We spent most of this episode breaking down Thursday night’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary debate between Zach Wahls and Josh Turek, moderated by our man Dave!

The headline exchange was on abortion — Wahls went after Turek’s missed vote on the six-week ban, and Turek fired back that he was sick at the time due to a disability-related illness, calling the attack disgraceful. Laura dug into the context on that one, noting that the missed vote criticism is a bit of a cheap shot, and that Turek’s committee vote on the Moms program funding was more complicated than Wahls made it sound.

The bigger takeaway: these two don’t have many actual policy differences, so the race keeps coming back to electability arguments and voting record attacks.

We also previewed Tuesday’s Republican gubernatorial debate — four candidates, 90 minutes, no Feenstra (also moderated in part by Dave!). Zach Lahn is back after sitting out the Iowa PBS debate, and the big question is whether anyone can consolidate the non-Feenstra vote. A late-breaking story about how much time Lahn has been spending in Kansas could come up, though we’ll see if any of his fellow Republicans actually go there.

We absolutely love doing this show, and we thank all of you for helping us spread the word it really, seriously helps. We’re planning on going through the June 2nd primary with new episodes dropping each Saturday through June 6th. If you are able to contribute financially, whether that’s through a Substack subscription or a direct contribution to the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative, you can help us go all the way through the Summer! If you’re interested in making a direct contribution, please email me at [email protected] and I can get you more information. To those of you that already support us with your hard-earned money, THANK YOU!!!

Auto-transcript below:

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Dave Price: Welcome back, everybody, to the Iowa Down Ballot podcast. I’m Dave Price, joined, as always, by Kathie Obradovich and Laura Belin. We’re going a little extra early.

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Dave Price: On a Friday morning. The coffee has barely even kicked in, so who knows what’s gonna happen in this show. Hey, ladies.

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Kathie Obradovich: Hey! Happy Friday!

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Laura Belin: Yeah.

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Dave Price: Kathie has important duties today.

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Kathie Obradovich: I’m on the Iowa Newspaper Association Board. We’re having a meeting today, so my colleagues here graciously agreed to get up early and get going on this thing.

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Dave Price: I mean, for the record, I’m always up early with.

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Laura Belin: I was gonna say, yeah, I was up 2 hours ago, so…

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Dave Price: And you have a doggie who needs to be walked, right?

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Laura Belin: Correct.

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Dave Price: Okay, so…

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Dave Price: I was part of a debate on Thursday night. KCCI in Des Moines was the host station, and my company, Gray Media Iowa, our stations across the state took part as co-sponsors

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Dave Price: primarily it was KTIV in Sioux City, KCRG in Cedar Rapids, and KWQC, and Davenport and KYOU in Ottumwa. I believe a few other stations, probably stream this as well.

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Dave Price: So, I can maybe give a little background on this. I don’t know what you both think about this, but one thing that’s so hard when you’re right there.

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Dave Price: you go through the debate, and it finishes, and the reporter in me, I’m like, okay, what’s the news out of here?

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Dave Price: And, like, it takes me a while… I had to go back home and, like, re-watch it.

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Dave Price: Because it couldn’t… there’s just, like, too much stuff going on, and I couldn’t really process… there were moments that stuck out to me, but I’m curious what stuck out to you as you watched Zach Walls and Josh Turek do this hour-long debate?

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, well, first of all, good job last night. I’ve moderated a lot of debates, and I will… I will tell you that I used to always insist that a different reporter would cover the debate, because I… same with me, I could come out of that

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Kathie Obradovich: after moderating, and have not a thought in my head about what was actually news, you know? And I’d ask people afterward, did this… did we make news somewhere?

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Dave Price: Yeah.

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Kathie Obradovich: Because you’re always thinking about, you know, you’ve got the timing, you’ve got

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Kathie Obradovich: if you… if you’re on the clock, you have to watch the clock, you know, figuring out who gets the next question first, and, you know, keeping track of all of that, and it’s… it is exhausting. So, believe me, good job on that. You know, I think that the exchange about abortion, was the headline out of that. The, Zach Wahls went after.

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Kathie Obradovich: Josh Turek, about…

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Kathie Obradovich: missing some votes related to reproductive rights and abortion, and particularly the six-week abortion ban vote, and also about a vote on the budget for the Moms program, which is a.

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Kathie Obradovich: Sort of a…

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Kathie Obradovich: help for unplanned pregnancies type of program. And, you know, I think that, Turek.

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Kathie Obradovich: was ready for most of that, and the memorable point I think he made was that he was sick, when the six-week abortion ban vote was taken, with an illness related to his disability. He said.

