This would explain, in part, why President Trump this month endorsed candidates in two Republican primaries in Iowa, but conspicuously ignored Mr. King.
In 2018, Mr. King won the solidly Republican Fourth by only 3.3 percentage points — a total of about 10,000 votes against his Democratic challenger, J.D. Scholten. (Mr. King won the seat by more than 22 points in 2016). Mr. Trump took the same district in 2016 by a 27-point margin.
But Mr. King wasn’t always so offensively outspoken. Over his past few congressional terms, Mr. King has become fixated on things far from the interests of his constituents. And his constituents know it.
In 2018, at a town hall event I attended in Webster City, voters wondered why he was traveling to Europe to meet with far-right figures. They also raised questions about his lifestyle in Washington — expensive meals and the like. These Iowa voters, then, wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Mr. King has been paying his son Jeff several thousand dollars a month to manage his campaign, as he has in past years. Mr. King’s daughter-in-law is also on the campaign’s payroll.
But it’s Mr. King’s turn away from the district and toward divisive and racial issues that has really turned off his constituents. Bob Vander Plaats, an evangelical Iowa political broker, has called the congressman “embarrassing” and said the district deserves better. He’s endorsed Mr. Feenstra and appears in ads playing in Iowa’s Fourth. “Whatever you think of Steve King, it’s clear he’s no longer effective,” Mr. Vander Plaats says in the advertisement. “He can’t deliver for President Trump, and he can’t advance our conservative values.”
Mr. King wrote two weeks ago in a newspaper op-ed essay that it’s the “billionaire coastal RINO-NeverTrumper, globalist, neocon elites” who support Mr. Feenstra. Mr. Rove said the opposite is true.
“The people trying to take him down are ordinary people of western Iowa who are sick and tired of a showboater, not a workhorse, and by Republicans around the country who are offended by his remarks and by how badly it reflects on the Republican Party,” he said. “In reality, if he was doing his job representing the people of his district he wouldn’t have any primary opponents, let alone four.”