every single day. And I struggle picturing Chuck Schumer talking to my teammates back in Sioux City. Even with the most perfectly poll-tested talking points, it wouldn’t work, because it wouldn’t be real,” he said. “Nobody handed this to me,” he added. “I don’t have a campaign with big donors just handed to me.”
Turek not quite a week after that finally kicked off his run with a laudable launch video. He wanted to model his campaign after former Sen. Tom Harkin, whose signature legislative achievement was shepherding through Congress the Americans with Disabilities Act — “my political hero,” “a genuine populist,” Turek told a reporter from the Register. “I am a common-sense, moderate Democrat that is willing to work across the aisle in a bipartisan way,” he told the same reporter for the same story. “Josh is very much a product of Council Bluffs, so that means — that signals to the rest of the state — that he understands hard work, that he’s not an effete, elite guy,” Douglas Burns, a fourth-generation Iowa journalist who lives in Carroll, told me. “He has a know-it-when-you-see-it Iowa-ness.”
Even an indistinct indication of establishment support might sap that sense. The DSCC declined to comment for this article. It has made to this point no endorsement. But a whiff was in the air. The Intercept reported on it, progressive blogger and activist Howie Klein weighed in, and Bleeding Heartland’s Laura Belin asked Turek about the murmurs of D.C. sway. “There’s a perception that you are the preferred candidate of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, so has anyone from the DSCC promised you support or offered you support in a primary campaign?” she said. “I’m not the D.C. candidate,” Turek said in a wordy response. “I’m the Iowa candidate.” It wasn’t exactly a no.
“I think I’m the Iowa candidate is what I think,” he told me, too, when I asked. “We’re going to roll out endorsements for the Iowa House and Senate, and I think we’re going to end up with an enormous amount of them, and it’s going be from all across Iowa. And I would also say that what I am is the hardest-working candidate, going out here and being able to win in the reddest part of the state — that’s what I’m about. I mean, I’m going out every single day and knocking doors, and that’s crawling — like dragging my wheelchair up there. That’s the candidate that I am.”
“In 2020, Schumer called me up and said, ‘I don’t want a primary,’” Scholten told me, referring to a cycle in which Theresa Greenfield was the party’s Senate nominee (after a primary) and he ran again for the House. This time around? “Nobody said that to me,” Scholten said. “It all boils down to, like, I want to win here — and in order to get there, I feel like this is the best thing at this moment to do,” he said. “I think so much about politics, and life in general, is right place, right time — like, dating life, same thing. Right place, right time.”
Scholten was another Easy Eddy IPA in by the time he took the microphone 10 minutes from Barley’s on Broadway at Council Bluffs’ Hoff Family Arts & Culture Center. Behind him were scores of TUREK FOR IOWA signs — a blue silhouette of the state festooned with what at first looked like a sun but upon closer inspection was a gold medal. In front of him were a hundred or so people.
“When I launched this race, I was convinced that a western Iowa athlete who’s a prairie populist could win,” Scholten told them. “The thing is they still can. It’s just not me,” he said.
“In the last few months,” he said, “I think one of the biggest things that happened in national politics was the Republicans passing what I call the billionaire bailout bill, and one of the biggest components of that and the biggest impacts on Iowa is cuts to Medicaid. It’s going to devastate rural hospitals. It’s going to devastate all of our health care. And so I’m convinced that that’s going to be one of the key issues in the 2026 elections and I’m also convinced that there’s not a better Democrat in Iowa — in the country — that can speak about Medicaid than Josh Turek.”
Democrats, Scholten said, can win in Iowa — witness, for instance, the recent result in the state senate special election in Sioux City — and they can win, he said, in this race, too. “With that, I want to thank you all for being here, and I want to introduce somebody you already know but is my good friend …”
The people clapped and cheered, and Turek wheeled toward Scholten, and Scholten shook Turek’s hand. He handed him the mic and stepped to the side.
Democrats, Pat Dennis, the president of a Democratic opposition research firm, said earlier this year, need to be “normal” and “real.” But what’s … normal? What’s … real? Who’s to say who’s authentic, and based on what? Authentically Iowan, after all, is not, say, authentically Pennsylvanian or authentically anything else. And in a political context authenticity is less (or maybe not at all?) about ideology or policy and more just some aura or sense. “You know it when you see it,” Jesse Ferguson, the longtime Democratic strategist, told me. “It’s not about just saying the right thing. It’s about this feeling people have when they see you say it.”
Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris — the party’s last three presidential nominees — “from Hillary to Biden to Harris, we have not had as national leader who is comfortable speaking extemporaneously in interview settings,” Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki told me. Democrats need to stop sounding “like you’ve been put through 17 rounds of approvals with consultants who haven’t knocked a door in 20 years,” strategist April Glick Pulito told me. “The real issue,” Democratic digital strategist and Substacker Mike Nellis told me, “is that the party’s gotten really, really risk averse, it’s gotten really, really poll-tested, and then everybody has to be handed a bunch of talking points where they can go do a TV hit,” he said. “And then the establishment wants to push candidates that are popular with the donor class.”
I stood here and watched Scholten watch Turek and I thought about this fledgling primary and these two candidates, and the other three, too. “The thing that’s really funny about authenticity is … if you’re trying to be authentic, maybe you’re not,” Norris had told me as she ate hashbrowns at a café in tiny Anita. “Just be who you are,” she said. “If you try to be somebody you’re not, people pick up on that pretty fucking fast,” Wahls had said late one night on his porch as he smoked J.C. Newman Brick House cigars and we drank Iowa-made Templeton Rye. “I don’t know how else to fucking be,” Sage had said when we hooked up on a Google Meet. “I don’t know how to be a polished turd.”
The Democrats’ Senate primary in Iowa remains of course a four-way tussle. In spite of any perception of establishment influence, it’s voters in Iowa, not politicians in New York or D.C., who’ll get to pick in the end who’s authentic and who’s not — and which candidate they want and which candidates they don’t. Here at Hoff, Turek and Scholten did interviews together with local TV reporters. Turek said he was going to work harder than he ever had before. “It’s going to be long days. It’s going to be a lot of time on phones. It’s going to be a lot of time traveling,” he said. And Scholten? He was looking forward to getting back to Sioux City, he said, to play baseball for the last couple weeks of the season and maybe of his career. The Explorers were preparing for the playoffs.
Turek went on to work the room, moving from person to person, shaking hands and schmoozing as stragglers picked at what was left of the spread of charcuterie and snacks. He introduced his campaign manager to people who wanted to meet him. “He came out here from D.C.,” Turek said to one woman.
Outside, meanwhile, in the fading late summer light, Scholten was smiling. I asked him how he was feeling. “I wouldn’t say I’m happy about it. It’s more I’ve accepted it and — I don’t know — the anger and the frustration and all that has passed,” he said.
“I don’t fit in,” Scholten concluded. “It’s not my world. D.C. has never responded to me.”
He put his arm around his girlfriend’s shoulders, and she put hers around his. It was time to go home.