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Kathie Obradovich: he, you know, that was known at the time that Zach Wahls knew, and he said it was, I don’t remember what the word was, disgusting, or…

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Dave Price: Graceful places.

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Kathie Obradovich: disgraceful that he would bring that up. So… so that was a pretty memorable exchange. I think it’s, consistent with the previous debates and forums that we’ve seen with these two, with Zach Wells throwing elbows at, Josh Turk’s record, and, really not

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Kathie Obradovich: In this particular debate, not a lot of Josh Turek, you know, pushing back at, you know, at Zach Wall’s record, as we saw in the previous debate.

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Laura Belin: I also liked the questions that they were very direct and on issues that a lot of Democratic primary voters care about, so I appreciated that aspect of it. And I have not moderated a televised debate, but I have moderated candidate forums, and I can relate to that thing that you’re trying to keep track and make sure you get to all the topics and make sure the time is fair, so that it… I think it makes sense to assign somebody else to write the story about the

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Laura Belin: debate. I have been looking at this reproductive rights stuff, because the Walz campaign has been pushing this line since January, when the Roe v. Wade anniversary rolled around. And the missed vote, I remember in 2023, I asked a bunch of the legislators who were absent for that vote why they missed it, and so I got that explanation at the time, and Josh Turric had posted at the time that he was against that bill.

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Laura Belin: But I do think that it’s fair to say that Council Bluffs, not a socially liberal place, and another thing that Zach Wells brought up is that Josh Turek, until this year, had not co-sponsored or introduced any legislation on reproductive rights, and that’s accurate as far as I can tell. But, you know, representing Coralville and Johnson County is really different from representing Council Bluffs.

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Laura Belin: And the missed votes, I just feel like that’s a little bit of a cheap shot, because

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Laura Belin: legislators missed some votes. Zach Wells missed a lot of votes around the time his son was born in 2024, and I don’t think anybody points fingers and says, you’re not… you don’t care about that issue because you were absent the day they voted this, that, or the other. I did look into the vote on the Moms program, that’s the money that goes for the crisis pregnancy centers that are not medical clinics, but sometimes present themselves as offering healthcare, and that…

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Laura Belin: That was a committee vote on a bill that had a lot of pieces to it, including something about creating OBGYN residencies or something. And it wasn’t just Turek. Austin Bates and several of the committee Democrats voted for that bill coming out of committee. Then they all voted, all the Democrats voted against the final version of the bill that had the extra funding for these clinics, this, the moms.

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Laura Belin: program. So I think that that’s a little bit… it is accurate that he voted for it out of committee, but I think it kind of misrepresents what that committee vote was about.

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Kathie Obradovich: Well, and they had double the money for that mom’s program, apparently, from $500,000 to a million dollars on the floor, which, either… I don’t know if Turk said that during the debate, or if it was something his campaign put out later, but they said that when they raised that funding was a reason to vote against it.

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Dave Price: I mentioned this during one of my live hits for the TV stations on Thursday night, but that exchange that they had about those missed votes, that is where, as sitting up there on the desk during this, you know, I can…

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Dave Price: what I would want to see is, like, a bunch of primary voters hooked up to those little dials and stuff, you know, in the focus room.

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Kathie Obradovich: Because I would…

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Dave Price: so fascinated how that would go over with people. Like, is Wahls…

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Dave Price: making some progress on this by pushing this, or when Tura gives the explanation, are people…

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Dave Price: more likely to side with Turek and say, hey, this is… this is kind of wrong, and to your point, you know, this is a cheap shot. Like, how are people viewing this once they know the full picture?

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, you know, we may never know, you know, the responses to that, and I always wonder how important debates really are in the scheme of campaigns, you know? And I do think that the news coverage of debates is probably more viewed than the debates themselves sometimes.

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Dave Price: Yeah.

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Kathie Obradovich: But in a race like this, where it’s… it’s really close, you know, everything matters, and, you know, so I would think debates matter. Can I just say, too, I was fascinated by the responses to your question about which, Republican senators the candidates…

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Dave Price: Staying around.

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Kathie Obradovich: Most admired. I thought that was interesting. We were kind of wondering about, Zach Wall’s, choice. Didn’t he pick Ruben Gallego? I thought that was an interesting… Josh Terrick did.

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Laura Belin: Josh Turek, in terms of current senators you admire, Josh Turek.

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Laura Belin: Diego.

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Kathie Obradovich: Oh, okay, yeah, and then sure picked Grassley as the… which I thought was a pretty safe choice, but, but yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting,

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Kathie Obradovich: Responses to those questions.

