Joni Ernst Fights to Keep Her Seat

Clarinda, Iowa

Six years ago, Joni Ernst burst onto the national political stage with her bid to become Iowa’s first female U.S. senator.

What Ernst, an Iowa farm girl turned Iraq War veteran, lacked in money and name recognition she made up for with a personality and biography that made her a perfect fit for the state. In the 2014 Re­pub­lican primary, she blew away four male competitors — including a self-funding former Goldman Sachs employee favored by GOP powerbrokers in Wash­ington, D.C. — with one of the more memo­rable political ads in recent history. “I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm, so when I get to Washington, I’ll know how to cut pork,” Ernst said as she looked straight at the camera. “Let’s make ’em squeal.”

Ernst coasted to victory that fall, de­feating her Democratic opponent, Bruce Braley, by 8.5 percentage points. But in 2020, Ernst is the one feeling the pain. “Folks, is it a tough election cycle or what?” she told a small, socially distanced crowd in the parking lot of a Harley-Davidson dealership in Carroll, Iowa, on October 10. “It is a tough, tough, tough year, but you know what? I’m going to finish first!”

In the 2020 battle for the Senate, Iowa is key. With three weeks left until Election Day, the elections-and-polling–analytics website FiveThirtyEight gave Republicans about a one-in-three shot of keeping control of the Senate. Iowa was a coin flip, with FiveThirtyEight giving Ernst a 48 percent chance of holding on to her seat. A couple of polls from early October showed her trailing her Demo­cratic opponent, Theresa Green­field, by four or five percentage points, but Republicans in recent years have had a record of outperforming their poll numbers in Iowa.

Part of what makes the 2020 election cycle so tough for Ernst is that Democrats recruited a former farm girl of their own. “Right now, corn prices, heck, they’re down around $3.30. That’s goin’-out-of-business prices,” Greenfield said at a recent debate with Ernst. Almost any other politician who uttered that line would look like a complete and utter fraud. Greenfield, who grew up on a farm — in Minnesota, not Iowa (nobody’s perfect) — pulled it off.

During a discussion about education and the minimum wage, Ernst talked about her first job off the farm — making biscuits at Hardee’s — and Greenfield (now a well-paid real-estate developer) recalled how she helped put herself through a community college in Iowa by working at Pizza Hut. “I gotta tell you, I think Democrats just talk too much about four-year school,” Greenfield said. “I’m going to be fighting against Democrats to make sure we’re investing in trade schools, technical schools, apprenticeship programs where you can earn while you learn.”

Both candidates connect on an emotional level. “I am fighting for survivors of sexual abuse and domestic violence because I’ve been there myself,” Ernst said at the September 29 debate. Green­field often speaks about how, as a young mother with an infant and another baby on the way, she endured the tragic on-the-job death of her first husband — a journeyman electrician — and was aided by Social Security and union benefits. (Green­field dishonestly, but perhaps effectively, accused Ernst of being in favor of “defunding Social Security.”)

Greenfield’s strength as a candidate is, of course, only part of the reason Ernst is in trouble. Another factor is that Green­field and her allies have already spent more than $90 million on the campaign, compared with $65 million spent by Ernst and her allies. An even bigger difficulty is the national political environment.

President Trump, who won Iowa by almost ten points in 2016, is struggling to win there in 2020. One CBS/YouGov poll conducted in early October showed Trump and Biden dead even in the state, at 49 percent. That it’s a tied race is remarkable when you look a little deeper into the poll, which finds that 52 percent of Iowa voters say Trump would do a better job of handling the economy, compared with 38 percent who say that Biden would. And 55 percent of Iowans believe that their taxes will go up if Biden is elected, compared with 31 percent who say the same of Trump.

But the poll also found that Iowans break 49 percent to 40 percent in Biden’s favor when asked which candidate would do a better job handling the coronavirus pandemic. Trump earned worse marks than Biden when asked which man had better judgment. Perhaps the poll’s most revealing result was the response to this question: “Regardless of who you are voting for, who would you prefer to see on TV and in the news for the next four years?” Only 49 percent of Iowa voters wanted four more years of Trump TV, and 51 percent said Biden.

“He’s having a hard time with suburban women,” says Bob Vander Plaats, a former Iowa GOP gubernatorial candidate who runs the Family Leader, a conservative organization. “I think a lot of suburban women are with us on the issues. They may not be a fan of his personality.” To win these voters back, Vander Plaats says, it’s “exceptionally important” for Trump to “look presidential — or be presidential.”

One GOP strategist tells National Review that two internal Republican polls have recently shown Ernst tied in her race, running a few points ahead of Trump (the inverse of what public polls show). “There’s a natural profile for an Ernst-Biden voter that doesn’t exist for Greenfield-Trump,” says the strategist.

One glimmer of hope for Republicans in Iowa is that they’ve outperformed their poll numbers in the last three election cycles. In 2014, Ernst led her Democratic opponent by 2.3 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average; she won by 8.5 points. In 2016, Trump led Clinton by 3 points in the RCP average of Iowa polls; he beat her there by 9.4 points. In 2018, GOP governor Kim Reynolds trailed by 0.7 points in the final average of polls; she won by three points. The polling errors in the Midwest in recent years have been attributed to pollsters’ failing to properly account for white voters without a college degree. Pollsters say they’re now doing a better job of weighting their polls by education, but RealClearPolitics elections analyst Sean Trende wrote in a piece in September that “it isn’t clear that the pollsters have really fixed the problem at all.”

If a Biden presidency looks more likely, some voters might see a Republican Senate — or even a smaller Democratic majority — as a check on the far Left. On the campaign trail, Ernst has been arguing that Greenfield is an extremist on the environment, abortion, and guns. Green­field would help “lead us on an ugly path toward socialism,” Ernst said while speaking to a small outdoor crowd in Des Moines on October 11.

Despite the pandemic, Ernst has continued to hold small events across the state. On the weekend of October 10–11, she drove her Harley-Davidson motorcycle across the state (while forgoing her annual pig roast, because of the pandemic). Greenfield has kept her campaign mostly virtual. “It’s really hard to listen to Iowans if you’re not getting out of your basement and you’re not going into the communities where they live,” Ernst told the crowd in Des Moines on October 11 as she stood in the bed of a white pickup truck.

Greenfield says she opposes Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, but she has given Ernst ammunition by waffling on Court-packing and opening the door to ending the filibuster. In a May primary debate, Greenfield said flatly that she opposed increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court. But five days after the death of Justice Ginsburg, she said, “I wouldn’t say that I have formed an opinion on that, but that’s certainly not a high priority for me and it’s not something that Iowans are talking about at this point in time.” Then, on September 29, asked whether she would keep the number of Supreme Court justices set at nine, she replied, “Yeah, absolutely. That is our institution and our tradition, and I don’t support packing the courts.”

With Greenfield and a handful of other Democratic candidates balking at packing the Court, the bigger threat is that most of them are in favor of effectively getting rid of the filibuster. Radio Iowa reported that Greenfield said at a September 23 forum in Iowa that she “would look at reforms to the filibuster, maybe requiring that if you’re going to ask for a filibuster, you know, you show up on the Senate floor and personally make that request.”

Ernst rode to Washington full of optimism in 2014 that she could bring about big changes — repealing Obamacare, balancing the budget — but those hopes were dashed amid the reality that Republicans lacked the consensus and the will to accomplish either big objective. In 2020, a more realistic message is that Ernst might block a leftward lurch under a Biden presidency. If she can’t win in November, there’s a good chance Re­pub­licans across the country will be squealing in 2021.