A Little Gas Money

On Wednesday, October 14, which was the first day Iowans could vote early, Representative Ashley Hinson's campaign bus stopped in Fort Dodge and she asked the people who had come out to see her to "help give us a little gas money for our bus, make sure we're showing up at the polls." The paper has no quarrel with a candidate asking for money. It only notes the date and the price. Regular gasoline in Iowa was $4.14 that week, against $2.72 a year before. Diesel was $6.07, against $3.43, and had set a record in September; a farmer named Aaron Lehman told a reporter he was paying about a thousand dollars a day more to run his harvest. Brent crude was $109 because the United States has been at war with Iran since February 28, a war the President said would take four to six weeks. Ms. Hinson has voted six times against resolutions to end it. So when she asked Fort Dodge for gas money, the paper's reaction was the same as her opponent's, who called it "shameful," except that the paper would rather explain than name-call, and the explaining takes a while, because there is a lot of it.

Start with Medicaid, because that is where Iowa's year began. In May 2025 the House passed the President's big bill, and Ms. Hinson, who represents Iowa's Second District and used to anchor the news in Cedar Rapids, went home to Elkader and Decorah to hold town halls about it. More than 300 people came. They booed when she said the President's name and booed when she said the bill's, and people shouted "liar" and "you are a fraud," and she said, "I'm here to clean up lots of the misinformation out there today," and that she was "proud" of her vote. That was May 28. Two days later Senator Joni Ernst, at her own town hall in Parkersburg, was told by a constituent that people would die, and said, "Well, we all are going to die, so for heaven's sakes," and then posted a video from what appeared to be a cemetery apologizing for assuming "that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish," and three months later she announced she would not run again. Ms. Hinson announced for the seat within hours. She voted for the bill a second time in July, and her press release said it "strengthens Medicaid for vulnerable populations while rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse." She now calls it the "Working Families Tax Cut Bill." On October 13, at the second debate, she explained who the vulnerable populations were not: "the people who are losing Medicaid coverage, it's because you're either illegally obtaining it or you shouldn't be on it." PolitiFact looked at the first half of that and found that the law did not remove undocumented immigrants from Medicaid, because they were already ineligible, though it did remove some refugees and asylum-seekers who were here legally. As for the second half, the Kaiser Family Foundation's estimate is that about 80,000 Iowans lose coverage from the law's direct changes, and the work requirements start in January. Senator Ernst said they were going to die anyway. Ms. Hinson's position is that they should not have been on the rolls. The paper is not sure which is the kinder reading.

Now the war, since the gas money is the war. The House has voted seven times this year on ending it or narrowing it, and Ms. Hinson voted no every time, including on September 15, when seven Republicans, two of them her Iowa colleagues Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, voted yes and the resolution passed the House. Eight days after that vote, with Iowa diesel at a record, she posted that "the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end" and proposed suspending the federal gas tax. The next day a Cedar Rapids station asked her what would make her vote for congressional action to do that, and she named nothing: "Well, I think we've made our position loud and clear." At the first debate, October 7: "I don't think we need another resolution." At the second, October 13, she said she would keep voting no. So the sequence is six votes to continue, one post to end, and a pledge to vote to continue again. The paper has watched a lot of politicians ask for an end to something they are funding. It has rarely seen one do it in a single month, in writing, and then ask for gas money.

The tariffs are the same shape. In February the House voted, 219 to 211, to end the national emergency the President had declared to put 25 percent tariffs on Canada; six Republicans crossed, and all four of Iowa's voted no, and Ms. Hinson's statement was that "President Trump is the only one willing to level the playing field" and that "waiting isn't tenable when margins are tight, our farmers' livelihoods are on the line." Her party's count is that she has voted four times to keep the tariffs in place. Here is what the margins did. China's purchases of American soybeans fell 24 percent in 2025, Brazil took three quarters of the market, and when the President announced a deal with China at the end of September that cut tariffs on $60 billion of goods, raw soybeans, Iowa's $6 billion crop, were left out, still carrying an extra 10 percent. "A purchase commitment and a dependable market are not the same thing," an Iowa State economist said. The government then sent farmers an $11 billion check to make up for it, of which Iowa got more than any state, $843 million, and the soybean association said it "falls short." Iowa State's own outlook in July found that 19 percent of the state's mid-size and large farms were financially vulnerable, against under 8 percent in 2022, and that farm bankruptcies had doubled. In Amana, Whirlpool, which paid about $300 million in tariff costs last year, began laying off 341 people in March and the machinists say the production is going to Mexico. Ms. Hinson's reading of all this, in October 2025, was that "it's great to see things move in the right direction for our soybean farmers."