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Laura Belin: I thought it was interesting that Zach Wahls said, Tammy, Baldwin, because she rep… she comes from a liberal area, Madison and Wisconsin, and yet she’s been able to win statewide, so I thought that was kind of a response to the electability argument. I was gonna say…

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Kathie Obradovich: I’m gonna say Warren right off the bat, and of course.

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Laura Belin: Right, right. Sadly, we didn’t have the focus group of voters with the dials, but the Walz campaign, I mean, they did have earlier this year a message testing poll that was in the field, and so I think the fact that we’ve heard so much about Chuck Schumer in the first debate and reproductive rights, I think we can infer that their data from their message testing signaled that this was

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Laura Belin: these were effective lines to use. I just know, anecdotally, I’ve had Democrats ask me, like, is it true that Josh Turek isn’t pro-choice or something? You know, they got… they had this impression in their mind that

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Laura Belin: That he hasn’t supported reproductive rights.

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Dave Price: The one thing we were talking over…

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Dave Price: before the debate was, you know, the debate order, the subject order. And we had made the decision that, you know, it’s TV,

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Dave Price: Obviously, there are ways you can structure it if you really want the battle the whole time. We were not looking for that in a primary, we were looking for more substance.

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Dave Price: And we went back and forth on this. We ended up starting with the electability. I mean, part of the debate rules is that they get their opening statements. I’m not usually a big fan of those, because I feel like a lot of times those are throwaways, but…

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Dave Price: the electability thing, I thought, alright, that’s something Democrats are thinking about, and I was going through my head, like, does it make sense to start with that, or should that be the close? And we ended up doing it. I put it at the beginning.

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Dave Price: We put it at the beginning, hoping that maybe they’d get some of it out of their system, and then we can kind of start digging into the issues after that, but they do… they do offer two different

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Dave Price: Storylines about how they view their electability based on where they live.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I mean, I mean, it’s…

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Kathie Obradovich: one of Josh Turek’s main talking points that he’s won in, you know, twice in red districts, and, you know, certainly, you know, you look at the state of Iowa, that’s a pertinent argument, right? You want to be… and also one that,

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, sort of… it is a big contrast with Zach Wahls living in one of the biggest blue spots in the state of Iowa. Blue dots, I would say. So, you know, but Walz can point to the fact that, you know, he also has rural counties that he represents as part of his district, and that he

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Kathie Obradovich: he does spend time in small towns, grew up in a small town, and that he can relate, to people there. So, I mean, it’s not… it’s not, you know, definitely, a totally decisive… these electability arguments are so subjective, whatever, you know, what do you think is electable? So…

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Laura Belin: Yeah, I mean, the electability, a lot of it is a little bit vibes-based for people. I’ve… I’m someone who likes to dive into those numbers and look at how candidates performed relative to the top of their ticket, and sadly, we don’t have that kind of data for Zach Wahls because he hasn’t had a Republican opponent, so we don’t know whether he overperforms or not. But Josh Turek, I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole.

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Laura Belin: last night after the debate, because I saw somebody post

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Laura Belin: that, Turek almost cost Democrats a House seat, and that he underperformed in 2022, and I was like, that’s not right. So I went and looked at the results for just the precincts where Josh Turek was on the ballot, and he did, he outperformed not only the Democratic candidates for Senate and Governor, but he even outperformed Rob Sand in that race in his district.

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Laura Belin: Now, you can argue, well, just because he did that in an Iowa House race, where he knocked on a lot of doors and had face-to-face contact with people, that may not translate into a full statewide victory, and I think that’s a fair point, but, I mean, you can’t argue against the fact that he has overperformed in a Trump voting district, which is just not that easy to do.

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Dave Price: As a guy who’s done TV for 30 years, I try to not focus too much on performance.

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Dave Price: In a debate, and because I feel like probably TV people overvalue…

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Dave Price: Having said that, it seems like a lot of successful politicians have, you know, the communication skills. What do you… as I was sitting there, I think Wahls is a little more comfortable, a little more polished in his delivery.

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Dave Price: Turek maybe showed a little more nerves, and maybe a lack of experience in that kind of setting. Not that Walz has had tons of debates or anything like that, but does that… do you think that matters? Does that matter to people, or not?

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Kathie Obradovich: I mean, I think it matters to some people, and it matters more if we start seeing clips of these debates in advertising, for example, as opposed to, you know, people actually watching a debate all the way through. I definitely agree with your impression. Wahls is more polished. That was exactly the word I was thinking about. One of the things that surprised me

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Kathie Obradovich: was that Turek, you know, when Walz was talking about his, endorsements, by Elizabeth Warren, and that Turek, I’m pretty sure, unless I missed it, he did not even mention being endorsed by Tom Harkin. Did he not? Did he fail to mention that?

