Name: Steve King Faces Republican Primary Opponent After Racist Outbursts
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Steve King Faces Republican Primary Opponent After Racist Outbursts

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Remember politics? Voting? Elections? Those strange rituals so beloved by our ancestors in the Before Times. Well, there were a bunch of them going on Tuesday, more than anytime since Super Tuesday, which I believe occurred shortly after the Council of Trent. Nine states, plus the embattled District of Columbia, are holding one kind of election or the other. Valerie Plame, a victim of the previous Republican Worst President of All Time, is running in a Democratic congressional primary in New Mexico, which is interesting in and of itself. (It’s a three-way contest, and Plame is not the favorite.) In another congressional district in that state, the Republican primary has turned into a knife fight. From :Republican Yvette Herrell, a conservative former state legislator who lost to Torres Small in 2018, is back for a rematch. But most national Republicans think the GOP would be better off with new blood, identifying businesswoman Claire Chase as a top recruit. The Chase-Herrell primary has turned into one of the most bitter contests on the 2020 electoral map. Last month, Chase Herrell of a “despicable, untrue and deeply personal attack” after a military veteran said Herrell told him that Chase had cheated on her first husband when he was deployed overseas. (Herrell denies that exchange took place, and Chase says she met her current husband after she was divorced.)Yeesh.Greg Gianforte is also on the ballot.In Montana, Congressman Greg Gianforte, the goon who assaulted reporter Ben Jacobs a couple of years ago, is running in a GOP gubernatorial primary against the state’s attorney general, and all decent people hope Gianforte loses by 150 percent of the vote. But the real action is in Iowa, where the Democrats see targets of opportunity , Congressman Steve King, , Senator Joni Ernst. There are five Democrats fighting to oppose Ernst in the fall, with Theresa Greenfield, an Iowa businessperson, the favorite despite the fact that her last campaign for anything crashed in an embarrassing fashion back in 2018. From the :In , Noah Wasserman said he falsified signatures in required petition documents that Greenfield and other Iowa candidates were required to submit to get on the ballot. The ad was the first time Wasserman has publicly commented on the incident. The incident is well-known; back in March 2018, shortly before the deadline and announced that her campaign manager had faked signatures. Greenfield said she immediately fired Wasserman, though at the time she did not share his name. Greenfield attempted, with the help of staff on other Democratic campaigns, to collect new signatures to qualify for the primary ballot. She ended up coming short, .This time, Greenfield has lined up a juggernaut of Washington establishment Democratic support, which may or may not ultimately be to her benefit.Greenfield is still the odds-on favorite on Tuesday. But she needs to clear 35 percent to clinch the nomination. Otherwise the nomination fight heads to a party convention, where delegates might be torn between Greenfield’s national support and some raw feelings on the ground about the party’s intervention in the primary.Meanwhile, in Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District, the state and national GOPs are trying once again to pry the albatross that is Steve King off the party’s neck. Remarkably, after our little chat on MSNBC, King went on to be even more of an obvious white supremacist, so much so that the Republican caucus in the House stripped him of his committee assignments. In their attempt to unload him this time around, the Republicans are being characteristically chickenshit.King’s strongest challenger on Tuesday is state Sen. Randy Feenstra, who has adopted the party’s line on the incumbent. He has cited King’s lack of legislative effectiveness — Republicans booted the congressman from all his committee assignments after he appeared to defend the terms “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” in a New York Times interview — without directly condemning him.Yes, the biggest problem with King is not that he’s a raving racist loon, it’s that he's a raving racist loon who can’t bring home the pork. The biggest problem with the Republican Party is that it’s still trying to finesse this question, because too much of its base wants the hate as much as the bacon.Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has his three children.This content is imported from OpenWeb. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.&nbsp;Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below

Remember politics? Voting? Elections? Those strange rituals so beloved by our ancestors in the Before Times. Well, there were a bunch of them going on Tuesday, more than anytime since Super Tuesday, which I believe occurred shortly after the Council of Trent. Nine states, plus the embattled District of Columbia, are holding one kind of election or the other. Valerie Plame, a victim of the previous Republican Worst President of All Time, is running in a Democratic congressional primary in New Mexico, which is interesting in and of itself. (It’s a three-way contest, and Plame is not the...

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Charles P. Pierce is a writer-at-large for Esquire and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the LA Times Magazine, the Nation, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated and The Chicago Tribune, among others.

Steve King Faces Republican Primary Opponent After Racist Outbursts

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