It was the bottom of the fourth, in a scoreless night game between the Sioux City Explorers and the Lake Country DockHounds, and time for a tall right-hander named J.D. Scholten to start limbering up. But first, Scholten had additional business to attend to in the bullpen: Iowa governor Kim Reynolds had vetoed a pipeline bill earlier that day, and Scholten, who is not only a 45-year-old pitcher for his hometown minor-league ball club, but also a state representative serving Iowa’s First District, had to telephone in to a last-minute Democratic caucus meeting.
“My life,” he told me as he put his earbuds in for the call, “is weird right now.”
And it was only getting weirder: Scholten—who gained national attention for his two promising but ultimately unsuccessful runs for the United States House, in a part of the state where there are hardly any elected Democrats—had just launched a Senate campaign to oust Republican Joni Ernst. Now he would have to balance his duties as both a state lawmaker and a professional baseball player with running a long-shot bid for a seat that the GOP has held since Tom Harkin, a five-term senator, retired a decade ago. It meant making donor calls on the team bus between games, fielding interviews in the clubhouse, and, on this evening in mid-June, hosting a Vanity Fair writer who’d driven in from Chicago on a kind of scouting trip: Could this state representative from Sioux City actually help the Democrats end their slump with a two-seam fastball and some economic populism?
It had been a slow night at Lewis & Clark Park, a no-frills stadium surrounded by strip malls. A hot, hazy day had given way to a cool night and the wind was blowing toward home, carrying the faint scent of manure and keeping fly balls from going deeper than the middle outfield. Neither the Explorers—the X’s, to their fans—nor the DockHounds could get much offense going. Fans on this Wednesday evening—who might’ve fit relatively comfortably into the stands of a local high school field—shivered in the unseasonable cool, while a handful of kids shagged foul balls that soared over the press box, bounced into the parking lot, and thumped off the hoods of cars.
Scholten had spent much of his life at ballparks like this. Born in Ames and raised in Sioux City, where his father coached the Morningside University baseball team, Scholten played four years of minor-league ball in his 20s—for the Saskatoon Legends, of the independent Canadian Baseball League, and for the Explorers, then of the now defunct Northern League. (The X’s currently compete in the American Association of Professional Baseball, a High-A–level partner league of Major League Baseball.) After years as a paralegal—and failed congressional runs in 2018, against Steve King, who was apparently too racist even for the MAGA GOP, and 2020, against now representative Randy Feenstra—he returned to the game in 2023, playing in the Netherlands. By 2024, Scholten was back in Sioux City serving as a state lawmaker, and he attended an Explorers game as a fan. The team got routed, and he emailed the manager to offer up his services—almost as a lark, in his telling. The next day, three hours before game time, he got called in to start.
Scholten threw 6.2 innings in an 11-2 victory over the Milwaukee Milkmen, and signed a contract with the X’s the next day.
Now, in the second season of his comeback with the team, Scholten is more than 20 years older than some of his teammates, many of whom are out here trying to play their way into affiliated ball, where there is a direct path to the major leagues. These are long-shot bids too. But places like Lewis & Clark Park, where you can buy a ticket with pocket change and get $2 beers if a specific player on the visiting team strikes out, are places of perpetual hope, of optimism against the odds. A similar romanticism can run through an underdog political campaign—a kind of civic purity that stands in stark contrast to the cynicism of this particular moment in America. It might not work. But you get on the bus anyway and keep showing up—ballpark after ballpark, stump after stump. Baseball is the “best experience I could’ve ever had to prepare me for politics,” Scholten would tell me later. “These seasons are a marathon. It is a grind every single day…. It is grueling, but I love it.”
It wasn’t so long ago that Iowa was purple. Barack Obama won the state twice—by nearly 10 points and then by almost 6—a little over 15 years ago. But Donald Trump has won it each of the last three presidential cycles; like many states Democrats used to win or at least compete in, it has become reliably red.
Ernst—who took office in 2015, just months before the onset of the Trump era—hadn’t had much reason to sweat heading into her 2026 reelection campaign. But an event late last month opened up a potential new vulnerability: After constituents at a town hall raised concerns that people could die due to the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, Ernst replied, “Well, we are all going to die.” When backlash ensued, Ernst released an “apology” video—recorded in a graveyard. “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth,” she said. “So I apologize.”
It was the kind of thing that, in another era of American politics, might’ve ended a career. Scholten had been thinking about running against Ernst, he told me, but hadn’t been sure. However, when Ernst doubled down in her apology video, “it was game on,” he said.
The night before he announced, he gathered his teammates in the clubhouse: “If this hurts the team in any way,” he recalled telling them, “I’ll walk away.” Weeks later, he’s still suiting up for the X’s and has committed to playing out the rest of the season. “My teammates are awesome,” he said.
