The Fight for Iowa’s White Working-Class Soul

For Abby Finkenauer, authenticity is everything.

“Sorry we’re late!” she calls out, walking through the front door of her childhood home and into the kitchen, where I sit waiting with her campaign manager. Finkenauer, the 29-year-old candidate for Iowa’s first congressional district, wears a flowy blue blouse, skinny jeans, and pink lipstick. Smoothing her long brown hair, she describes how she and a staffer had been caught on the highway behind two tractors, one of which was pulling a contraption for distributing fertilizer. “Or, as I like to call it, a shit spreader!” Finkenauer says. She shakes my hand, then heads for the fridge. “There’s pop!” she says, offering me a bottle. “There’s always pop!”

A member of the Iowa House of Representatives since 2015, Finkenauer is now challenging the 63-year-old incumbent Rod Blum, a Tea Party Republican and member of the House Freedom Caucus, in Iowa’s first congressional district. Blum, Finkenauer says, is out of touch, whereas she is one of the people: Her father was a union pipe fitter–welder, her mother an employee of the public-school system. She’s a progressive Democrat, but she doesn’t fashion herself that way; instead, her campaign has stressed economic issues and neighborly goodwill.

“In a lot of ways, she is the antithesis and antidote to Trumpism,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who has served in senior roles for the House’s campaign arm. “Congressman Blum and the Republican Congress have forgotten the ‘forgotten man’ … She is stepping into that void with a megaphone.” Blum did not respond to my request to be interviewed for this story.

I grew up in Burlington, Iowa, just south of the first district, and Finkenauer reminded me of the people I grew up with—the way she says “tellin’” and “workin’” and talks about her “grampa.” But the race also intrigued me: Every politician wants to demonstrate a oneness with their constituents, but there is something uncanny about watching a candidate perform her statehood when you’re from the same state.