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Dave Price: You mentioned that you were different.

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Laura Belin: He mentioned it somewhere, I can’t remember exactly the kind.

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Kathie Obradovich: Okay, because I was… I was listening for that, and I didn’t… I didn’t hear it, and then also, I didn’t hear him mention his recent endorsement by Pete Buttigieg.

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Dave Price: I don’t think he’d mentioned.

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Laura Belin: No, I don’t think he mentioned that.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, so I was… I was a little surprised by that. I do remember there was a mention of Harkin in, like, running for Harkin’s seat, or taking Harkin’s seat back, but I just… I didn’t hear him say, and Tom Harkin has endorsed me.

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Kathie Obradovich: And I was, I was pretty surprised by that, so…

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Laura Belin: I’ve not worked in television, but as a…

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Laura Belin: former high school debater. I agree with the impression that Zach Wahls seemed a little more comfortable in speaking in a more polished way, and just, when it came to the closing statements, I didn’t know what the rules were or the agreement ahead of time. If I were Josh Turek, I would not argue about who was supposed to go first, even if… and I think that as it turned out, it was… it was correct that

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Laura Belin: Turek was supposed to go first, but in any case, even if I thought, well, he got to speak first.

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Dave Price: Oh, yeah, I mean, I think he was supposed to go first, excuse me, yes.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, so, I mean, whatever the agreement was ahead of time about who should be first or last, and I understand the idea that you want to have the last word, but on the other hand, I don’t think it’s a great look to be

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Laura Belin: arguing about that during the debate. I would just let that go, even if I… but I think that it’s hard, you know, they have in their mind a certain idea of what things… you know, they’re also thinking, not only about answering the question.

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Dave Price: But they’re.

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Laura Belin: They’re in their mind, thinking about the points that they haven’t made yet.

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Dave Price: that they’re needing.

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Laura Belin: to make sure to get in before the end of the debate, so I can imagine it’s easy to get nervous.

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Dave Price: And it gets, you know, it gets, when you’re doing it.

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Dave Price: When you’re doing it live like that, it gets clunky and awkward when you have one of the candidates

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Dave Price: Thinking that the rules aren’t being followed, and you’re sitting there in the moment going, oh, crap.

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Dave Price: Because it’s going through your head, like, we don’t want to screw this up, because these are all… these are all laid out to the campaigns beforehand, and yeah, in the grand scheme of life, is it that big of a deal? I would think, to many people, probably not. But in the heat of the moment, you want to be accurate, too, and you don’t want to screw one person over, or whatever.

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Dave Price: That’s why I kind of made it a jump ball thing, because… I also… And…

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Dave Price: like, I’m a people watcher. I don’t… I probably shouldn’t even acknowledge this, but, in a recording like this, but, like, I like to see… I mean, you’re talking about leadership, right? So I wanted to see, in the spur of the moment here, alright, let’s see who sort of seizes the moment. Like, we’ve got some confusion, who wants it or whatever, and Wahls…

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Dave Price: So Waltz jumped in and took it. Turek had one other challenge earlier when the timer

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Dave Price: clock, quit working for a little bit, and for the most part, and I should say both of them.

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Dave Price: were remarkable for sticking to the pre-agreed time limits. They were supposed to do, like, a minute for the main question, and they got little warnings. We had… there was, like, a green light and a red light or whatever, and it would flash. They got, like, a 10-second warning kind of thing.

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Dave Price: And they were both remarkable about sticking to that, which allowed us to really

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Dave Price: make our way through a lot of the questions, but something did go haywire in the middle of that, and I think Turek saw it, and he no longer saw the countdown clock, so he probably didn’t know how long Wahls was speaking. We knew in our ears, because the producer up in the booth is like, hey, something’s going on with the timer clock here, so we’re just gonna let Wahls go.

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Dave Price: let him finish his thought, you know, whatever, and then we’ll do the same thing with Turek and kind of reset the system. And it ended up working, but, that is one more complication, one more wild card that you throw in when, no matter how much

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Dave Price: time these… how much experience these candidates have. I mean, it is a live thing, so there’s a lot of pressure, and you don’t know what’s coming, and…

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Dave Price: I get people who occasionally ask me, like, do we give them the questions in advance? Well, of course not.

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Dave Price: They have no… we don’t… we don’t do subjects, we don’t do anything. They don’t know anything.

