Holding a blue chair in a red-hued place like Iowa’s Third Congressional District takes discipline. It takes a relentless focus on the people back home, which is why you won’t see Cindy Axne laughing in “Morning Joe” or rubbing elbows with Jake Tapper on DailyExpertNews. It takes who-knows-how many hits on national radio stations that may only reach a few hundred people at a time.
Axne is a living case study of political survival. Donald Trump carried her district in both of his presidential runs. In 2020, a bad year for House Democrats, she held on to her seat by less than 7,000 votes.
This year, Axne has one of the toughest reelection tasks of any congressman. She is the only Democrat in the Iowa to Washington delegation, which represents a state that has moved sharply to the right. Thanks to the reclassification, she just inherited nine additional counties that voted for Trump in 2020. At town hall meetings, she proudly tells voters that her is “the No. 1 targeted race in the nation.” Forecasters rate it as a “tossup,” but privately Democratic strategists acknowledge she may be doomed to failure.
What is her survival strategy? While Axne doesn’t explicitly articulate them, we plucked these unspoken lines from an interview in her Capitol Hill office. It’s the kind of advice President Biden could use as he tries to reverse the declining polls that threaten to topple his entire party:
Struggling to explain your policy? Visualize the voter you want to reach: “Take these big things and bring it to that one person. If that mother is not in the audience, put that mother in your head.”
Sell your infrastructure invoice? Speaking of convenience, not how many program dollars you’ve spent: “That doesn’t resonate. It resonates that I gave you an extra 40 minutes to fix this bridge. That’s big.”
You also won’t hear much rousing rhetoric about saving American democracy from Axne. The voters are her customers and reflect her business background. “I’ve been a manager all my life,” she said. “I’ve led customer service departments and retail.”
And as she puts it, the burden is on her to earn the client’s approval. “My job is to go to them, to show them that they can trust me and that I deserve their vote,” she said.
She urges the president to adopt the same retail mentality: leave the mess in Washington, go to local communities, and bring politics to a human scale.
As she put it: “Come out and say, ‘People, here we are.'”
‘Tired’
And where her customers are now, Axne said, can be summed up in one word: “Moe.”
They are tired of the pandemic. Tired of the disruptions it has brought to their families. Tired of their packages not being delivered on time. It’s the common thread through all the complaints she hears, whether it’s about education, jobs or masks.
“I’ve never seen anything like this impact on our psyche, have I?” she said. “There’s just a lot that families have to deal with. It’s just hard for them to see some of the benefits that the Democrats have delivered — because frankly, the Democrats have delivered, I’ve delivered — but it’s hard to see when things still aren’t back to normal.”
If and when it does, Axne said, “We need to be really loud about it and make sure people feel comfortable and understand, ‘Get back to normal, folks.'”
Axne has had to think a lot about how to explain the key legislative packages she helped pass and is urging the White House to break them down into recognizable pieces.
Returning to her infrastructure example, she points to bridges in Iowa that are so poorly maintained that they can’t support the weight of a bus full of schoolchildren, leading to long detours. “You know, ask any parent what their mornings are like, and would they like 40 more minutes?
Earning provinces and then losing them
Axne was first elected to Congress in 2018, as part of that year’s anti-Trump wave.
She was a longtime Iowa state government official, an MBA holder who started a consulting firm before running for Congress. If you ask her what’s on the minds of farmers in Iowa, get ready for an impromptu seminar on the intricacies of soybean processing.
In 2019, when devastated communities in her district flooded along the Missouri River, Axne was everywhere: touring broken levees, lobbying for federal aid. It earned her some credit in the suburbs around Council Bluffs and Indianola, helping her get that win in 2020.
Unlucky for Axne, those areas along the river are no longer her responsibility. After Iowa’s latest round of impartial reshuffle, they have become part of the district of Republican Republican Republican Randy Feenstra.
Her first task this year was to visit her new counties, which voted for Trump along with nearly 19,000 votes. She doesn’t need to win them — just keep the margins tight enough as she gathers votes in her Iowa capital city of Des Moines. But she has to create some distance from the national democrats, which she tries to achieve with humor.
“I’m not Nancy Pelosi,” she joked at a recent town hall-style rally in Ottumwa, one of 74 she’s held since her first election. ‘I’m a meter taller. I’m from another state. I don’t wear five-inch heels.”
Axne would like to see Democrats break the Build Back Better Act, their stalled social policy bill, into “chunks of coordinated policy.” And in the meantime, she wants Biden to go out and hear directly from his disgruntled customers.
“It’s not that he doesn’t understand,” she said. “There’s just so much happening at this high level that sometimes it’s really hard to get it to that micro level. But that micro level is what is piling up across the country.”
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McCarthy and Pompeo take mega donors to court
As Republicans prepare for midterm elections that they hope will give them control of both houses of Congress, California Representative Kevin McCarthy, the man who hopes to become their house speaker, will speak this week in Palm Beach, Florida. for some. of the mega donors who will fund the party’s efforts this fall and in 2024.
The occasion is the biannual meeting of the American Opportunity Alliance, a coalition of major donors led by New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, who has worked mostly behind the scenes to form the Republican Party.
Also expected to speak is Mike Pompeo, who served as Secretary of State under President Donald Trump and would consider seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, which could pit him against Trump.
Other potential 2024 Republican candidates attended an alliance meeting in Colorado last year, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador. Florida Senator Rick Scott, who heads the Republican Party’s campaign branch, also spoke with the alliance’s donors last year.
The Palm Beach meeting is expected to draw candidates competing for nominations to the Republican Congress, including Herschel Walker (who is running for the Senate in Georgia), Katie Britt (Senate in Alabama), Jane Timken (Senate in Ohio) and Morgan. Ortagus (House in Tennessee). †
The donors in the alliance are likely to be fervently courted by Republican candidates for a range of positions and will be solicited for donations to super PACs and party committees.
Their donations and associations will be closely watched as the party and its donor class grapple with whether — and how — to move forward with Trump.
Singer was one of the most aggressive Republican donors trying to prevent Trump from winning the 2016 Republican nomination. A conservative website he funded paid for early research into Trump’s ties to Russia. But Singer later donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and visited the Trump White House several times.
Other donors who have been involved with the American Opportunity Alliance include brokerage titan Charles Schwab, hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin, and Todd Ricketts, who served as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee under Trump.
Among the donors expected in Palm Beach are former Trump cabinet officials Wilbur Ross, who served as trade secretary, and Linda McMahon, who was administrator of the Small Business Administration.
Is there anything you think we’re missing? Something you want to see more of? We would love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics.†
