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King Still Has Backing in Iowa, but Even Supporters Say 'He's Done'

King Still Has Backing in Iowa, but Even Supporters Say 'He's Done'
King Still Has Backing in Iowa, but Even Supporters Say 'He's Done'

But here’s the thing: These rock-solid supporters of King, whose comments seeming to endorse white supremacy brought stinging rebukes from his own party leaders, are also convinced that his 16-year career in Congress representing northwest Iowa is effectively over.

“I think he’s dead in the water,” said Pat Reed, a retired history teacher in a purple University of Northern Iowa sweatshirt, reacting to the news that House Republicans this week had stripped King of his positions on the Agriculture and Judiciary committees.

“I think he’s done,” echoed Ross Nemitz, owner of Ross’s Appliance Center in Fort Dodge, a small blue-collar city in the heart of King’s district full of agribusinesses.

Every rural Iowa community has its Zakeer’s, a cafe with a table of early morning regulars — a Greek chorus speaking with a collective voice on dramas playing out on the local and national stage.

The men at Zakeer’s have had breakfast together for more than 20 years. They keep attendance logs and play a game of chance to see who picks up the coffee tab. (On Wednesday, the loser was an out-of-town reporter.)

For King, 69, losing the chorus at Zakeer’s spells deep trouble. A copy of The Des Moines Register on a table displayed a top-of-the-page headline, “House rebukes King.” It upstaged the story of Gov. Kim Reynolds’ State of the State speech.

King was also the top story on WHO, a conservative talk radio station broadcasting across much of his vast, 39-county district of corn and soybean fields, whose black furrows lay under 2 inches of snow.

John Kilmer, a retired truck-driver listening from an adjacent table, who had voted for King in the midterms, said now he must resign. “They’ve stripped him of his committees and he’s just taking up space,” he said.

And it wasn’t just voters who think King’s career is nearing an end: Republican officials are already planning to move past him, and are busy recruiting and raising money for primary challengers in 2020 if he does not step down.

King says he has no plans to seek “another line of work,” as Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, recommended this week. He pushed back Wednesday in a fundraising letter to supporters, writing that “the unhinged Left has teamed up with Republican ‘NeverTrumpers’ and is pulling out all the stops to destroy me.”

He attacked The New York Times, which published a quote from him in an article last week that led to the firestorm in Congress.

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” King told The Times, comments he now says were taken out of context.

Some longtime supporters in King’s 4th District said that even if the nine-term congressman defiantly stays on, they will most likely back a primary challenger. Two candidates announced this week that they would jump into the race, including a prominent Republican state lawmaker, Randy Feenstra, and others are expected.

The Fort Dodge Messenger, which in November endorsed King over his Democratic challenger, J.D. Scholten, issued an unusual correction Wednesday night, calling on King to resign.

“It is now clear that the endorsement we made was a mistake,” the editorial board wrote. “We should have pondered more carefully King’s pattern of making outrageous statements.”

There are many reasons King has been re-elected repeatedly despite years of white identity politics and demeaning comments about Hispanic immigrants, whom he has compared to dogs, dirt and drug mules “with calves the size of cantaloupes.”

The most basic reason may be the deeply conservative nature of his district, where Republicans almost always triumph: President Donald Trump carried it by 27 points. King’s conservatism on abortion and gun rights lines up with a majority of his constituents, as does his reputation as an outsider defying the party establishment.

Some supporters said the rebuke by party leaders in Washington and Des Moines would only increase his appeal and backfire on those hoping he leaves Congress.

“Now that they’ve stripped him of his committee assignments, I’ve seen people dig in their heels and say, No, Congressman King is one of us, Congressman King is a pro-life, pro-gun, pro-conservative person, just like we are,” said Jacob Hall, who leads an activist group, Sioux County Conservatives.

Hall disputed the notion that King’s latest comments about white supremacy would move many votes one way or the other.

“There’s nothing anybody is going to hear Congressman King say that’s going to change their mind about him, whether they’re a supporter or a detractor,” he said. “Our minds are made up in the 4th District.”

But the results of November’s midterms call into question that view.

King barely squeaked out a three-point victory in the midterms, after winning by 23 points two years earlier. His support plummeted late in the race after he endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate with neo-Nazi ties and met with members of a far-right Austrian party accused of trivializing the Holocaust. The chairman of the House Republican election committee issued a stinging rebuke of him a week before the election, labeling him a white supremacist.

Many Iowa Republican officials fear that if King is on the ballot in November 2020, he will drive up Democratic turnout, threatening other Republicans running, especially Sen. Joni Ernst.

“Down-ballot and up-ballot, he’s definitely a liability,” said Dean Nealson, a former Republican chairman of Story County, the largest and most Democratic county in King’s district.

Ernst may be vulnerable even if King is not running, after distancing herself from him only this week, as did Iowa’s senior senator, Charles E. Grassley, and Reynolds. Each had spent years embracing King because they needed his conservative base of voters.

“Grassley, Joni Ernst, Kim Reynolds, they could have taken a stance on this years ago,” said Troy Price, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. “It’s appalling; it’s a failure of leadership on their part.”

Opponents of King, and even some of his supporters, have long been frustrated by the impression he gives to non-Iowans who think his 16 years in office prove that his constituents are racists.

“I’m embarrassed by him,” said Amy Presler, 48, a librarian in Fort Dodge, who grew up on a farm as the youngest of 10 siblings. “I don’t want people in the nation and the world to think that Iowans are behind him and support that sort of talk. We don’t.'’

King’s racist remarks over the years have mainly been directed at unauthorized Latino immigrants. He was years ahead of Trump in calling for a concrete border wall, in demonizing migrants as violent criminals and opposing any plan to legalize Dreamers as a form of amnesty.

Mike McCarville, a former Fort Dodge mayor, said that when it came to the many Latinos who work in meatpacking, construction and agriculture in the region, native-born Iowans could be “two-faced.'’

“All the farmers will bitch about all the Hispanics,” he said, “but they hire them and we can’t get along without them.”

“If they accomplished what they say they want and just round them all up and ship them back, our economy would grind to a halt,” he added.

On Monday, after House Republicans stripped King of his committee assignments, Lorena Lopez, publisher of La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper in the district, received a flood of texts and emails from readers. “Every Latino knows how he has been, his negative comments especially against Latinos,” she said.

The response of the Latino community, she said, has been simple: “It is about time.”

Back at Zakeer’s, the coffee crew said that King’s loss of committee assignments means the 4rth District now has no seat at the table in Congress.

“No matter how much you may like the guy, if that person can’t represent you as well because he’s been stripped of powers …” began Nemitz, the appliance dealer.

Reed, the retired schoolteacher, finished the sentence: “Then there isn’t much sense of being there.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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