Scholten talks to voters at ‘drive-in’ stop Saturday

By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

As a former baseball player, playing from behind is nothing new to J.D. Scholten.

“We’re out hustling – no one is going to out-work us,” he said. “Just going from town to town, you build relationships that way,”

Scholten, a 40-year-old paralegal and former professional baseball pitcher from Sioux City, made an unusual “drive-in” campaign stop in the parking lot of the Senior Center in Charles City on Saturday. Touring in a Winnebago he calls “Sioux City Sue,” Scholten talked to voters from the back of a pick-up truck.

“We’re talking to people in parking lots like this one, on farms, in welding shops, anywhere,” he said. “We want to hear the stories of Iowans.”

To abide by social distancing protocols, potential voters showed up in their cars, and every car was given a radio frequency to hear Scholten speak and a phone number to text in questions that Scholten answered live. Those gathered honked their horns when they approved of something Scholten said.

Scholten said this was the 16th and final drive-in event he has hosted during the campaign.

The Democrat is running for the U.S. House seat representing Iowa’s 4th Congressional District — the seat currently held by Republican Steve King. In 2018, Scholten gave King the closest general election he had faced in his 18 years of representing the Republican-leaning district, as he came just 3 percentage points short defeating of King.

This year, Scholten isn’t facing King, but instead is running against Republican nominee Randy Feenstra of Hull. Feenstra, 51, defeated King by nearly 10 percentage points in the GOP primary, which had four candidates. King had been shunned by mainstream Republicans and removed from committees he had been assigned to after being denounced for comments on white supremacy.

Feenstra has served as a member of the Iowa Senate from the 2nd district since 2009. Polls taken in late summer showed Feenstra with a substantial lead in the district, but recent polling indicates the gap has narrowed.

“Our internal polling has us even closer than the other polls,” Scholten said. “We’re so close in this district that’s mostly Republican because of our grassroots campaign.”

Scholten provided a list of five campaign promises on the back of a baseball card — rather than on typical campaign literature — that he hands out to all who attend his events. His top promise — Iowans over party.

“We invite everyone to the table. It doesn’t matter if you’re white, black or brown. It doesn’t matter if you’re Democrat, Independent, Republican or never voted before, we welcome you,” Scholten said. “At the end of the day, we’re all Iowans, and we all need to respect each other.”

His second promise is that he will always show up. In his race against King in 2018, Scholten claimed to be the only candidate to ever visit all 39 counties in the district — which he said he did three times that campaign cycle. This time around, his aim is to visit 374 cities and towns in the district.

“So many small town folks don’t have the voice they should, they don’t feel like they’re heard,” Scholten said. “This is how we all should campaign. We should listen and take their stories back to Washington. There are too many people in this district who are doing everything right but not getting ahead.”

His other promises include fixing health care, fighting for an economy that works for everyone and “securing our democracy from special interests.”

This past summer, Scholten surprised many Democratic Party insiders when he declined to take money from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“We won’t be beholden to special interests or the DCCC,” he said in a statement. “We’re reaching out to folks across the political spectrum to earn votes.”

Scholten said Saturday in Charles City that a campaign should be run out of Iowa, not out of Washington D.C.

“It’s heartbreaking for me to see these huge multi-national corporations give these huge donations to career politicians,” he said. “This system will continue until we elect people that want campaign finance reform.”

As to his other promises, Scholten said that although he is in favor of universal health care, an important next step is an expanded public option, which would allow middle-income and working-age Americans to choose a public insurance plan instead of a private insurance plan.

“It seems like everybody has a health care story in this district,” Scholten said. “I will not quit until we have universal health care. We’re too good of a nation to not have it.”

Scholten said that many towns in the district have not yet bounced back from the 2008 economic recession, and said that there was a two-step process to revitalizing rural economies.

“We need to make sure we have the technology needed throughout the district,” he said. “The next wave of the Iowa economy is most likely going to be agricultural technology, and we need to make sure we have the infrastructure in place to allow that to grow.”

He said the other step was to better enforce anti-trust laws in agriculture, and stop favoring big corporate farms over small farmers.

“It’s about allowing our farmers to stay on their land and make a dime,” Scholten said. “If they have a dime, they’re coming to town and spending that dime, and it feeds the community.”

Scholten was wearing a shirt printed with the words “America Needs Teachers.” He said that when he was in school, Iowa was usually ranked first in the nation in secondary education, and that isn’t the case anymore. He promised to make that a priority.

“In my neck of the woods we’re seeing teachers go to South Dakota and Nebraska to teach, because they have better benefits,” he said. “That was unheard of.”

Scholten called public education “the great equalizer.”

“Everything comes back to investing in education,” he said. “If you want a better economy, you invest in education. If you’re concerned about the civil unrest we see throughout the country, invest in education.”

Iowa Rep. Todd Prichard (D-Charles City) introduced Scholten Saturday and Iowa Senate candidate Deb Scharper (D-Osage) was also on hand at the event.