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Laura Belin: But they’re prepared. I mean, you didn’t ask about anything that was way out there that… I mean, if they’re doing decent debate prep, they should be prepared for questions on any number of major issues, including the ones that you raised.

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Dave Price: Totally, and you would think if you’re out there campaigning a lot, so much stuff comes up organically from the audiences anyway. They’ve had most subjects.

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Dave Price: They may not always be drilled for specifics, but most of the things should have come up, and I appreciate that we, you know, you can’t get to everything. When I used to do a show at Channel 13, we had this final segment, which was called the Quick Six, which was like a lightning round kind of thing.

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Dave Price: That was always my favorite.

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Dave Price: Because… it could be anything under the sun. I mean, I didn’t do gotcha questions.

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Dave Price: But it could be anything under the sun, and you could… I like to see how quickly they could respond to stuff, plus they had to, like, instinctively answer things. You couldn’t sit there and pontificate and give stump speeches and all that, so… I was hoping we were gonna have time at the end for the lightning rounds, and we had a few more.

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Dave Price: I think I had 6 or 7 questions in there.

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Laura Belin: Boom.

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Dave Price: built out, so I was glad we were able to get to a few of those, because they were very brief in that second half, so we ended up having more time at the end than we thought. Did any… I was curious from, from you both,

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Dave Price: My quick takeaway from last night is that while we had some exchanges about some things, there weren’t a lot of really evident policy differences. What did you both think?

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Kathie Obradovich: No, I mean, I think that’s been true throughout, and one of the reasons why they’re really…

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Kathie Obradovich: Emphasizing pretty heavily on electability, you know, and then, you know, sort of some of these issues like missed votes, or…

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Kathie Obradovich: the previous debate, you know, there was an emphasis on Josh Turk’s vote on an immigration bill that most Democrats didn’t support, and, you know, I don’t know if those random votes really add up to policy differences, but

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, those are… those are, you know, when you… when you point to voting records in, in a debate, you know, certainly that… that carries a little bit more, weight, I think, than just saying so-and-so is just not as committed as I am, you know, to this issue, so… Yeah.

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Laura Belin: I feel that it… they don’t disagree on very many policy issues, as we talked about last week. This isn’t a primary with big ideological differences, and I think that

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Laura Belin: both of them came out of the debate with plenty of clips that have already seen clips that they’re sharing on social medias, and nobody made a big gaffe, so I feel like, in that sense, it…

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Laura Belin: It probably didn’t change the dynamic very much.

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Dave Price: Laura, the one thing afterwards that I wish I would have…

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Dave Price: Worked in there, and somebody else pointed out sort of a different version of this question.

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Dave Price: is that the Democratic brand, like, to try to lean into what Iowans think about the Democratic brand, they’ve clearly soured on it. And we can talk a bunch of different times about, you know, is it the…

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Dave Price: the kind of coastal themes that people here in the Midwest don’t like, and they, you know, however you want to dig into this, but somebody…

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Dave Price: had said, you know, I wish you would have asked something like… and it made me think about your story, Laura, that I’ve referenced numerous times here on the podcast, for Democrats who have high hopes about November, the reality of being almost 200…

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Dave Price: 1,000 registered voters short, still, and we’re not really seeing

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Dave Price: I guess we’ll see what happens after the primary. Maybe those numbers change a little bit, but, I mean, it’s not like we’re watching the numbers go like this, right? Like, I mean, it’s still a gap. They’re gonna have to get a lot of these independents to come over and win back some of these Republicans, and I wish I would have thought…

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Dave Price: I don’t know where it would have fit in there, maybe I could have gotten it in at the end or something, to sort of address, like…

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Dave Price: where Democrats have lost their way, and, like, maybe just simply, like, what is a Democrat, what does a Democrat stand for, or something like that. We were trying to get a lot of specific answers on things.

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Dave Price: And I think we tried to push for a bunch of those things, but I wish we… I wish I would have worked in one kind of more philosophical…

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Dave Price: you know, kind of what is a Democrat, and why should we think that you’re gonna bring Iowa to rally around, you know, you representing whatever this vision is?

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, it’s always an interesting question, although when I’m trying to write questions for debates, I always try to lean more heavily on not what candidates think, but what they’ll do, you know?

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Dave Price: Yeah.

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Kathie Obradovich: to try to make that distinction, because it’s, you know, it’s interesting, and it may be, you know, a question like you’re talking about may be instructive to see, you know, how candidates are thinking about these philosophical issues, but, you know, I really, you know, one of the functions, I think, of a debate

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Kathie Obradovich: Is to create a record of what candidates

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Kathie Obradovich: Actually say that they will do, so that you can hold them accountable for it later, if they get elected.

