October 30, 2018

The House Republican Campaign Chairman Finally Condemned Steve King

And corporate sponsors are pulling their support.

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, attends a rally for Iowans prior to the anti-abortion March for Life on January 19.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

For years, Republican leaders have turned a blind eye to Iowa Rep. Steve King’s countless racist and anti-immigrant comments. But on Tuesday, as King faced a fresh wave of controversy—and as he appeared to be in more danger than ever of losing his seat—National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman and Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers finally condemned the Republican congressman in a strongly worded tweet. 

The tweet came as King faced an increasingly intense backlash after he endorsed a white nationalist mayoral candidate in Toronto earlier this month, and news broke that he had met with a far-right group in Austria during a Holocaust memorial trip in August. The congressman also came under fire for retweeting a white nationalist earlier this year. 

On Friday, King’s conservative hometown paper, the Sioux City Journal, broke with tradition to endorse his rival Democrat J.D. Scholten, a former professional baseball player and paralegal, in the race for King’s seat. And this week, corporate donors Intel and Land O’ Lakes announced they would stop funding King’s campaign in light of his recent actions. 

King is no stranger to controversy—the eight-term congressman has a long history of making offensive comments about immigrants and supporting politicians with fringe views. But that hasn’t stopped him from holding onto his congressional seat in this agriculture-heavy district; in the last election, he won by 23 points. The closest a Democrat ever came to unseating him was in 2012, when King beat Christie Vilsack by 8 points.

But on Monday, a poll by the left-leaning group Change Research showed Scholten trailing by just 1 point. Shortly after, King’s campaign released a separate poll, conducted just several days before by Republican group WPA Intelligence, which showed the congressman up by 18 points. The competing polls make it hard to tell how much danger King is really in—a nonpartisan poll in September showed King with a 10-point lead.

Still, Scholten is leading an energetic fight, outraising his opponent by nearly $1 million: The most recent Federal Election Commission filings show that Scholten has raised $1.73 million, while King raised just $739,553. While Scholten says he’s visited each of the district’s 39 counties three times, King has refused to even debate his opponent. 

Scholten’s campaign has seized on King’s absence as a campaign issue, releasing a trio of ads this week that attack the congressman for his offensive comments and criticize him for taking overseas trips and not “showing up” in the district. The ads emphasize his support for farmers in this agricultural region, which has been affected by retaliatory Chinese tariffs in President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war. And they feature a host of Republican voters who criticize King—an attempt to win over conservatives in this stubbornly red district.

But while King’s future looks more uncertain than ever, Scholten still faces an uphill battle: The district went for Trump by 27 points in 2016, and FiveThirtyEight still gives King a 5-in-6 chance of keeping the seat. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate