She voted repeatedly to protect President Trump’s war powers. She defended his tariffs. She promised to be his “top ally” if she wins a pivotal Senate seat this fall.
For most of the past year, Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa has been a staunch Trump supporter.
Then came the beef.
After Mr. Trump said he would slash longstanding tariffs on foreign ground beef, arguing that it would curb rising grocery costs, Ms. Hinson said the plan would hurt American cattle ranchers who were already struggling.
“We need to focus on affordability, but I think this isn’t the way to do that,” she said on Fox News late last month.
The rare public fissure reflects the shifting economic and political headwinds that Ms. Hinson is facing in her agriculture-heavy state. A third-term House Republican, she is shouldering the responsibility of defending her party’s control of Iowa’s open Senate seat, which could decide the balance of power in Washington.
After frequently supporting Mr. Trump’s agenda, she has downplayed her alignment with Mr. Trump in the last stretch before the election. She stayed off the stage at his midterm convention in Dallas last week, in contrast with most other red-state Republican Senate nominees in tossup races.
Asked last week if a vote for her would be a vote for Mr. Trump, she would not say, adding only that “a vote for me is a vote for common-sense policies.” In a campaign ad released Tuesday, she highlighted her work with Democrats as well as the president. And she is notably not attending a rally on Friday headlined by Vice President JD Vance in Council Bluffs, Iowa, her campaign said, citing previously scheduled events.
Iowa farmers, ranchers and consumers are absorbing a double hit from Mr. Trump’s tariff policies and the trade disruptions of the war with Iran, which have sent fuel and fertilizer costs into the stratosphere. Ms. Hinson’s Democratic opponent, Josh Turek, has argued that her fealty to the president is hurting her constituents.
With Democrats increasingly bullish on their prospects both nationally and in conservative-leaning Iowa, the race is testing the congresswoman’s low-profile, policy-focused approach — and her loyalty to Mr. Trump.
A former local television news anchor, Ms. Hinson, 43, has been running as a down-to-earth deal maker. Clad in a plaid purple dress at the Iowa State Fair last month, she called herself a “minivan-driving mom” and joked that being in Congress was like raising teenage boys because “you spend all of your time negotiating with unreasonable people, and they have questionable hygiene.”
She says she has little interest in the influencer-style antics that consume the days of some of her colleagues in Congress.
“There’s a whole crop of people now who just want to start off the day and figure out how to get on the prime-time news at night, and that’s not how I operate,” Ms. Hinson said in a phone interview this month with The New York Times. “I don’t live on Fox News, I don’t live on Twitter. I live in Iowa.”
The national political environment may not be on Ms. Hinson’s side, but the math is: Iowa has roughly 180,000 more registered Republicans than registered Democrats. Polls nonetheless show a tight race in a state that Mr. Trump won by 13 points two years ago.
A Journalist Turned Congresswoman
Ms. Hinson has risen steadily through the political ranks in Iowa and Washington.
She was born in West Des Moines, a wealthy suburb of Iowa’s capital city, and began learning the violin at age seven. She can play “everything from Mozart to ‘Margaritaville,’” she said, and performed Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” at her annual barbecue in August, tapping her foot to the music.
Those who knew her in high school called her a serious and disciplined student.
She made phone calls for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign with the student Republican club at Valley High School, rooting her in an iteration of the Republican Party that no longer exists. She also “caught the journalism bug,” she said, working at the school radio station during the day, helping run the cameras at the local TV news station part-time and later studying journalism at the University of Southern California.
At her first full-time TV news gig in Grand Junction, Colo., in 2004, she made $8.65 an hour and ate “canned green beans and ramen noodles for a year,” she said in the interview. She moved back to Iowa in 2005 to anchor the news at KCRG in Cedar Rapids.
Eventually, as she reported on state government, she reached a point where she wanted to “stop talking about it and start doing something about it.”
Taxes and government spending were central in that decision.
“I want to see everybody pay less taxes,” Ms. Hinson said. “I think that the size and scope of government needs to be scaled down.”
She says that background informs her legislative approach, in which she prefers to “think things through” before weighing in. She has also shied away from inflammatory dialogue on the campaign trail; one of her sharpest jabs against Mr. Turek was to say that his percentage of missed votes in the Legislature was “not very Iowa nice.”
This year’s Senate contest is far from her first battleground race. She won a close State House contest in 2018, escaping a blue wave, then narrowly ousted a Democratic U.S. House incumbent two years later.
In Congress, she serves on several committees, including House Ethics, which polices member misconduct, and Appropriations, which oversees federal spending.
Her Iowa House colleagues were unsurprised by her ascent.