Scholten is one of several Democrats who have declared against Ernst, who faces an additional challenger from the right in election denier Jim Carlin, also of Sioux City. When the season wraps in the fall, he’ll start campaigning in earnest. Until then, he’s leaning into the baseball angle, as he did in his previous congressional runs, having aired an ad narrated by Kevin Costner, star of the Iowa-set Field of Dreams, in 2020. (The diamond in that film is in Dyersville, closer to Illinois and on the side of the state opposite of where Scholten lives and plays.)
That ad portrayed Scholten as a different kind of Democrat—one hailing not from the urban centers the party has increasingly relied on, but from the rural and manufacturing areas that had previously made up one of its core constituencies. Scholten sees himself as part of a lineage of working-class Democrats: He described himself, in kicking off his latest campaign, as a “baseball-playing, monopoly-busting, beer-drinking, Bible-reading, working-class, proud prairie populist.” His political heroes include the late Iowa populist Berkley Bedell, who served the Sioux City area in Congress from 1975 to 1987. And he gets particularly animated talking about how corporate monopolies are screwing over Iowa farmers. (“You’re Probably Getting Screwed,” incidentally, is the name of his Substack, where he catalogs the various ways everyday Americans are getting raw deals from the powerful and monied.) “People feel cheated,” he said. “The economy is working as it’s meant to, but it’s not working for everybody. And that’s the thing.”
Will that play in the Hawkeye State these days?
“I think there’s potential there,” said Chris Larimer, a professor of political science at the University of Northern Iowa. Scholten has name recognition among Iowa Democrats and could have crossover appeal thanks to his deep roots in one of the reddest parts of the state. And amid the fallout over Ernst’s comments, the Cook Political Report shifted its rating of the race from Solid Republican to Likely Republican. Still, incumbents tend to do well in Iowa, Larimer noted, and “it’s going to take a lot” to overcome the unfavorable headwinds for Democrats, both nationally and in the state. “I think it’s still just going to be a challenge,” he added.
But it’s one Scholten seems eager to embrace, on the campaign trail and the field: Wearing a jersey with “Sioux City” across the chest “means the world to me,” he said. “When you love where you’re from, you’re gonna fight for these people.”
On Wednesday, Sioux City lost 1-0, a heartbreaker that ended with two consecutive X’s striking out with the bases loaded. It was that kind of night for the home team. It was that kind of night, too, for the Democrats—some 1,200 miles away, in DC—as they got clobbered 13-2 by the Republicans in the annual Congressional Baseball Game—symbolic, it seemed, of the GOP’s current Washington dominance. “Another W,” Ernst crowed. “That’s five straight.”
Adding a six-foot-six professional to the rotation would surely help Democrats on the field. “Everyone on the team is ready to chip in to J.D. Scholten’s campaign,” said California representative Linda Sánchez, coach of the Democratic baseball team. “We want to win the game, but more importantly, we need senators in Washington who are not afraid to stand up to Trump and fight for working Americans.”
After the game, Scholten and I sat at the bar at the Miles Inn—a hundred-year-old Sioux City dive famous for the Charlie Boy, its take on Iowa’s loose meat sandwich. “It’s sad,” he said over a heavy goblet of near-frozen Coors, an American flag ball cap tilted back on his head. “Democrats aren’t the cool kids right now, and that’s a tough pill to swallow.”
Scholten—who told me that a teammate has a parent younger than him—has learned that firsthand in the clubhouse: “They’re more progressive,” he said, “than my teammates were 17 years ago. They’re more accepting of different people than my teammates were 17 years ago. [But] they’re more likely to vote Republican than my teammates were 17 years ago.”
The problem, to him, is partly messaging—the much-discussed difficulties Democrats have had in breaking through to young men, the working class, and people who aren’t watching MSNBC. But it’s also, he suggested, the failure of those in the more corporate sect of the establishment to differentiate themselves from Republicans on policy. “A lot of these folks who aren’t full of politics at the forefront, they don’t know the difference between Dems and Republicans,” Scholten said. “Part of the reason why I’m in this race is because there’s a movement waiting to happen when it comes to this.”
“I’ve been out there for the last eight years,” he added, “and there’s a sense of frustration at towns being just shells of what they used to be.”
Later in the evening, as the bartender started turning out the lights, one of Scholten’s teammates asked him if he was getting a vote. That is a running joke, apparently, in the clubhouse: Whenever Scholten talks to someone or signs an autograph, they ask if he’s getting a vote. I wondered, Would he get their votes?
“I voted for him for president,” one told me. He’d even sent Scholten a picture of his write-in ballot last fall to prove it.
“I think I came in 500th,” Scholten joked.
Teammates like this, he told me, are more like “the electorate than people who are in politics surround themselves with.” And while he knows that many in the clubhouse—and in the bleachers—may not share his party affiliation, he sees them as persuadable, as people “getting screwed” by powerful forces and looking for a political home.
If he builds a populist movement here in the cornfields of Iowa…will they come?
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