Then the Epstein files, which the paper covers because she has made them a test of honesty and the paper agrees. Through the summer and fall of 2025 a discharge petition sat one signature short of forcing a vote on releasing the files, for about two months, and Ms. Hinson did not sign it. Three times, on July 15, July 17 and September 3, she voted with her leadership on the procedural motions that kept the bill off the floor. In August of this year a caller at her telephone town hall asked, "I saw that you blocked the release of the Epstein files for several months," and she said, "I did not block the release of the Epstein files. I voted to release them," and then, "A discharge petition is a Democrat floor procedure. That's all that is." She did vote to release them, in November, after the President reversed himself and the bill passed 427 to 1. On October 13 she put out an ad saying, "Men like Epstein, who hurt children, they'll have to answer to God. But men who lie about it to win an election, they'll have to answer to you," and the ad received a Community Note explaining that she had voted for the earlier motions that blocked standalone votes and had not signed the petition. In a direct-to-camera video the same week she said, "This week, I had to explain to my boys, 'No, mom does not protect pedophiles,'" and her campaign called Mr. Turek's ad, which says she "skipped three votes to help expose the Epstein files," "astounding and disgusting." PolitiFact, for its part, rated a Democratic ad that said she "voted against releasing the files" Mostly False, so the paper will be exact: she did not vote against releasing them. She voted three times not to be asked, waited for permission, and then voted yes, and now says the people who describe that sequence are lying. The paper is describing the sequence.

Two more, briefly. On October 7 Ms. Hinson said Social Security needed a bipartisan commission to consider "all options," including raising the retirement age for younger workers, a position she first floated in 2020; on October 13 she said, "No, I do not support raising the retirement age." Six days. And her September ad says, "I don't trade stocks and no one else in Congress should either," which is true as far as it goes: she sold her individual stocks in 2021, and the bill she touts exempts holdings acquired before office and private stock, which happens to describe her family's $1 million to $5 million stake in the insurance firm that bought her husband's agency. Her husband chairs the government-affairs committee of the Iowa insurance agents' association, which arranged a meeting with all four Iowa House members; the campaign says the role is unpaid and that "Matt's not a lobbyist nor has he ever lobbied Ashley on anything." The paper believes that too. It just notices that every rule Ms. Hinson is proud of has a door in it the size of her own house. And since the paper is being exact, it will be exact about the other side too: a Democratic super PAC's ad says she is "$8 million richer" since she went to Washington, and PolitiFact on Friday rated that Mostly False, because the arithmetic takes the low end of one year's range and the high end of another's, and the honest figure on the disclosures is closer to $4 million, most of it the husband's stake. The paper takes the $4 million. It is still a lot of gas money.

The Democrat is Josh Turek, and the paper is going to tell you the worst thing about him before it tells you the best, because Ms. Hinson has made the worst thing her closing argument and it is true. Mr. Turek is a state representative from Council Bluffs, and between January 12 and April 2 of this year, while running for the Senate, he missed 261 of 445 floor votes, 58 percent, the second-worst attendance in the Iowa House, and took the full per diem. PolitiFact rates that True. His attendance in his first three years was above 90 percent, and the Iowa legislature's own reporters say floor votes in a session run by the other party are "simply performance," but the paper has read his answer, "I'm out campaigning," and agrees with the Iowa State professor who said he has "never answered well" on it. He should have shown up or given the money back. Ms. Hinson's line, "you're not getting a promotion, you're getting fired," is a good line. The paper notes that she delivered it in the same debate where she explained that she would keep voting to continue a war she had asked, in writing, to end, and that nobody is docking her per diem for that.

Here is the rest of him. Josh Turek was born with spina bifida, which his family attributes to his father's Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, had 21 surgeries before he was twelve, found wheelchair basketball at a camp in Omaha, played professionally in Europe for most of two decades, and won Paralympic gold for the United States in Rio and in Tokyo. He went to work selling wheelchairs and mobility equipment to Iowans on Medicaid, which is where he says he watched the state's privatized Medicaid deny and delay the people who needed them, and in 2022 he won the reddest seat any Democrat holds in Iowa by six votes. In the legislature he got a law passed that lets disabled Iowans keep Medicaid when they go to work. His campaign has raised more money than any Senate candidate in the state's history, $20 million by the end of September, nearly $14 million of it in the last quarter, four times what Ms. Hinson raised in the same quarter, and most of it in small amounts. On the war: "Let's get back to diplomacy. I certainly don't want to see Iran have a nuclear weapon, but we have to end this war." On Social Security: lift the cap, so that "every single teacher and police officer" is not paying on every dollar while "folks like Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos" stop in January. On impeachment: "I have no interest in looking at impeachment. I think that we need to look forward, not back." He has said he would work with the President on the border and his campaign ran an ad saying so, and Ms. Hinson calls that "a tale of two Tureks," and the paper, which spent the spring on a candidate in Michigan who answered the same kind of question better than anyone, would say Mr. Turek's answer is ordinary and honest: he said in April that ICE's conduct was "inhumane" and that he would not fund the department without reforms, and at the debate, asked if that was still his position, he said, "Yeah, that is my position." That is two Tureks only if you need it to be.

