U.S. Senate hopeful Finkenauer in Charles City: ‘I will not forget you’

By Mitchell Hanson, mhanson@charlescitypress.com

Abby Finkenauer, a Democrat seeking the party’s nomination for election to the U.S. Senate in November, wants to unseat incumbent Republican Chuck Grassley.

That, admittedly, is not an easy feat, she explained last Friday evening to about 25 people gathered at Thor Manufacturing in Charles City as part of a small public tour of northeast Iowa that Finkenauer made over the weekend.

After mingling with and greeting the crowd, Finkenauer explained that Grassley has held the Senate seat for more than 40 years straight.

That’s longer than Finkenauer has been alive.

The 33-year-old former U.S. House District 1 representative was greeted by Vince Rottinghaus of Thor Manufacturing, who helped organize the event.

She began by describing her initial motivation for getting into politics, at age 24.

“It was after years of seeing my dad (a welder) coming home after working long, long hours, dripping wet with sweat,” she said. Then it dawned on her. “Our workers and small towns were being forgotten,” she continued, adding that it had become obvious that many of Iowa’s elected officials were “forgetting about their own state.”

She described her election to the Iowa House of Representatives in 2015, and later her election to the U.S. House, an office she held until 2021. She may have been done there, but a certain event within 2021’s first week compelled her to stay in the game, she said.

The events of Jan. 6 at the nation’s capital “proved to me, Iowa, the United States, democracy – all these were worth protecting.”

This sent her down the road to seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for Senate in the November 2022 election, though she shared another anecdote that further propelled her to seek that office.

“I visited New Hartford,” Grassley’s hometown, she said. “And all that was there was a post office, a bar, and empty buildings with boarded-up windows.”

She proceeded to ask a local what the town was like 40 years ago, around the time Grassley was first elected to his current position, and he described the town as being booming for a small town, well-populated and home to several thriving businesses.

His answer, she said, gave her further motivation to “fight for small towns, workers, family farms,” and other essential parts of rural Iowan living.

“I will never forget where I come from, and I will never forget you,” she said, “the way that Grassley has.”