Rep. Steve King, a Republican serving in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2003, is known for few things. Longevity: he’s and eight-term Congressman, and being a racist, anti-LGBT, and a white nationalist: he’s the one who attacked Hispanic immigrants by saying that for every Hispanic high school valedictorian, there are 100 who are running drugs across the Mexican border — and they have “calves the size of cantaloupes.”
That was 2014, when he also warned, after Hurricane Sandy, that its victims will spend money they may receive from FEMA on “Gucci bags and massage parlors.”
He has said on national television, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” a clear reference to immigrants from non-European countries. He added: “I’d like to see an America that’s just so homogenous that we look a lot the same.”
Congressman King has publicly compared members of the U.S. Military who are transgender to eunuchs, while co-sponsoring a bill that would ban transgender people from being protected under existing federal civil rights laws.
In 2016 Rep. King King insisted that throughout history no other “subgroup of people” have contributed “more to civilization” than whites.
Last year he predicted a race war between “Hispanics and the blacks.”
More recently, King this summer traveled to meet with Austria’s far right political party that has historical ties to Nazis. And he did so on a junket paid for by a non-profit Holocaust Memorial Group.
Despite all this, and so much more, King has never had to worry about his seat, which is in an uber-conservative Iowa district that is 95 percent white.
Not until now.
As King’s white supremacist and white nationalist beliefs are getting more attention, his financial backers, including Intel and Land O’ Lakes, have announced they are withdrawing their support, in the wake of King endorsing a Canadian white supremacist.
And a new poll finds that King is in a statistical tie with his Democratic challenger, J.D. Scholten, for what is likely the first time in history.
“Forty-five percent of respondents in the online poll said they would either vote for the Iowa Republican if the election were today, or have already voted for him early, according to the poll conducted by Change Research from Oct. 27-29,” The Hill reports. “Forty-four percent of respondents said the same for Scholten.”
Were Scholten to beat King it would be a tremendous blow to the GOP and to the President himself. Trump has told supporters they must vote in next week’s midterms, because they are voting for him. Even though he’s technically on the ballot, this election is a referendum on Trump, and Trumpism.
President Trump won Congressman King’s district in 2016 by 27 points.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license