The Big Question in Iowa’s Senate Race

Welcome to The Blue Book! Today, read about Josh Turek’s Senate campaign, data centers in Ohio politics, and more ...

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The big question in Iowa’s Senate race

Is Iowa still a swing state? That’s what Democrats are testing in the increasingly red state’s races for governor, U.S. Senate, and four House seats this fall. Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for a vital U.S. Senate seat, is hoping to prove that a Democrat can still win in Iowa. But he faces an uphill battle.

Turek, a Paralympic gold medalist basketball player who has served in the state legislature since 2023, is facing Ashley Hinson, a former TV journalist and current member of the House of Representatives, a role she’s held since 2021. The two are vying to replace retiring GOP Senator Joni Ernst. 

Both Turek and Hinson list affordability and agricultural policy high up on their policy platforms. Turek wants to raise the minimum wage, set term limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, and address cancer-causing water pollution—a serious problem in Iowa that has been linked to agricultural runoff. Hinson’s platform includes limiting regulations for family farms, moving federal agencies out of D.C. and into the states, and cutting government waste. Both candidates want to see Congress pass a farm bill, and Turek says he wants it to include anti-monopoly provisions and a “right to repair.”

In the last decade, Iowa’s status as a swing state has become increasingly debatable. The state has elected Republican governors since 2010, and both Senate seats have been held by Republicans since 2015, when Ernst was elected to serve alongside long-serving Senator Chuck Grassley.

President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 by over 9 percent, a massive 15-point rightward swing from the 2012 election. He then won Iowa by 8 percent in 2020, and by over 13 points in 2024.

Turek hopes his “prairie populist” vibe, which has won him elections before, will help him flip the Senate seat. In the state legislature, he represents the 20th district, which includes his hometown of Council Bluffs. He won the seat by just six votes in 2022 and 561 votes in 2024—even though Trump won the broader Pottawattamie County, which includes the 20th district, by 17 percent in 2020 and 20 percent in 2024. 

“When I went door to door, crawling up stairs and dragging my wheelchair behind me, the first question people always asked was ‘how in the world did you get up here?’ I would tell them ‘I crawled up here, because that’s how important your vote is to me. I think more than anything, people want their representatives to be willing to listen and fight for them, not for the billionaires and the large corporations,” Turek said in a written statement to The New Republic.

Turek will need independent voters this November. According to a new Emerson College Polling/Nexstar Media survey, independent voters break for Turek by an 11-point margin. But he still trails Hinson in the poll, with support from 45 percent of respondents to her 48 percent. Six percent of respondents remained undecided.

Some political analysts think Turek’s ability to appeal to independents and conservatives still won’t be enough. “If a Republican is disaffected this year, they’re a heck of a lot more likely to not show up or to skip over various offices on the ballot than they are to vote for a Democrat,” said Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report, in a speech at Des Moines’s Drake University in late July. “We’ll have to wait and see whether the Iowa Senate flips, but I’d give it probably a one in four chance.”

The Cook Political Report rates the Senate race as “leans Republican,” and Cook himself said that he believes Iowa hasn’t been a swing state “for a long time.”—Emma Janssen

The Ohio Capital Journal has published a trio of pieces reviewing candidates’ data center positions in three key races: gubernatorial (Democrat Amy Acton versus Republican Vivek Ramaswamy), Senate (Sherrod Brown versus Jon Husted), and the 9th congressional district (Marcy Kaptur versus Derek Merrin). Ohio passed tax breaks for data centers in 2017, and now ranks sixth in the nation for current and planned data centers. All three races are believed to be a dead heat, although there’s very little public polling on the 9th. While data center backlash transcends partisan divides, the pieces show that, across the board, Democratic candidates in Ohio seem to be adopting a more aggressive regulatory position. 

One of the water utilities recently targeted in suspected Iranian cyberattacks on the U.S. water supply, The Washington Post notes, was in western Arkansas—one of three states that sued the Environmental Protection Agency under Joe Biden to prevent it from instituting a requirement to harden water systems against cyberattacks. “Had the EPA rule been in place, some experts say, the Arkansas utility or others like it might have been spared,” write Ellen Nakashima and Amy B. Wang—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Open Markets Institute’s Center for Media and Digital Governance director, Courtney Radsch, condemns last week’s Federal Communications Commission vote to scrap a rule that limited TV media consolidation. “This decision effectively places FCC Chair Brendan Carr in open defiance of Congress, and it gives us yet again another reason to call for removing him from his post,” said Radsch in a statement.

Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert calls last week’s Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general a “stain on the record of Senators who voted to confirm him.”

After yet another company announced a settlement agreement with Trump’s Interior Department last week to abandon its offshore wind leases, the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that this brings the tally of such settlements up to “nearly $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds.” In a statement published on the organization’s website, NRDC policy analyst Pasha Feinberg said that “American consumers are paying twice, once with their tax dollars and the second time with higher utility bills.”—Heather Souvaine Horn

Four Questions For: Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center

Interview by Monica Potts

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?

A: I am the president of the Food Research & Action Center, where I’ve spent 27 years working to end poverty-related hunger in America. Before stepping into this role, I spent many years leading our child nutrition work. Right now, we are focused on restoring, protecting, and strengthening the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program after Congress made unprecedented cuts to the program in July 2025. Since then, five million people have lost access to SNAP.

Q: What is the most difficult thing about your line of work?

A: Helping policymakers feel the urgency of ending hunger can be one of the hardest parts of this work. Children only get one childhood, and there are no do-overs. Growing up in a food-insecure household, as one in five children do, can have a lasting impact on how they grow, learn, and thrive. Hunger is solvable. It just requires political will.

