The Iowa Caucuses, with J.D. Scholten

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Hi, this is Isaac Dovert, the Atlantic's political correspondent, and this is the the first episode of The Ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

If you're new to the show, welcome.

And if you've been subscribed to Radio Atlantic, welcome back.

It's 2020, so it's election time.

It's maybe the most important presidential election of any of our lifetimes.

The results and repercussions will shape the future of the country and the planet.

And so we're going all in on politics.

But I'm trying to go at this election in a different way.

I'm going to dig into what matters and what's happening beyond the cable news chatter.

And And I want to bring you along for the ride.

For the last year and a half, I've been traveling all around the country, to all the early states and the swing states and back to DC.

And I'm going to keep racking up those frequent flyer miles as the year goes on.

And this week, I'm where it's all going down on Monday night, Iowa.

And actually, for the start of this episode, I wanted to bring in the person who's been making this show since Radio Atlantic began over two years ago.

You've heard his name in the credits each week, producer Kevin Townsend.

Hi, Kevin.

Hey, Isaac.

So, Iowa is in a few days.

You're about to fly there.

What number of flight is this to Iowa for you this past year?

It is hard to keep count.

I

have gone a lot.

And so, this week you interviewed someone who's running for Congress in Iowa.

But before we get to that conversation, I thought maybe it would be helpful to do some setup.

So, for people that don't go to Iowa like every week, like you do,

why does Iowa vote first?

It votes first because ahead of the 1976 election, there were people in Iowa, some Democratic operatives, who decided they wanted to have the first vote.

And so they got out ahead of New Hampshire, which was the first primary, to say that they were going to have caucuses.

And then it became a big deal right away because in 1976, Jimmy Carter, who basically nobody had ever heard of, he was the governor of Georgia, was running and he did really well in Iowa.

He He came in second, uncommitted to anybody came in first.

And that creates this buzz around him, and he goes on, obviously, to become the nominee and the president.

And so people say, oh, Iowa's a big deal.

And then Republicans and Democrats both started tracking their way to Iowa every four years.

And here we are.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So ultimately, thank you, Jimmy Carter, history's greatest monster.

If not for Jimmy Carter, I would not have a favorite restaurant in Cedar Rapids.

So Iowa's had this role in American elections for almost a half century now, but a lot of the chatter ahead of the election hasn't been just about who's going to win Iowa.

It's been also about why do we let this very white, very unrepresentative state decide our president.

Yeah, and it's been an issue because Iowa is not reflective of the rest of the country in demographics in pretty much any way.

There is no major city there

in terms of the racial and ethnic breakdown.

It is a more diverse state than it was even 10 years ago, but is 90-something percent white.

It is an older state.

It is just not what the country looks like.

And so you have this influence over the process that has to happen because it's the first state that votes that is done by something that doesn't look like the country as a whole.

And with that conversation that's happening, though, it looks like this year might be kind of a bookend to the Jimmy Carter years of innovating and creating the Iowa caucuses, essentially, and creating what they are now, that this might kind of be possibly the end of the story.

Is that right?

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, that pressure has been building for several election cycles, but this year it seems to have really come to a head because this started out as the most diverse field in the history of any political party, including the Democratic Party.

But it ended up with a list of front-runner finalists who are all white.

And that has prompted a discussion of whether it's because of Iowa going first that that happened.

Iowans would point out that Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 and Hillary Clinton won the Iowa Iowa caucuses in 2016.

So they have a pretty good track record of not just picking white men, but there are some realities that are about Iowa and that are about the race as a whole.

It's not just because of Iowa that the field ended up looking like this.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so all eyes on Iowa.

Now on to the show.

This week's guest is J.D.

Shulton, whose campaign video you can hear narrated by Kevin Costner, Mr.

Field of Dreams himself.

It is here

among the rolling hills.

Shulton is a former baseball player and a fifth-generation Iowan.

He ran as a Democrat against the famously anti-immigrant and xenophobic Steve King in 2018.

He came close to beating King.

Now they're up against each other again this year.

I spent a lot of time in Iowa, but Shulton spent most of his life there.

A sense of who we are.