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Laura Belin: I think that the voter registration… well, we’ll see what happens after the primary, but I think that the gap could get even wider, because there’s so much focus on the Republican race for governor.

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Laura Belin: And yes, this is a competitive Senate Democratic primary, but there are a lot of uncompetitive Democratic races. Rob Sand, without having a primary opponent, he’s basically running a general election campaign already, rather than trying to turn out voters in high numbers for the primary. So I feel like it’s… the 200,000 vote in the whole thing, I mean, that’s still going to be a serious problem

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Laura Belin: for not just the Senate nominee, but for everybody running on a statewide basis.

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Dave Price: And I should mention that…

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Dave Price: We did hope to hold a Republican Senate debate as well with Ashley Hinson and Jim Carlin. Hinson did not agree to do to, did not agree to a debate, and she hasn’t agreed to a debate with anybody else. I don’t know how many different media partnerships pitched a debate.

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Dave Price: we will drop this, we’re recording on Friday, we always drop this on Saturday mornings.

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Dave Price: We do have an upcoming debate that will, go on Tuesday. That is for the Republican gubernatorial debate, and we will have four.

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Dave Price: So unlike the Iowa… Iowa PBS one that only had 3, so if you recall, Zach Lahn kind of took that stand and said, I’m not gonna debate because Randy Feenstra’s not gonna debate, and until Randy Feenstra debates.

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Dave Price: I’m not debating.

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Dave Price: He has changed his mind, so he will take, take part in this debate, that we will record this weekend. Feenstra, as you could maybe guess, has not agreed to do it, so it’ll be the four without, without Feenstra. And I’m,

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Dave Price: Like I’ve said here, we’re recording Friday morning. All Friday and all Saturday, we’re going to be finalizing the debate topics. It’s like a whole different dynamic, though, right? Because you have 4 people.

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Dave Price: And, you know, you want to make it fair on time and questions and all that kind of stuff.

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Dave Price: But it also means… now, this will be a 90-minute debate instead of the 60-minute that we had for the Senate Democrats, but… I mean, it still limits with 4 people. It limits how many topics you can get into, and I feel like…

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Dave Price: I don’t want it to be boring, either. I mean, I want it to be substantive, but, you know, I don’t want it to be robotic, where we’re going down the line, okay, what would you do about this? What would you do about this? What would you do about this?

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Dave Price: So we’ll have to… we gotta…

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Dave Price: there’s a way I have in my mind about, how to do this, but the order of it

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Dave Price: We had… we had a little, you know, there was confusion with Turek, as we mentioned, from the Senate campaign. Man, with 4 of them. That’s when it gets funky for us.

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Dave Price: under the lights, in the moment, to remember, okay, who went first last time, and who went this time, and…

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Kathie Obradovich: That’s always…

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Dave Price: It’s hard, right?

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Kathie Obradovich: It’s always hard.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, one thing with four people, you know, one of the ways to sort of keep it from being a robotic right down the… is basically to ask different questions on the same topic, so you might let two answer a question, specific question on a topic, and then

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Kathie Obradovich: You know, to change it up just a little bit for the… for the other two. If they want to answer the original question, they will anyway. Yeah. But…

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Laura Belin: That’s what they did on the Iowa PBS debate. I honestly… I don’t love that. I prefer having… asking everybody the same question, but that’s hard with four candidates.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah.

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Dave Price: I will try to, like I did last night, sometimes I’ll take…

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Dave Price: Part of the answer, the first candidate.

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Dave Price: gave, and used that in the question for the next one. And I tried to do that so that people could have some comparisons. There was one that…

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Dave Price: I remember Wall said something about, lowering Medicare age to 55, and I think I used that as a way to, to get into Turek. But, like, the other wild card for this is, like, you don’t know when it was just the two of them, especially. And I didn’t think Turek was gonna be…

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Dave Price: super aggressive. That hasn’t been his style, unless something was going to change.

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Dave Price: But I didn’t know what Wahls would do. You know, he’s really stressed this, I’m not the insider guy kind of thing, and ripped on Turek for being associated with these insiders, so you, you know, you sort of carefully script out…

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Dave Price: How you want the debate to go, and we had one 2-minute commercial break in there, so you know you have the total time.

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Dave Price: available. You know, when you want to hit the commercial break, you know the topics you want.

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Dave Price: potential follow-ups that you can think of ahead of time, but you need to adjust if they say something that’s not clear, and you’re trying to keep, like, a mental clock of.