Q: What was your biggest success in the last year or two?

A: We have made significant progress on Healthy School Meals for All. More schools are offering school breakfast and lunch to all their students at no cost, regardless of household income. That’s a win for kids who have the nutrition they need to thrive in school, families who can count on school meals to help ease pressure on their household budgets, and schools who have students who are well nourished and ready to learn. 

Q: What keeps you going in these stressful times?

A: What motivates me is knowing that hunger isn’t inevitable; it’s a policy choice. We know what works. We have the tools to solve it. And that is what we focus on every day at FRAC. I also draw strength from the commitment and passion of my colleagues, who bring that same sense of purpose to the work.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

A Democratic Wisconsin senator from the 1960s and ’70s was the creator of Earth Day. Who was he? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.) 

Protecting Workers From AI Is Easier Said Than Done

Welcome to The Blue Book! Today, read about a new plan to address AI-related job loss, Sarah Trone Garriott’s campaign in Iowa, and more ...

Editor’s Note: Welcome to The TNR Blue Book. It’s our new daily newsletter that covers Congress and much more, but with a distinctly TNR twist: Our focus will be strictly on Democrats, liberal and progressive groups, and the fight to take back power and save democracy. Every morning, you’ll get a rundown of late-breaking news, what Democrats on Capitol Hill are thinking, quick hits on what you need to know nationally, the latest on what’s coming out of the think tanks and activist groups, short interviews with progressive newsmakers and authors, and more (including some humor and political trivia!). There’s nothing else out there like it.

Protecting workers from AI is easier said than done

House Democrats trying to address artificial intelligence–related job loss have a problem: No one’s really sure what the economic upheaval from AI is going to look like.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made headlines last year when he predicted that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman predicted 20 percent to 30 percent unemployment within the next two to five years. A coalition of 200 AI-industry professionals and economists (including 16 Nobel laureates) released a statement titled “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” which calls for stakeholders to prepare for the economic impacts of more powerful AI.

On Thursday, Representatives Greg Casar, Valerie Foushee, and Sara Jacobs unveiled the latest installment in a host of Democratic and bipartisan bills seeking to address concerns about AI. Their proposal: the AI Tax and Work Protection Act, a plan to tax AI companies and build a new Work Protection Administration to create AI-proof jobs.

“While workers get pushed out, some of the world’s biggest corporations are raking in record profits off of AI systems trained on human work, without ensuring workers share in those gains. So Congress needs to act right now,” said Jacobs.

Legislative proposals around AI so far have mostly focused on data centers and safety regulation—although no bills on this front have been passed. Some legislators are also trying to get more information about how AI is already affecting workers. Senators Jim Banks, a Republican, and John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, are collaborating on a bill that would add questions to federal job surveys about how AI is used in the workplace and which roles are most impacted by AI. That bill, the AI Workforce Projections, Research and Evaluations to Promote AI Readiness and Employment, or AI Workforce PREPARE Act, was introduced in December. The new bill from House members also spells out a plan for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to collect more data about AI and the economy.

The current lack of information around how AI is impacting workers is a major concern for researchers. “I think it is fair to say that nobody really knows exactly what’s going to happen with regard to related job loss, and we have no good measures of it,” said Thomas Davenport, a professor of information technology and management at Babson College.

But some experts are skeptical of predictions like 50 percent of white-collar jobs disappearing. “I think there’s a lot of uncertainty, of course, about AI, and potential for job loss has been dominated by the opinions of people in industry,” said Morgan Frank, an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. “That means that certain narratives can run wild without the empirics to back it up. And so I can understand why the public is worried and wants to see legislators respond, and therefore legislators are responding.”

Lawmakers say they’re acting on concerns they’ve been hearing from their constituents. “It’s what people want, and so these AI PACs can try to spend huge amounts of money to try to shut people up, but I think that Democrats should pick where the voters are, what the voters want, over what big money interests want,” said Casar, addressing the role that AI-industry money has been playing in elections. Leading the Future, a PAC supported by major tech figures like Greg Brockman, the co-founder of OpenAI, and Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, has been spending heavily to elect pro-AI candidates. The PAC’s policy wing, Build American AI, has endorsed 43 House members so far.

Addressing the fact that data about AI-related job loss is sparse, legislators on the call said that the bill is designed to be flexible and responsive to a changing economy. They pointed to its shifting tax rate: The rate rises when unemployment rates rise. If AI usage increases dramatically, more tokens are spent, so the token tax revenue rises too. “This bill has this kind of framework that plans for an uncertain future,” Casar said. “We should have a plan in place so that if unemployment does go up, we’re prepared, rather than just dealing with the crisis once AI billionaires are becoming trillionaires and many people are put out of work.”

Revenue from the taxes would be invested in projects like building housing, training caregivers, increasing access to elder- and childcare, and modernizing infrastructure. The grants would be disbursed from the Work Protection Administration to states, cities, tribes, localities, nonprofits, unions, and educational institutions, the bill says.

The bill “recognizes that creating this full-employment economy, ensuring that we still have a full-employment economy, is not a matter of dreaming up make-work jobs. It is a matter of elevating and expanding the desperately needed jobs that are undersupplied today and will be undersupplied tomorrow,” said Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president for economic policy under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Sperling worked with the lawmakers to draft the legislation.

Casar said that he’s hopeful the bill will complement other recent legislative proposals, like an AI safety bill from Representatives Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan, and another bill from Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran. “This is not a symbolic proposal. This is a proposal that we have been vetting with the relevant committees, and we hope it’s written in a way that it is intended to be put in place as soon as possible,” Casar said. “So this is not a messaging bill. This is what we want Democrats rallying........

© New Republic