So while everyone else does the who's up and who's down punditry, I wanted to talk to him to understand how this really looks on the ground.

Take a listen.

J.D.

Shulton, thanks for being here on The Ticket.

It's an honor to be here.

Thanks for having me.

So

I have spent so much time in Iowa.

Every political reporter has spent so much time in Iowa, all the politicians, everybody.

But with all of us coming, it's just such a weird way of seeing a state where you go from

event to event.

You know, there are restaurants that I like in various cities now, but Iowa is your life.

It's your entire entire life.

What do you think we all missed about Iowa over the course of this?

Well, I mean, if I had to guess, you probably know Des Moines pretty well, know Cedar Rapids pretty well, and maybe on the eastern side of the state pretty well.

Not a lot of folks come out to western Iowa.

I live in Sioux City, which is an arm's length away from Des Moines, which I like to say is an arm's length away from D.C.

And so it's interesting.

We just are wrapping up our 39-county town hall.

The fourth congressional district has 39 counties, and we're doing them in towns of under a thousand people.

And honestly, impeachment has come up twice.

Yeah.

And so things like that.

It's not always the narrative that I think some of the national folks always talk about, but it's one of those things where

you really see the pain that's happening in America, in rural America, is pretty prevalent in my neck of the woods.

And I think that's one thing that a lot of these presidential campaigns, when they come up, it's one thing to talk about some of these things, and it's another thing to actually feel it.

And the folks who do make it up, Northwest Iowa, I think they're seeing that.

What is that pain?

We're the second most agriculture-producing district in America.

So it's very much agriculture-driven.

And I think a lot of folks just assume that if the tariffs ended tomorrow, which Lord knows that's not going to happen, but that farmers will be okay.

And that's not the truth.

We see market consolidation and years of allowing mergers.

And what we're seeing right now are a lot of small towns struggling just to keep their local grocery stores alive.

Aaron Ross Powell, it leads to a question that is the bigger question that everybody always has about Iowa.

It's what my friends and family and

even fellow journalists sometimes ask is

why Iowa?

Why are you going there?

Why is it first?

And the argument comes back.

Well, it's representative, but it's not representative, obviously, demographically of the country.

It's representative of some things about the country.

I would assume that as a

good Iowan and a a good Iowan politician, you are not going to take a stand against Iowa

first.

I'm not going to Julian Castro it.

But, you know, I think there is something to be said about diversity and what a caucus is versus a primary and all that.

I think we need, especially as a Democratic Party, we need to be very open about things that race does play in a lot of different things.

It matters where you grow up and how much access you have to political candidates.

And I understand that, and I think it's a dialogue that we need to really have.

However, I think there should be even class diversity in D.C., working-class candidates.

And that's one thing I'm trying to do is be a working-class candidate who makes it to Congress.

And

I think that discussion needs to be had.

But,

you know, Iowa has a lot of benefits to it.

I think we do a really good job of forcing candidates to be retail politics.

And you see traditionally senators from large states don't do well here because they're used to just fundraising and putting on TV ads.

But when you have to go out there and meet people with where they're at,

there's something to be said about that, and especially for someone who's going for the biggest office in the land.

And I'm proud of what we've been able to do so far.

And

more and more criticism comes each time.

And so it will be interesting to see what happens next.

I often say

in somewhat defense of Iowa, and

the rationale that seems to me of Iowa at this point is it may not have been the best system in the first place to put the Iowa caucuses first, but at this point, there is a sophistication of Iowa voters that also can be a little bit of a

self-involvement for some that say, oh, well, I need to meet each candidate ten times or whatever it is.

But of people who do take the process seriously and really will go to every candidate's events that that they can and

try to dig in deep on some of the issues.

And that that, again, maybe is not an argument for Iowa overall or maybe it should have never been in Iowa, but ends up being an argument for why it does somewhat make sense for what happens in Iowa.

Yeah, and I mean, at the Story County soup supper I went to, it was minus four and with Windshield, it was like minus 25.

It was miserable out.

And we still packed 300 people into a church basement.

It's one of those things where we know we got to go.

And I just, I mean, the old saying is we fall in love with a candidate the fourth time we meet him in person.

Yeah.

