Progressive Millennial Abby Finkenauer wants to make the first district blue again.
F or Abby Finkenauer, authenticity is everything.
“Sorry we’re late!” she calls out, walking through the front door of her childhood home and into the kitchen, where I sit waiting with her campaign manager. Finkenauer, the 29-year-old candidate for Iowa’s first congressional district, wears a flowy blue blouse, skinny jeans, and pink lipstick. Smoothing her long brown hair, she describes how she and a staffer had been caught on the highway behind two tractors, one of which was pulling a contraption for distributing fertilizer. “Or, as I like to call it, a shit spreader!” Finkenauer says. She shakes my hand, then heads for the fridge. “There’s pop!” she says, offering me a bottle. “There’s always pop!”
A member of the Iowa House of Representatives since 2015, Finkenauer is now challenging 63-year-old incumbent Rod Blum, a Tea Party Republican and member of the House Freedom Caucus, in Iowa’s first congressional district. Blum, Finkenauer says, is out of touch, where she is one of the people: Her father was a union pipefitter-welder, her mother an employee of the public school system. She’s a progressive Democrat, but she doesn’t fashion herself that way; instead, her campaign has stressed economic issues and neighborly goodwill.
“In a lot of ways, she is the antithesis and antidote to Trumpism,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who has served in senior roles for the House’s campaign arm. “Congressman Blum and the Republican Congress have forgotten the ‘forgotten man’… She is stepping into that void with a megaphone.”
I grew up in Burlington, Iowa, just south of the first district, and Finkenauer reminded me of the people I grew up with—the way she says “tellin’” and “workin’” and talks about her “grampa.” But the race also intrigued me: Every politician wants to demonstrate a oneness with their constituents, but there is something uncanny about watching a candidate perform her statehood when you’re from the same state.
If Finkenauer wins in November, it will be because she’s convinced enough members of the white working class that Republicans don’t have their best interests at heart. If she doesn’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.
I arrived at Finkenauer’s Dubuque headquarters on a steamy day last month, entering through the city’s sprawling downtown, full of old, repurposed brick warehouses, and bordered by the Mississippi River. Overlooking her Main Street office is a steep bluff peppered with churches and Victorian-style houses, all made accessible by a 19th-century cable car offering tourists a round-trip ride and a view into Illinois and Wisconsin for $3 a pop. Downtown Dubuque would be the perfect setting for a Nicholas Sparks romance, or a Gilmore Girls reboot. But I didn’t stay. Instead, Finkenauer’s (now former) campaign manager, Joe Farrell, carts me 10 miles down the road to her childhood home in Sherrill, Iowa. It’s the picturesque backdrop for most of her media interviews.
“She’s so authentic. She can just tell her story, and people understand it,” Farrell says in the car, as the brick downtown gives way to gentle green hills.
Inside her family’s home, there’s a big fireplace covered in trinkets: Family photos. Canvas prints of inspirational phrases. A box containing the ashes of a beloved labrador retriever. A rifle leans against a gas fireplace in the family room. Fishing tackle is spread out on the dining-room table. It reminds me of the homes of some of my childhood friends—and I get the sense that it’s supposed to. Authentic.
Iowa’s first district, which has a high concentration of working-class voters, encompasses 20 counties in the northeastern part of the state. Fifteen of those supported Barack Obama by double digits in 2008 and 2012, but swung to Trump by four points in 2016. Republicans and some Democrats are to blame for the shift, but some 40 percent of the district’s active voters aren’t affiliated with any political party. These voters are largely credited with Trump’s victory, and they’re expected to decide the midterms, too. Finkenauer has sold herself as the candidate best able to win them over.
She’s advocated for infrastructure reform, and raising the minimum wage. She talks about the Republican tax plan as a giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. She frequently describes how she keeps one of her dad’s old sweatshirts at office in the capitol to remind her of the hard-working Iowans back home. “At the end of the day we all want the same thing. We all want to work hard and be able to have good lives,” she says, her voice full of passion. “[The election isn’t] going to come down to Democrat or Republican… It’s a referendum on our values.”
Finkenauer was part of the first batch of candidates added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red-to-Blue” list, which provides candidates in Republican-held districts extra funding and support. (She has so far raised more than $1.8 million, after bringing in over $750,000 in the second quarter of 2018 alone.) The most recent public poll, taken in April, gave her a 6-point edge over Blum, and the race is currently rated as a “toss-up” by three different trackers. Iowa 1 “is the quintessential purple [district] in what has become a pretty purple state,” said David Oman, a Republican strategist and the former chief of staff for two Iowa governors. “It’s no surprise to me that Democrats have made that a target, that they’ve put a lot of support behind this new candidate, and that Rod Blum is having to work very hard.”
Finkenauer, despite expressing support for a public option and emphasizing the need for affordable college, is perhaps best recognized throughout the district as a union ally. The Republican-led state legislature, in February 2017, voted to dramatically reduce collective-bargaining rights for some 180,000 public employees. Conservatives celebrated the move as a win for taxpayers and managers in local government, but Finkenauer gave an impassioned floor speech condemning the bill. “You had a lot of union guys who had voted Republican who just saw their rights gutted, their health care rights, their wages, all of it,” Finkenauer tells me. Several local and state-level union leaders remembered this moment, and eagerly offered her their support when she announced her candidacy in May last year.
“You can argue there are a whole lot of posers out there who can say and talk and tweet about all kinds of things…but they don’t have the experiences she’s had,” said Charlie Wishman, the Secretary Treasurer of the Iowa Federation of Labor, in an interview. Tom Townsend, the president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Dubuque, said the same. “I think what Trump did really good in the Midwest was he talked to working people,” Townsend told me. But “with her it’s real, it’s not fake.”
Finkenauer’s experiences are genuine. But she’s happy to use them for political gain, and she’s not alone. A slew of progressive candidates with populist economic messages have taken to flaunting their populist credentials through social media and gritty, deeply personal TV ads. Take New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist who tweets regularly about her very authentic interactions in the Big Apple: “There’s nothing like walking into the bodega, grabbing an iced cafecito,” and “chopping it up with everyone behind the counter,” she wrote on July 5.
“You wanna know what tough is?” Finkenauer asks in one of her campaign videos, standing in an empty warehouse wearing a red sheath dress and a blazer. Loud rock music plays as her dad wrings the sweat out of his belt and cracks open a cold one. “Tough is Eastern Iowa.”
That display of authenticity doesn’t work for everyone. “No doubt in my mind she’ll be a career politician,” said Monty Alexander, a 41-year-old account manager in Dubuque who plans to support Blum in November. “The commercials she has been running makes it look like she wants you to vote for her dad.”
A fter Finkenauer arrives for the interview, we douse ourselves in bug spray and walk out to the backyard, where there’s a small, green pond and a picnic table. We sit, and she tells me that growing up, her parents never talked politics. “Dad was talking about—when he was home on the weekends—how he would love to get on the river and go fishing,” she says. “So we were talkin’ about if the walleye were biting and where.”
Finkenauer gets why so many people in her district voted for Trump: They were tired of politicians, and Donald Trump was someone different. He’d promised to provide a voice for “the forgotten men and women” of America. He had pledged to make healthcare more affordable, and invest in infrastructure.
