After Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst told a town hall audience that “we’re all going to die,” when responding to constituents’ concerns about Medicaid cuts, Democratic state Rep. J.D. Scholten — who has been publicly flirting with a run against the GOP incumbent — decided to launch his campaign.
“I just felt, you know, I have to do this,” Scholten told POLITICO in an interview ahead of his announcement Monday. “Now’s the time, and rather than being perfect with everything, I just feel like you got to do it.”
Ernst’s remarks, he said, “disrespected” Iowans.
“We’re taking them off [Medicaid], so billionaires can have a second yacht, so they can have a bigger tax break,” Scholten said. “We have a system that’s geared towards and favors billionaires and huge multinational corporations, and that’s not working for most of Iowa.”