You said that some big state senators who have

suffered because they have not been as used to the retail politics as they have been to fundraising and campaigning on TV.

I remember in October 2008 when Kamala Harris came to Iowa for the first time, that was a question that she was asked, and she defended by saying that she,

when she was running for district attorney, she would campaign outside of supermarkets with her ironing board.

It's a story that she told for the first time then, but then started telling a little bit more over the course of the campaign.

But she struggled for a number of reasons and obviously dropped out right after Thanksgiving.

Does it surprise you which of the presidential candidates have caught and which ones haven't?

Yes and no.

I guess when there's 20-some people running, it's just kind of unusual to begin with.

But I think this cycle, I think people realized, oh my goodness, we can connect with folks almost on a greater scale if we go on CNN or MSNBC as much as it's getting into the Des Moines Register.

And that's really been a big shift.

And so I think there's that component that you absolutely still need to show up and connect with folks.

But then there's this other scale of being on national television.

And so I think this cycle has really shifted.

the candidates have been.

And I think some campaigns have picked it up, some haven't.

I mean, Booker got a ton of endorsements and didn't make it to caucus night.

And so it's a very different cycle than I think we thought it was going to be a year ago.

The caucuses, usually the candidates come out, they test run a few things, they go into backyard barbecues.

But from day one, there was so much media on each candidate.

And with the way social media is now, it's these candidates.

If they screw up early, it's going to get seen where before people could test run things.

And so, man, it's a cutthroat out there now.

And most of that, Iowa is a place in New Hampshire, too, where people have house parties with presidential candidates that show up.

I mean, I've been in people's basements

with presidential candidates or in their living rooms.

But this time around, very few of the candidates did that.

And like you said, that's how they road tested some of their ideas and some of their talking points.

But even then, that's me sitting there and I can tweet right away whatever they're saying.

Right.

All right.

So, JD,

you are not someone who, when you were graduating high school, was thinking that politics was the way forward for you.

Could you just walk through the pathway that got you to filing to run for office the first time?

Oh, man.

So I was chasing a dream of playing minor league in professional baseball.

I was blessed that my dad was a college baseball coach.

And after college, I had a chance to play professionally, not only here in the U.S., but overseas as well.

And when you see the limitation and your career plateauing, you try to find out what's next.

And I found a nice little niche working in e-discovery and

law firms as a paralegal.

And so that's not the path that most people take.

But 2016 happened and impacted a lot of people, especially a lot of people who ran for the first time in 2018 in a lot of different ways.

And for me, I wanted to get more active, but I didn't know what that meant.

And actually, I was living in Seattle.

And my grandmother, who's my inspiration in life, I went to see her.

And the last thing Grandma Fern told me was, JD, you need to move back to Iowa and take care of the farm.

And it resonated with me because I was the last person to get her to eat, and she passed away.

And a month later, the

funeral and I gave the eulogy at that rural church where she was an active member most of her life.

And I felt that pull to come back home.

And then you fast forward a month after that.

The

oh, I'm really sorry.

I got a distracted Elizabeth Warren's calling me.

That is

the Iowa caucus right there.

We've been playing phone day.

Feel free to patch her in.

I just declined it.

I apologize.

So

text her and say you're busy right now, JJ.

Well,

that actually brings me, DeVil Sack always talks about Obama talking and like Obama's campaigning all day, and his folks are like, hey, here's a group of lists that you got.

That's a great story.

Here's a list of folks you got to call.

And he calls, and it's like a 16-year-old girl or a high school girl.

And he calls her up, and she goes, oh, I'm busy with volleyball practice.

Can I call you back?

I believe the story starts that when she first picks up the phone, he says, hi, this is Senator Barack Obama.

He's already like almost going to win Iowa at that point.

And she says, oh, hi, Barack.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Thank you.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And then says, Yes, she's busy.

I've heard it as a yearbook meeting, but it might be.

Oh, yeah, it was.

I think, yeah,

your version's way better.

We're going to take a short break.

We'll be back with more with JD Shelton in just a moment.

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So you were a pitcher,

right?

And then you come back and you want to figure out how to turn a reasonably successful, although not major league

professional career as a baseball player.

I was a dime a dozen.

