Steve King of Iowa is most notorious for his racist remarks. But labor also knew him for his repeated attempts to push a national “right to work” bill through Congress. Tonight he lost his party’s primary as he tried for a tenth term in the House of Representatives.
“Representative Steve King of Iowa, the nine-term Republican with a history of racist comments who only recently became a party pariah, lost his bid for renomination early Wednesday, one of the biggest defeats of the 2020 primary season in any state.
In a five-way primary, Mr. King was defeated by Randy Feenstra, a state senator, who had the backing of mainstream state and national Republicans who found Mr. King an embarrassment and, crucially, a threat to a safe Republican seat if he were on the ballot in November.
The defeat was most likely the final political blow to one of the nation’s most divisive elected officials, whose insults of undocumented immigrants foretold the messaging of President Trump, and whose flirtations with extremism led him far from rural Iowa, to meetings with anti-Muslim crusaders in Europe and an endorsement of a Toronto mayoral candidate with neo-Nazi ties.
In interviews over the years, voters in Iowa’s most conservative region downplayed Mr. King’s incendiary comments. His loss after 18 years in office was mainly because opponents painted him as ineffective after party leaders in Congress stripped him of his committee assignments last year.
That move came after comments that Mr. King made in an interview with The New York Times in 2019, in which he asked, ‘White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?’
The remarks caused an uproar. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, told Mr. King ‘to find another line of work.'”
For the rest of the story, visit The New York Times here.
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