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Dave Price: Okay, Candidate A is approximately had this time, Candidate B has had this time, but the wild card is, like, when somebody goes, you know, you suck, kind of thing. Some… some allegation about the other person, because you don’t want to be unfair and not let candidate…

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Dave Price: Y respond to what candidate X said, but there’s also the balance, right? Because you don’t want that to devolve early, where if one comes out really hot.

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Dave Price: Then it just ends up being this tension where they’re just lobbing garbage back and forth, and the whole thing’s gone off the rails.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, and candidates, you know, I think they know, if they’re experienced debaters, they save a lot of that for the end, when time is tight, and there’s less, maybe less time and less opportunity for the opponent to respond to that, so it’s definitely part of the tactic, managing the clock in a debate.

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Laura Belin: I remember that from one of the debates in 2018 between Kim Reynolds and Fred Hubbell, that Kim Reynolds, several times, she ended her com- her response to a question with an attack on Fred Hubbell, and sometimes it was even unrelated, and then he would end up

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Laura Belin: Wasting the first 10 or 15 seconds of his answer responding to what she just said, so it really seemed to throw him off his game.

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Dave Price: Alright, as we come to a… come to a close here…

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Dave Price: What do you think the Republican field, minus Feenstra, needs to accomplish in this… what will now be the second and final gubernatorial debate?

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Kathie Obradovich: Mmm.

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Laura Belin: I think that the key is to… everyone needs to make themselves into the… the focus for the non-Feenstra vote. The only way that any of them can win this primary is to consolidate the non-Feenstra vote, and so that is… I think we may see some…

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Laura Belin: some shots lobbed between Adam Steen and Zach Lahn, for example.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I think so too, and I just want to remind everyone that we all said it was really stupid for Zach Lane to skip that previous debate, and maybe he decided that it was not a good idea to miss that, but I do think that, you know, Laura’s absolutely right. I mean, what they’re trying to do is make themselves into the

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Kathie Obradovich: main alternative to Randy Feenstra. And, you know, I… at this point.

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Kathie Obradovich: I really miss… can I just say, I miss…

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Kathie Obradovich: the Dwayne Register Iowa polls. We have not seen, really, any polling, a lot of independent polling in these debates. I’d really love to know what numbers these candidates are looking at, as they go into this debate, because it… I mean, it does seem like, Steen, with his, family leader endorsements, is in a…

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Kathie Obradovich: good position to, you know, argue that he’s the, main alternative to Randy Feenstra, but Zach Lahn is definitely a wild card, and again, we don’t know how much of the vote, Eddie Andrews and Brad Sherman will be able to pull. It does… it makes a difference whether anybody gets to 35%.

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Dave Price: I’m curious…

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Dave Price: I’ve been with you throughout this, Laura, about the need to… this is why I didn’t understand why Lahn skipped that first debate.

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Dave Price: when you… when you’re coming in with Feenstra, and we can, you know, we can talk about whether Feenstra really has the name ID outside the 4th Congressional District.

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Dave Price: and how much that could be a, you know, a hurdle for him that it’s something he’s gotta work on. He’s still the obvious frontrunner into this, and he clearly thinks he is, otherwise he’d be doing the debate, regardless of whether, you know, debating…

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Dave Price: is his forte or not. But I’ll be curious in this 90-minute debate.

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Dave Price: how they direct their attention. Do they spend a bunch of it… I don’t really know that Sherman and Andrews would do this a lot, but I’m thinking particularly with Lahn and Steen, but do you spend a bunch of your time trying to knock Feenstra, A, for not being there, and then on policy things?

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Dave Price: Or do you spend your time…

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Dave Price: focusing on the other three there to try to hold them down, to raise yourself up, so that you can establish yourself in your mind. When this debate ends, I’m the clear number two. It’s gonna be Feenstra versus

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Dave Price: whoever that person is. Or do you somehow find a way to thread a needle where you try to do both those things? Does that make sense?

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, acting like Beanster doesn’t exist, is one way to go. You know, it’s like, you know, these are the candidates that are standing before you, and here’s why I’m the best of this, this group.

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Kathie Obradovich: And, you know, that’s one strategy. If you think that Feenstra is not that well known outside of the 4th District, or that, you know, he has.

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Kathie Obradovich: if he does have name recognition, then just ignoring him is… is one possibility. But I do think, you know, each candidate, just as you said, has to be, you know, the tallest, one on the stage, in the sense of the, you know, the one that has the

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Kathie Obradovich: the ability to actually win the primary and go on and challenge Rob Sand. So, and you know, frankly.