And one of the things, can I just stop you for a second?

Because I think one of the things that's interesting is that you had to work as a paralegal to make enough money, even as you're playing professional ball.

Yeah.

I mean, I was working two jobs in the offseason.

I mean there was times where I had to decide between paying rent and paying for health care.

And here I am maximizing my body.

My arm was hanging on by a limb and I was blessed that I didn't have any major surgeries or anything like that because during season you're covered but when you're offseason you're not and it's the reality of what's happening here in America.

And so ultimately I was in 2017, the women's march that we just had the third year anniversary of, I was in Seattle and it just blew me away, just the raw power and energy.

And I knew right then that, you know what, I'm going to go home and I'm going to make a difference.

I don't know what that meant.

And then when I moved back, I started working.

There was no job.

In the Sioux City Journal, my hometown paper, I looked for a month for a job and the best job I could find was 15 bucks an hour with no benefits.

And so then I ended up.

As a college grad.

Yeah, as a college graduate.

And at this point,

working a decade decade as a paralegal, obviously on and off with minor league stuff.

And so

I just did consulting work on paralegal work.

And then I was on the hook for my own health insurance.

And finally, I saw there was nobody in this race for a month.

And so we launched very humbly.

And that's kind of how it all started.

And I looked to my two political heroes, Berkeley Bedell, who just recently passed, and Tom Harkin.

And in the early 80s, they represented 80% of my district.

And I know my district now is far more conservative than it was back then, but it showed there's hope.

And what they were able to do was get out to the people, prove you're trustworthy, and prove that you're going to fight for your constituents.

You're going to earn votes.

And that's what we were able to do.

And we moved the needle 24 points, which is third most in the nation.

We got 25,000 more votes than there are registered Democrats in the district.

And in my home county, Woodbury County, the largest county in the district, Kings never lost, and we won it by 54%.

So Iowa is sort of the home of the Obama-Trump voter that we hear about all the time.

There were 31 counties in Iowa that flipped from supporting Obama to supporting Trump.

Obama, of course, won Iowa twice, including starting out winning the Iowa caucuses, but then went on in the general election against both John McCain and Mitt Romney to win Iowa.

And then Trump wins Iowa by over nine points, almost nine and a half points.

It's the biggest swing of a state from an Obama state to a Trump state.

Five of those counties that switched are in your congressional district that you ran in in 2018 and are running in again.

What are the Obama Trump voters and how should we understand what it is that they were responding to?

Oh man, if I had that answer.

I mean, I get it.

You know, I understand why I don't agree with it, but I understand why a lot of folks switched.

And

there's that pain.

There's that sadness that's out there, and they're looking for change.

They want somebody different.

They want somebody who will listen to them.

And

Obama ran on hope and change in some form.

So did Trump and he was an outsider.

And so I see that.

And

you look at where the progressive movement in the Democratic Party originated from.

It was a lot of prairie populism.

And we don't have that part in the Democratic Party, it seems, especially here in the Midwest.

And that's what we've gone away from a little bit.

And so I thought there was a little bit of a void.

Trump was able to just step into that.

And so that's been a huge part of what we've been trying to correct.

We feel your pain, but that's not the direction we should be going.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Do we have this rural-urban divide that seems to have played out, at least in the way that the votes have been going?

If you look at the 2016 results, certainly the votes for the Democrats were concentrated in and around cities, and the votes for the Republicans, and in this case, Clinton and Trump, most of all, were concentrated in rural areas.

And then

the decision points were in a lot of ways in the suburbs.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, I mean, you look at the Democratic Party overall, and what we're seeing are very coastal and very urban.

And,

you know, I see that's the trend, but like, I'm trying to buck the trend and go the other way.

What we're really trying to do is get back to retail politics because you look at the model of how we campaign and what the DCC pushes is to stay at home and call from the minute you get up to the minute you go to bed and call strangers, ask for money.

And then you win by messaging on television.

Well, in my district, if I did that, I would lose by 20.

And so we really just made a commitment of getting out there.

I put 35,000 miles in my personal vehicle.

We bought a Winnebago RV proudly made in the district through our logo on the side, called it Sioux City Sue, and put that on another 25,000 miles and connect with folks where they're at.

