The importance of being Ernst

IOWA—Joni Ernst, the Republican candidate in Iowa’s fiercely contested U.S. Senate race, walks from table to table, greeting supporters inside Millers’ Kitchen, a restaurant in Onawa in rural western Iowa. Ernst, 44, is a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard and an Iraq War veteran, but you wouldn’t guess that by her soft-spoken tone, motherly demeanor, and the way she hugs and poses for pictures with restaurant visitors, most of whom are middle-aged or seniors.

Lorraine Davis, a 93-year-old former kindergarten teacher on her way to volunteer at the charity consignment shop across the street, emerges from an Ernst hug and smartphone photo op with a glow, saying outside the restaurant, “She’s A-plus! She’s down to earth!”

Politicians can peddle congeniality while vote fishing, but supporters of Ernst say her friendly manner is genuine. As a strong conservative campaigning at a time when Iowans are fed up with the Obama administration, Ernst has a political advantage over her Democratic opponent, four-term U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley. But her personality and ability to connect with farmers and small-town folks is what could tip the state’s November election in her favor.

Ernst and Braley are battling over the U.S. Senate seat held by Tom Harkin, a Democrat retiring after representing Iowa in Congress since 1974. Iowa is a swing state that supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. It tends to be culturally conservative but fiscally liberal: Many Iowans are farmers concerned about agricultural subsidies and many more depend on entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. The state has one of the highest proportions of people over 64 in the nation.

Ernst, a state senator since 2011, grew up weeding beans and feeding hogs in rural Iowa. Today she and her husband and three daughters live in the southwest town of Red Oak, where she has taught Sunday school in the same Lutheran church in which she was married and baptized. She hopes her down-home background will convince Iowans to trust her like a neighbor.

In February, during the primary race, Ernst trailed wealthy GOP frontrunner Mark Jacobs by 7 percentage points. That changed a month later after Ernst released a pivotal television ad. “I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm, so when I get to Washington, I’ll know how to cut pork,” she smiled in the video, between camera shots of pigs. “Washington is full of big spenders. Let’s make ’em squeal!”

“It’s the most effective political ad I’ve ever seen in Iowa,” and it ultimately won Ernst the primary, says Steve Deace, who hosts a conservative radio talk show in West Des Moines.

By contrast, Braley has committed several gaffes: He got into a silly dispute over a neighbor’s chickens wandering onto his vacation property; he complained about losing towel service in the House gym during the government shutdown; and he derided popular Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley as “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.”

“He just sort of feeds that limousine liberal, elitist stereotype,” says Deace. Barring any gaffes of her own, the election is in Ernst’s hands, Deace says. “Braley’s not likeable, and he’s on the wrong side of every issue people are the angriest about this November.”

Like Obamacare. Ernst wants to repeal the healthcare law and even close the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. She has a strong pro-life record in the Iowa Senate, and co-sponsored a “personhood” amendment last year.

“I do support contraception, but not at the taxpayers’ expense,” Ernst told me when I caught up with her at Millers’ Kitchen. She said businesses with religious objections to abortifacients or contraceptives should not be “forced to provide those types of services to the women that work for them.”

At the restaurant, prospective voters named a variety of issues worrying them: the debt crisis, national defense, abortion, illegal immigration, Social Security. Another concern: Muslim extremism at home and abroad.

Ernst, who served in both Iraq and Kuwait, said that when President Obama withdrew all U.S. troops from Iraq, it left a void for terrorist groups like ISIS. “They’re killing innocent Iraqis, they’re killing Christians over there, they’re murdering Americans. And that type of extremist group has to be stopped.”

Deryl and Joan Hennings, retired farmers who oppose abortion, sipped coffee after meeting Ernst in Millers’ Kitchen. “I like that she’s a veteran,” said Joan. “She has the same values we do. She comes from a small town like we did.”

A September poll found rural voters favoring Ernst over Braley by a margin of 4-to-1. But her appeal is broader. Three-quarters of Iowans say they would vote for a candidate on the basis of personal qualifications rather than party.

“I always vote for the person I think’s the nicest. This last time I put Obama in,” said 81-year-old Clarence McKee, who sells old coins at his shop in Oskaloosa and described himself as a Republican.

Will Rogers heads up the Polk County GOP, which includes Des Moines. He says Iowans need to be able to look a candidate in the eye and “know that this is somebody, when they go to Washington, they can trust them to do what they say they’re going to do.”

More and more Iowans apparently are deciding they can trust Ernst: Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan political forecast, from July to October changed its rating of the Iowa Senate race from “Leans Democratic” to “Toss-up” to “Leans Republican.”

The September poll, conducted by Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer for The Des Moines Register, found Ernst leading Braley by 6 percentage points—and tied with him in his own typically Democratic congressional district. (The race remains tight, though—an October poll showed Braley trailing by 1 point.) Selzer told me Ernst has presented herself to voters as a credible candidate: “She seems very calm, she seems very poised.”

As Iowa City Democrat Dianna Fuhrmeister told the Register, Ernst “seems to have common sense” and would get her vote.