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Kathie Obradovich: With a, with a huge competitive primary.

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Kathie Obradovich: Whoever does come out of that primary does come out, I think, with a head of steam against Rob Sand. So, so it is an… I think it is kind of… even despite the challenges posed by a large field, whoever comes out of it is going to have a benefit from it.

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Laura Belin: I think that you can… you don’t have to spend a lot of time on Feenstra, but I think it makes sense for people to spend 5 seconds, 10 seconds.

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Laura Belin: pointing out that he’s not there. I’m sure that we’ll hear that it’s a disrespect to the voters that he keeps skipping these venues. Adam Steen has been using this line, Runaway Randy, so that might be something we hear, but you don’t have to spend a lot of time on that. And I don’t think that they’ll necessarily attack each other a lot, although Brad Sherman seems to have some animosity toward Adam Steen, so he may… they’re competing for that Christian conservative niche, so we may

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Laura Belin: here’s some attacks there. But I think if I were Steen or Lahn, I would just focus on what is my base of support, and why am I the person who can really beat Randy Feenstra and then carry it through to November? Whether it’s Zach Lahn saying that he has Steve King’s endorsement, and he has a lot of money that’s mostly money that he’s put into his own campaign, or whether…

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Laura Belin: Adam Steen talking about the network of support that he has, I don’t know, but I think that that’s what people will want to know, who can really beat Rob Sand.

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Kathie Obradovich: Well, is somebody gonna go after Zach Lahn for this news this week, that he’s spending a lot of time in Kansas, and flying his plane back and forth between Iowa and Kansas? Is that, I mean, is that… are we gonna hear about that, do you think?

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Dave Price: That’s another one, when you’re talking about, like, a focus group. When I read Breanne’s story in the register, and we have heard this throughout the campaign, I was not aware of the specifics of how much time

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Dave Price: Lahn was spending in Kansas versus how much time he was here. And he is a pilot, so he flies back and forth, and he has a plane and all of that. I think the plane was out of commission somewhere in there for a little bit, but regardless, going back and forth, and they have this big blended family that he has with his… with his second wife, and so, you know, you have

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Dave Price: kids… and they have kids together, too, so you have kids, you know, in Kansas, and then they have their children as well in Iowa, so it is going back and forth to make sure they can spend time with everybody. But I am curious what people think about that reading…

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Dave Price: reading through that story is… is that, is that a positive, that he’s committed to the kids to make sure that, you know, they’re around, for the upbringing of these kids? Does it show that he’s not here enough? I’m really curious how that’s gonna go over, once people see that.

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Kathie Obradovich: because the Democrats are already attacking Lahn as a, you know, he’s a carpetbagger, he’s, you know, he’s… he’s a Kansan, you know, not… he’s, you know, he says he’s gonna put Iowa first, but he’s not in Iowa. So that… that… that line of attack is already out there from the Democrats. I’m just curious about whether any of the fellow Republicans will do it.

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Laura Belin: Well, and I also don’t know… I mean, the focus… the frame of the article was that he’s made a lot of trips to Kansas and spent some time in Kansas, but then the kind of subtext of the article was that this is a…

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Laura Belin: second marriage, and that he and his wife were working together, and they were married to other people. So, I mean, in the mindset of a conservative Republican primary voter, I don’t know which would bother them more, the fact that there were divorces, and that there’s a blended family, or that he’s spending time going down to Kansas.

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Kathie Obradovich: Well, I mean, isn’t he trying to appeal to Trump voters? I don’t think that the multiple marriages are gonna bother him that much.

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Dave Price: Yes. Alright, let’s leave it there. We’re not getting into more… we’re not… we’re not touching this marriage stuff. Thank you.

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Dave Price: We can… we’ll assemble next week and see how this… their final debate,

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Dave Price: We’ll go, we’ll see how.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, good luck, good luck with the final debate.

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Dave Price: Thank you. Four people, we’ll need our… we’ll need four people, 90 minutes. I think we have two commercial breaks, so… but that’s a lot to fit in in 90 minutes. Good to talk to you both. Have a great weekend.

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Laura Belin: You too.

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Kathie Obradovich: wise.

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Dave Price: Thanks for joining us for the Iowa Down Ballad podcast. Thank you very much for sharing this with friends and family.

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Dave Price: As we continue to grow week to week, we very much appreciate that, and thank you to those of you who become new paid subscribers of the podcast. That is very instrumental to help with the production costs to keep distributing this week after week, so if you haven’t done that, if you would consider that, we would greatly appreciate it. Have a great week ahead, and we’ll talk to you next week.

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