And I thought folks really connected with us because of that.

And maybe I got a few sympathy votes because I spent more nights in a Walmart parking lot the last two months of the campaign than my own bed, but we'll take it any way we can.

Immigration is an issue that is playing out for the country, and it plays out in your district, if only in the rhetoric for it.

Steve King was

farther out than Donald Trump long before Donald Trump was ever running for president and has made a number of comments.

One of the ones that got a lot of play when he said it was that people are coming across the border with their

calf muscles are like grapefruits.

The size of cantaloupe.

Cantaloup.

Sorry, I got the fruit wrong.

And when Trump came into office, I remember him talking to people about that he had models of the border wall that he wanted Trump to make.

I had that conversation with him myself at one point, and he has showed those models to Donald Trump.

And I should say it's not just about the immigration issue per se.

He's also talked about the importance of keeping white European culture and somewhat famously got himself into trouble a year ago for talking about how he said when did white nationalism become such a bad thing and that got him removed from his committee assignments by the Republicans and seems to have prompted some Republican primary challengers that he's he's going to have.

That's his issue in the election.

You're looking toward November with him.

But with all of that coming out of him, he has been elected many times from your district, and he beat you.

And you came closer than anybody had come for a long time.

But he still won.

So doesn't that mean that there's more support for where he is on immigration than where you are on that issue?

I disagree.

And

it's complicated why he wins, but I think the simplest way of saying is there's 70,000 more registered Republicans than there are Democrats.

And so a lot of Republicans just view him as a regular Republican.

But I think what we were able to do last time and since, there's been a real distinct narrative of who he actually is versus other Republicans.

And you have Senator Joni Ernst calling his remarks last year racist for the first time, even though he said the same exact thing in October on television, and she didn't say a thing, and she campaigned with him afterwards, but that's a whole different thing.

There seems to have been a sense in the Republican Party in the last year of just like, enough with Steve King

nationally.

But again, that's after he won.

But here's what I see in the district.

When I first went on my first 39 county tours, I stopped in a very rural county and I just started talking with them and asking what's happening.

And they needed 39 employees for the harvest, and not one American citizen applied.

And so there's this huge need for workforce.

And when I talk about that throughout the whole district, I see a lot of heads nod, and especially in rooms that aren't democratic friendly.

And

that immediately transitioned into immigration and where we're at and just trying to find practical approaches to this issue.

And because the majority of the kids I graduated with, they all moved away.

But at the same time, you look at my high school was 4% minority when I graduated 21 years ago.

And now it's 24% Latinx.

Some have migrated.

Some have just moved from California.

And what we're seeing in these dying towns, in these towns that are shrinking, some of these main streets, the only things coming in is a Mexican restaurant or a Mexican grocery store.

And that's the reality of it.

And you look at the history of Iowa.

We had a Republican governor, Robert Ray, who welcomed the Thai Dom culture.

from Laos and Vietnam and all that area in the 70s.

We have a very welcoming culture, and that's the traditional way.

And so for us to have Representative King as our congressman,

it's not the norm.

It's extreme.

And I mean, when he was on the Holocaust trip and then he took a side trip to meet with neo-Nazis in Austria, that was reported in the Washington Post, he was interviewed in Austria, and he talked about the great replacement and that theory.

I mean, that's pretty conspiracy theory driven.

And so what King represents, even though he's considered our representative,

where he stands on immigration is pretty radical.

And I feel most people in the district

don't agree with it, even though they might have voted for him.

Aaron Powell,

I think that to come back to what I asked you at the beginning of it,

how

much we've missed of Iowa.

I think one of the things that I have seen

over and over again out on the trail is how the country is different in how people conceive of it, that Iowa must be this place that's just just all corn and white people.

And there is a lot of corn and there are a lot of white people.

Let's talk about corn, though.

That is still a big part of Iowa.

And I think

in the national conversation about the trade war, it gets talked about as,

yeah, there are tariffs and, oh, things are going to cost more.

There was a whole back and forth about, oh, avocados are going to cost more.

That is so divorced from the experience, again, that I have seen people having in Iowa.

