Rep. Steve King, a Republican who has served in the US House of Representatives since 2003, is known for few things. Longevity: He’s an eight-year-old congressman and a racist, anti-LGBT and white nationalist. He’s the one who attacked Hispanic immigrants by saying that for every High School Hispanic valedictorian there are 100 drugs that run across the Mexican border – and they have “calves the size of cantaloupes”.
That was in 2014, when, after Hurricane Sandy, he also warned that his victims will spend money they may receive from FEMA on “Gucci bags and massage parlors”.
He said on national television: “We cannot restore our civilization with someone else’s babies,” a clear reference to immigrants from non-European countries. He added, “I would like to see an America so homogeneous that we look very much alike.”
Congressman King has publicly compared members of the U.S. military who are transgender to eunuchs while supporting a bill banning the protection of transgender people under existing federal civil rights laws.
In 2016, Rep. King King insisted that no other “subgroup of people” has contributed “more to civilization” throughout history than whites.
Last year he predicted a race war between “Hispanics and blacks”.
More recently, King traveled this summer to meet with the far-right political party of Austria, which has historical ties to the Nazis. And he did so on a junket that was paid for by a non-profit Holocaust memorial group.
With all that and more, King never had to worry about his seat, which is in an overconservative district in Iowa that is 95 percent white.
Not until now.
As King’s beliefs as a white supremacist and white nationalist gain attention, his funders, including Intel and Land O’Lakes, have announced that they will withdraw their support after King endorses a Canadian white supremacist.
And a new poll found that King has a statistical connection with his Democratic challenger JD Scholten for probably the first time in history.
“Forty-five percent of respondents in the online poll said they would either vote for the Iowa Republican if the election was today, or they would have voted early, according to Change Research’s October 27-29 poll. ” The Hill reports. “Forty-four percent of those polled said the same for Scholten.”
If Scholten beat König, it would be a severe blow to the GOP and the President himself. Trump has told supporters that in the meantime they will have to vote next week because they will vote for him. While technically on the ballot, this election is a referendum on Trump and Trumpism.
President Trump won Congressman King’s district with 27 points in 2016.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license
Comments are closed.