He spent little energy on fundraising, put few controls on his racist language and made little effort to hold town halls with constituents.
Then in November he was re-elected by just 10,000 votes in what he called “the nastiest, most dishonest political gauntlet that any Iowan has been put through”; two months later, he was stripped of his committee assignments and rebuked by the House for comments that seemed to endorse white supremacy. Now the nine-term Iowa Republican is under attack from both the left and the right.
Far from folding, though, King is returning to basics, reasserting an aggressive presence in his northwestern Iowa district, scheduling events in every county and holding as many as three town halls in a week, where constituents pack in, then linger to take photos and shake hands.
“This is a really important part of our civic activity,” King told constituents crowded into a room in a library here in Algona, a northern town of about 5,000. “We have always done so, we just haven’t always told you that.”
The winds have shifted, even Republicans concede.
“Things are different than they’ve been before,” said Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa. “Steve King can only be so good for so long. A lot of eyes were opened when they saw just how close he came to losing that seat in the last election cycle.”
Hoping to win over prominent conservatives tired of putting out King’s fires, three Republicans — widely considered the most serious challengers King has faced in years — have already pledged to run in the 2020 primary race, including an assistant majority leader of the Iowa state Senate, Randy Feenstra, who represents one of the most conservative swaths of the district.
The campaign arm of the House Democrats has also put a target on his back, and the state Democratic Party has deployed an organizer to set up a ground game for next year, the earliest Democrats have ever begun such efforts in a district that backed President Donald Trump by nearly 30 percentage points.
“We see him being held accountable. We really put a spotlight on something that was overlooked for a very long time,” said J.D. Scholten, the Democrat who lost to King in November. “You’re seeing his reaction to things where he hasn’t been held in check for years.”
Regardless of scrutiny, Steve King will be Steve King. Last week, he declined to answer a question at a town hall here asking whether a “white society is superior to a nonwhite society” because the query was “so hypothetical.” At another town hall last week, he complained that Hurricane Katrina victims, who were mostly black, asked for help for only themselves, not their neighbors, while “Iowans take care of each other.”
The Cedar Rapids Gazette issued a scathing editorial accusing King of choosing to “embarrass Iowans with inflammatory rhetoric.”
For many western Iowans, that’s part of his appeal.
“He’s a straight talker,” said Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of King’s hometown newspaper, The Storm Lake Times. “He ain’t afraid of the man. He ain’t afraid of the system. That’s powerful.”
The system is clearly against him. House Republican leaders removed King from his committee assignments in January, after comments he made to The New York Times questioning why “white supremacist” was considered offensive. A number of powerful party leaders, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, suggested he should resign, and the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution disapproving of King’s statements.
Even before then, in October, the head of the House Republican campaign arm at the time, Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio, all but jettisoned King just a week before his election, declaring, “We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms.”
King has long made remarks denigrating immigrants, and they were long overlooked. Republican presidential candidates genuflected toward him as a kingmaker before the critical Iowa caucuses. Republican House leaders ducked and dodged rather than answer for King as he enmeshed himself in one scandal after another: retweeting a Nazi sympathizer, saying young unauthorized immigrants have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” displaying a Confederate flag and adopting white nationalist language such as “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
But his close race in November signaled to members of his own party that voters’ patience may be wearing thin. Feenstra announced his primary challenge a day before King’s incendiary comments on white supremacy were published, then raised $100,000 in the next 10 days, according to The Des Moines Register.
“Today, Iowa’s 4th District doesn’t have a voice in Washington because our current representative’s caustic nature has left us without a seat at the table,” Feenstra said in January.
King’s younger son and spokesman, Jeff King, was quick to fire back, telling The Register that Feenstra’s challenge amounted to “misguided political opportunism, fueled by establishment puppeteers” and “the lies of the left.”
Republican strategists say the conservative tilt of King’s district and his entrenched presence will make for an uphill battle even for conservative challengers like Feenstra. But in a presidential year, when a wide-open Democratic field and antipathy toward Trump will energize liberals, Republicans should be worried.
“There will be a lot of Republican activists who will defend him until the very end,” Robinson said.“But I think when we get closer to primary day, people’s opinion might change, because he barely held on last time, and I think it would be concerning, especially in a presidential year, that Republicans could lose this seat, which would be unfathomable.”
Before 2018, the last scare King faced was in 2012, when Democrats pumped resources behind their challenger, the former Iowa first lady Christie Vilsack. She mustered less than 45 percent of the vote.
This time Democrats face something of a conundrum.
Scholten, a 39-year-old former minor league baseball player, must decide whether to run again for the House or shoot higher. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, flew him to Washington to discuss challenging Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, according to Democrats familiar with the meeting.
“The dilemma I’m having right now is that Democrats won the House, and so in order for us to pass some of these things, we need to have at least one senator from the state of Iowa be a Democrat,” Scholten said. “It’s difficult because King is the most vulnerable he has ever been, but do we advance the things that I’m fighting for if I go back to the House seat?”
The decision may not be all Scholten’s to make. Schumer and his staff have also made overtures to state Sen. Liz Mathis and freshman Rep. Cindy Axne — and it is also unclear whether another breakout Democratic candidate exists in the 4th Congressional District.
King’s supporters say he has been unfairly treated by the national news media, and they praise him as a steadfast ally of agriculture and an anti-abortion crusader. Confronted with the question about white societies at the town hall meeting, King demurred. But his rambling anger ended with a proclamation of his belief that life begins at conception — and left his questioner agreeing with him.
“Ask anyone who talked to him: Didn’t you think he was kind of like your crazy uncle?” Cullen said. “Didn’t you kind of like the guy when he was talking about white supremacy?”
Many will answer yes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.