A race I’m intrigued by: Ashley Hinson has held a seat in the U.S. House since 2021, representing Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District as a Republican. Her stance has largely aligned with President Donald Trump—supporting tariffs, backing his foreign policy, and stressing her rapport with the MAGA faction to win over voters. She is now aiming for Iowa’s open Senate seat, as the retiring Republican Senator Joni Ernst is stepping down, a contest that Democrats view as a potential pickup even in a solidly conservative state.
Last May, after the House approved Trump’s expansive tax-and-spending package, Hinson began to feel the pressure: constituents at town halls booed her, jeered her, and criticized her backing of the president. She defended Elon Musk’s involvement, saying, “I think that Elon Musk came in and helped to join and lead a team of people who are actively working to find this waste, fraud and abuse every single day,” a defense that drew further anger from voters who saw it as siding with the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans.
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Her present challenger, Democrat Josh Turek, has repeatedly highlighted her voting record to good effect: “It’s been nearly a year since Ashley Hinson cast a vote for the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ which reduced healthcare coverage for more than 100,000 Iowans and worsened a system already in crisis,” he remarked at a healthcare roundtable earlier this year.
Today, Vice President J.D. Vance is slated to campaign in Iowa, and Hinson has declined to join him onstage. She also skipped the midterm convention in Dallas last week. In addition, she has publicly started questioning Trump’s tariff reversal—a shift back toward free trade, which, in her view, could hurt Iowa’s cattle producers whose votes she is courting.
“We need to focus on affordability, but I don’t think this is the right path to get there,” she argued after Trump reduced his own beef tariffs. The rationale is simple: removing tariffs forces domestic beef producers to compete with overseas rivals.
The underlying point is not that Hinson lacks principles (though that may be a related takeaway); rather, it’s a case study of how a candidate in a relatively red district navigates the midterm pressure to either embrace or distance themselves from Trump. Hinson has wavered, and those flips could themselves be damaging. More broadly, the episode raises questions about whether Trump’s policy playbook still resonates with the average voter.
“There’s a whole generation now that wants to hit the primetime headlines at night, and that’s not how I operate,” Hinson told The New York Times, seemingly attempting to run as a relatable, ordinary-Iowan figure. “I don’t live on Fox News. I don’t live on Twitter. I live in Iowa.” This race appears tightly contested, a striking contrast to Trump’s 13-point victory in the state two years ago.
It remains possible that the president has lost some of his appeal—especially on cost-of-living concerns—and that the midterms will teach the party this lesson a bit late. It’s equally possible that Hinson’s challenges are peculiar to Iowa and that Trump’s broader agenda retains more traction elsewhere. Only time will tell.
Scenes from New York: I know many of the people pictured and quoted in this piece, and I’ve spent a bit of time at the Arverne Cinema in Rockaway, Queens, which is now in danger of closing. It’s a wonderfully quirky and special venue; consider visiting before it shutters if you’re nearby.
QUICK HITS
- “[Federal Reserve Chair Kevin] Warsh maintains a closer tie to Trump than his predecessor, Jerome Powell, whom Trump picked for the role during his first term,” notes The Wall Street Journal. “Warsh manages this relationship differently from Powell. He avoids saying anything that could draw the central bank into the administration’s problems, and he has framed the Fed’s independence as something to be practiced rather than proclaimed.”
- “If the election were held today, we would win the majority,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) told The Washington Post. Schumer told reporters he was “considerably more bullish” about Democrats’ odds of retaking the Senate now.
- Very bad:
NEW: The Second Circuit ruled that federal officers may manually search travelers’ cellphones at the border without a warrant, probable cause, reasonable suspicion, or any individualized suspicion, holding that such searches are “routine” border searches. pic.twitter.com/nNbwSzF5b9
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) September 17, 2026
- “What I did not understand when I first tested positive was that pregnancy tests present a misleading, somewhat arbitrary binary between being pregnant and not pregnant. You can be somewhat pregnant, a little pregnant, almost pregnant, or perhaps pregnant, and still test positive,” writes Apoorva Tadepalli for The New Yorker. That framing is questionable—pregnancy shouldn’t be redefined as a spectrum—but the piece is somewhat intriguing in its discussion of how human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) levels work, and how that hormone is what pregnancy tests actually measure.
- Kind of a fair point:
How does this person still walk around in a Covid mask and at the same time so confidently wave away all AI safety concerns? pic.twitter.com/5oOKKFjRIq
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 17, 2026