The polls have been within the error for a month. The Times had it 48 to 47 for her; Marist has him up three among likely voters and seven among registered; Fox has him up two; the Republican pollsters have her up two or three, and InsiderAdvantage, polling Wednesday and Thursday, had her up two; the averages round to a tie. The President is at 42 percent in Iowa, a state he carried by thirteen, and on Thursday night he flew into Sioux City for her and spoke for more than ninety minutes. He asked the crowd to "pretend that I'm running." He called her "such a pain" for the things she asks him for, called Mr. Turek a "woke, far-left radical," said that with her in the Senate E15 would be sold year-round, said he had signed an order letting farmers and truckers fill up on red-dye diesel "totally tax-free," and said he would rename the Atlantic Ocean the American Ocean on Monday morning. Ms. Hinson says she asks him for "a lot of things for Iowa," and the paper has looked for the one time this month she told him no. On Wednesday, asked on NBC what she would say to the President about the deal he made with Mr. Putin to put Russian diesel back on the market, she said, "I think that's a bad idea. I don't think we should be making deals with Russia." That is the push-back she promises, and here is what it consists of. The Treasury issued the license for the Russian diesel on October 9. Since then twenty-two House members, five of them Republicans, have signed a letter asking the President to revoke it; Ms. Hinson's name is not on it. Gregory Meeks introduced a bill on October 16 to void the license and bar another, and one Republican, Don Bacon, has cosponsored it; Ms. Hinson has not. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican, filed his own bill on Thursday; she is not on that one either. What she has done is tell a television anchor it is a bad idea, the night before she stood on the President's stage and he called her a pain for all the things she asks him for. She had not asked him for this one. She told reporters so on Wednesday: she had not talked with the President about it, and "maybe I'll have a chance to come have a conversation with him at the rally." The paper has found no account that she did. It then went looking for one time in five years that the President changed his mind about anything because Ashley Hinson asked. On the beef, she called the tariff holiday a bad idea in August and said "absolutely I'll be advocating to the administration," and the beef came in. On the war, six no votes and a post. On the tariffs, she never asked. On Russia, she had not brought it up. The diesel relief she praised last week was announced by the administration and praised afterward by her, Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Marshall in that order, and nobody has produced the ask. The paper could not find one. This is the posture of every Republican in a close race this fall, and the paper would like to name it plainly: say the thing the voters want to hear, on camera, and do nothing in your actual power, which in Ms. Hinson's case is a signature and a vote, so that the President is not displeased. It is the war votes again, in miniature. Six no votes and a post saying end it; a license she calls a bad idea and a letter she will not sign. And the reason Russian diesel is on offer at all is that the war she keeps voting to continue took the other diesel off the market. The paper will go on the record about where that leads, so it can be checked later. The license runs to April 2027. It will be renewed, or replaced by another, and American dollars will be paying for Russian diesel, which is to say for the war on Ukraine, for the rest of this President's term, and the Republicans who called it a bad idea on television will still be calling it a bad idea on television. If Ms. Hinson would like to prove the paper wrong, the letter is still open for signatures. Iowa diesel was $6.17 on Wednesday, up ten cents in a week. About 167,000 Iowans had already voted by the time Air Force One landed. Her own polling tells her she is losing voters under fifty by fourteen points and winning voters over fifty by thirteen, which is why the ads are about per diems and not about diesel.

The Daily Buffoon endorses Josh Turek for the United States Senate from Iowa. It does so with the 58 percent on the record and not excused, because the choice in Iowa is between a man who missed votes to run for office and a woman who showed up for every one of them and voted, each time, for the thing Iowa is now paying for: the Medicaid rolls she says were full of people who shouldn't be on them, the tariffs that cost the soybean market, the war that put diesel at six dollars, and the files she voted three times not to be asked about. Mr. Turek would be the first Paralympian in the Senate and the first senator in a wheelchair since Tom Harkin's law made the building passable, and he knows what a Medicaid denial letter looks like because he delivered the chairs. Iowa votes early through November 2. The paper would like Iowans to remember who asked them for gas money, and when.

Four clowns. Ms. Hinson is not a fool and the paper will not pretend she is; she is a professional who reads a room and says what it wants, and the trouble is only that the room keeps changing. Four is for a woman who was proud of the Medicaid bill in Decorah while they booed, who voted to keep the war going on a Tuesday and asked to end it the Wednesday after next, who blocked the vote and then voted yes and called the rest of us liars, who calls the Russian diesel a bad idea on television and will not put her name to a letter against it, and who stood in Fort Dodge on the first day of voting, with diesel at six dollars, and asked for a little gas money. The fifth clown is for people who don't know what they did. She knows. She has a 99 percent attendance record, and she was there for all of it.