MAGA Loyalty in Iowa

A race I’m intrigued by: Ashley Hinson has been in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2021, representing Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District as a Republican. She has generally been pretty pro-President Donald Trump: in favor of tariffs, supportive of his foreign policy, and emphasizing her closeness to the MAGA wing in an attempt to curry favor with voters. Now, she’s trying to win the state’s open Senate seat (retiring Republican Sen. Joni Ernst isn’t seeking reelection) in a race Democrats see as a pickup opportunity despite the state’s redness.

In May of last year, after the House had passed Trump’s huge tax and spending package, Hinson started feeling the heat: Constituents in town halls started booing her, jeering at her, and criticizing her support of the president. She defended DOGE (“I think that Elon Musk came in and helped to join and lead a team of people who are actively working to find this waste, fraud and abuse every single day,” she told constituents), and earned even more ire, perceived by voters as having sided with the ultrarich at the expense of everyday people.

Her current opponent, Democrat Josh Turek, has emphasized her record over and over again, to good effect: “It’s been almost a year since Ashley Hinson voted for the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ which cut healthcare for more than 100,000 Iowans and further strained an already crumbling system in a state with a severe healthcare crisis,” he said in a healthcare roundtable earlier this year.

Now, Vice President J.D. Vance is set to campaign in Iowa today, and Hinson has declined to appear with him. She did not appear on stage at the midterm convention in Dallas last week. And she has publicly started criticizing Trump’s tariff reversal—a return to free trade, in her telling, means Iowa cattle ranchers whose votes she’s vying for might be harmed.

“We need to focus on affordability, but I think this isn’t the way to do that,” she said, after Trump slashed his own beef tariffs. The reason, of course, is because the removal of tariffs means now domestic beef producers have to compete with international producers.

The point of all of this is not that Hinson has no principles (though that could be a related takeaway); it’s an interesting case study in a fairly red district of how candidates are struggling in advance of the midterms to figure out how to align with or distance themselves from Trump. Hinson has flip-flopped, and it’s possible that the flip-flop itself will be damaging. But more than that, it’s interesting that Trump policies might no longer have such resonance with normie American voters.

“There’s a whole crop of people now who just want to start off the day and figure out how to get on the primetime news at night, and that’s not how I operate,” Hinson told The New York Times, seemingly trying to run in that relatable normie lane. “I don’t live on Fox News. I don’t live on Twitter. I live in Iowa.” This race is proving to be rather tight, which is especially interesting given that Trump won the state by 13 points just two years ago.

It’s possible the president has lost the plot—especially on cost-of-living issues—and midterms will teach the party this lesson too late. It’s also possible that Hinson’s issues are specific to Iowa and that the Trump agenda has more salience elsewhere. Time will tell.

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Scenes from New York: I know a lot of the folks pictured and interviewed in this piece, and I’ve spent a bit of time at the Arverne Cinema in Rockaway, Queens, now in danger of closing down. Really funky and special place; try to go before it shuts down if you’re local(ish) to the area.

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QUICK HITS

• “[Federal Reserve Chair Kevin] Warsh enjoys a closer relationship with Trump than his predecessor, Jerome Powell, whom Trump selected for the post during his first term,” notes The Wall Street Journal. “Warsh has approached the relationship differently than Powell. He avoids saying anything that draws the administration into the Fed’s problems, and he has spoken about the Fed’s independence as something to be practiced rather than proclaimed.”
• “If the election were held today, we would win the majority,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) told The Washington Post. Schumer told reporters he was “considerably more bullish” about Democrats’ ability to retake the Senate now.
• Very bad:

NEW: The Second Circuit ruled that federal officers may manually search travelers’ cellphones at the border without a warrant, probable cause, reasonable suspicion, or any individualized suspicion, holding that such searches are “routine” border searches. pic.twitter.com/nNbwSzF5b9

— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) September 17, 2026

• “What I did not understand the first time I tested positive was that pregnancy tests draw a misleading, somewhat arbitrary, binary between a state of pregnant and not pregnant. You can be kind of pregnant, a little bit pregnant, almost pregnant, or maybe pregnant, and still test positive for pregnancy,” writes Apoorva Tadepalli for The New Yorker. That is silly framing—pregnancy should not be redefined as a spectrum—but the actual article is somewhat interesting, about how human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) levels work, and how that’s the hormone that’s actually being measured by pregnancy tests.
• Kind of a fair point:

How does this person still walk around in a Covid mask and at the same time so confidently wave away all AI safety concerns? pic.twitter.com/5oOKKFjRIq

— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 17, 2026

The post MAGA Loyalty in Iowa appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/09/18/maga-loyalty-in-iowa/