When I've traveled in Ohio, in Wisconsin,

in your district, there is a lot of farm country.

Yep.

We're the second most agricultural producing district in America.

And I think there's a narrative that if the tariffs ended tomorrow, farmers are going to be okay.

And that's completely wrong.

It's years of market consolidation that is really, it forces them to farm a certain way.

And so we have these multinational corporations that are dictating how we farm and how much farmers get paid.

The reality of the district is we have two farm-to-table restaurants in all 39 counties.

We have farmers not making a dime.

We have grocery stores closing all over the place.

And

who are we doing this for then?

If we're not feeding ourselves, if farmers aren't making a profit, like it, it's the system's

a mess.

And we have these get bigger, get off the farm policies.

And if we don't change uh in the next generation we're gonna end up being uh just a bunch of contract employees and it's the end of family farms right and so i think the number one thing that i've i've worked on about five or six of the presidential rural policies and and the number one thing i i push from them is we have to enforce our antitrust laws if you're if you're for uh farmers being able to make a dime and stay on their land, it's antitrust.

If you're for fairness in a level playing field, antitrust.

If you want to combat climate change, we have to enforce our antitrust laws or these multinational corporations are going to dictate what we're doing.

Aaron Powell, have the subsidies that have been put out by the administration helped?

The bailouts?

Yeah.

So

they would call them subsidies.

You could call them bailouts.

This is for farms that have reported loss of income because of the tariffs and the trade war that the administration has been handing out billions of of dollars.

But of course, a lot of that money has ended up with large farming conglomerates.

Trevor Burrus: Right.

And that's it's similar to the payouts and the subsidies we see in the farm bill.

A lot of the largest farms get the benefits and a lot of money ends up going to Wall Street or South America to JBS.

The folks who actually really need it, the middle-sized farm, those folks and younger farmers, they're not receiving what they need.

The bailout and the farm bill are pretty consistent that it's get bigger, bigger, get off the farm.

And you see things like in Wisconsin, the farmer suicide rate of people just

giving up.

Yeah, I mean, loan delinquencies are skyrocketing,

bankruptcies

skyrocketing, farmer suicide.

It's just awful.

It's one of those things that so much of agriculture is, it's driven by policy.

It's just, it's, it's really sad to see right now.

Okay, so Monday night, this all comes together in the caucuses.

Caucasus are weird things.

I don't think that it becomes such a thing in the Iowa caucuses, but to really understand what it is, that in high school gyms, in common rooms, of social halls, sometimes in homes.

I'm at an American Legion.

American Legion.

People come together and the way that it is that they walk into the room and the caucus unfolds before them.

This is not going to be your first caucus.

Can you just, for people who don't know this experience, what it's like to walk into that room?

Yeah, I mean,

you're in for a long night.

You have to be in line by 7 p.m.

And

if you're in

a more metropolitan area, you're going to have to move around.

Each corner,

there's different areas for different candidates.

And you go there initially and you set place, then you got to do the counting.

And then this year it's different where years before you can move around a few times.

Now

there's only two counts.

And so if you're viable on the first time.

Which means that your candidate has gotten 15% of

the people in the room.

Right.

And if you're viable, then you're stuck in that.

So if you're undecided and there's enough people to be 15% undecided,

then you're stuck in undecided.

You don't get to choose.

Jimmy Carter, who made the Iowa caucuses a thing,

everyone says he won Iowa, but actually he came in second.

Uncommitted came in first in 1966.

You know, love it or leave it, that's how it is.

The really interesting part is after the first round for me.

And I think

this is what the entire caucus is going to be coming down to.

Which campaigns are well organized, which they have precinct captains who, to these people who are not viable, whether it's somebody undecided or somebody from a campaign that didn't make that 15% threshold, do they have that skill to convince them that their candidate's the best candidate in a very short amount?

In a very short amount of time.

And so I love the caucuses.

I absolutely love them.

I'm also ready for them to be over.

Well, that's a good place to end.

JD Shelton, thank you for being here on The Ticket.

It's an honor to be on.

That'll do it for this, our first week of of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

And if you like what you heard this week, spread the word, share it with a friend, and of course, please drop a rating in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

Catch you next week.