“She always dug in, did the work, talked to the people that were building roads and the people that were paying for the roads,” said Linda Upmeyer, a former Republican state representative and the Iowa House’s first female speaker.
“When she got up on the floor to speak, you knew she had her i’s dotted and her t’s crossed,” said Gary Mohr, a Republican state representative. He added, “I remember thinking early on, ‘This woman is going places.’”
The Trump Anchor
Ms. Hinson’s alignment with Mr. Trump has helped her win tight races and sail through the Republican Senate primary this year. But with the president’s low approval rating dragging down her party, her support for him could be her biggest liability in November.
At town halls, she has embraced his efforts to ax federal jobs and defended his restrictions on Medicaid and the federal food stamp program, saying they would reduce benefit fraud. She has campaigned on cuts to taxes on tips and overtime that Mr. Trump championed, too.
While she has voted to preserve his tariffs and war powers, including as recently as Tuesday, her support for both has been noticeably less full-throated.
At a campaign event in May, Ms. Hinson told an attendee that the protracted Iran conflict could hurt Republicans.
“I do hope we can get this done by the next couple of weeks,” she said at the event, according to audio obtained by The Times that was earlier reported by Politico. “If it drags on beyond that, it’s a political liability for us too, because we’ve lost Iowa soldiers. I’ve been to four funerals since December. It’s awful.”
While she said in the interview with The Times that she wanted to see the war end “as quickly as possible,” she declined to say how long would be too long for it to continue, saying instead that Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
Since Mr. Trump took office, his tariffs have cost Iowa importers roughly $1.7 billion through this June, according to data from the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Asked whether she supported the president’s import taxes, Ms. Hinson danced around the question.
“What I support is making sure that we can level the playing field to get a better deal, because people have been taking advantage of us for a long time,” Ms. Hinson said.
But there are signs that Ms. Hinson’s support for Mr. Trump could push some moderate voters away. Matt Walsh, the Republican former mayor of Council Bluffs, said he was supporting Mr. Turek in part because of the candidate’s willingness to stake out a centrist platform as well as his familiar presence in Council Bluffs, the district Mr. Turek represents in the Iowa House.
The modern Republican Party “wants to be in everybody’s business,” he said, adding that he opposes much of Mr. Trump’s politics. “And they’re certainly not fiscally conservative anymore.”
A spokesman for Ms. Hinson, Billy Fuerst, said she would “be a thorn in the side of anyone in Washington for Iowa’s best interests.”
The Opposition
Mr. Turek, a Paralympian and state representative who uses a wheelchair, has pitched voters heavily on his life story while attacking Ms. Hinson’s. He has claimed that her net worth has increased by “up to 10 times” since entering Congress, painting her as an “out of touch” Washington insider.
In the interview, Ms. Hinson said the claim that she was enriching herself in Congress was “a terrible, shameless lie and what everybody hates about politics.”
She and her husband sold all of their publicly traded stocks and invested in mutual funds shortly after she took office in 2020, she said. In her ads, she has emphasized that she cosponsored legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.
The increase in their net worth comes from the couple’s partial sale of her husband’s independent insurance company in 2021, her campaign said. According to a Times analysis of her financial disclosure from last month, Ms. Hinson and her husband have a net worth of between $2.3 million and $8.8 million, roughly three times as much as the initial range in asset values that she reported during her first congressional run.
She said in the interview that attacks about her finances and her husband’s business overlooked the sacrifices they made to build it, and her experience as a working mother.
“I drove my minivan for 10 years so I wouldn’t have a car payment,” she said. “We painted the agency walls ourselves.”
“We have achieved the American dream,” she added.
Ms. Hinson is also fending off attacks from an unusual coalition of teachers, administrators and students from her West Des Moines high school, some of whom say they object to her self-portrayal as a relatable “minivan-driving mom,” given her comfortable upbringing. (Ms. Hinson’s high school prom date, however, told The Times he would vote for her.)
Ms. Hinson said she respected the group’s right to voice its opposition. But she also cast her former classmates and teachers as petulant.
“Maybe they disagree with me politically now, but that’s OK,” she said in the interview. “Maybe they’re just mad that liberal indoctrination in our school system didn’t work on me.”
Ms. Hinson has zigzagged across all 99 of Iowa’s counties during her Senate campaign, hitting the road on recesses from Congress. She reflected on the blur of political events as she drove home from an Iowa State football tailgate one Saturday afternoon.
“I have one shot at being a good mom and a good public servant,” she said. “And I think I can do both.”
The post A Republican ‘Minivan-Driving Mom’ Swerves Away From the Trump Brand appeared first on New York Times.
