This week’s episode got recorded Saturday morning instead of our usual Friday because there was just too much news going on Friday to keep up with, and a lot of it needed to be in the show. Laura broke down two big court stories: the Trump/Selzer poll lawsuit hearing (ruling expected in a few weeks, but headed to the Iowa Supreme Court either way) and the tangled Libertarian ballot fights over Marco Battaglia and Rick Stewart’s names.

We also recapped the Republican Party’s Lincoln Dinner, where Kim Reynolds let loose dancing and reminiscing about a Journey concert, Zach Lahn announced Trump’s endorsement, and Ashley Hinson took aim at Josh Turek over missed legislative votes.

Kathie closed things out with a plug for Iowa Capital Dispatch’s benefit concert Sunday (today) in Ankeny, supporting local news. More information on that can be found at the top of the page at iowacapitaldispatch.com.

Speaking of, big shoutout to those of you who subscribe, share, and discuss this show with friends and family. We continue to grow in terms of downloads, subscribers (both paid and free), and donations. None of that is possible without you. Thank you!

Auto-generated transcript below:

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Dave Price: Hi everybody, and welcome back to the Iowa Down Ballot Podcast. I’m Dave Price, joined by Laura Belin and Kathie Obradovich.

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Dave Price: If we can peel back the curtains a little bit. If you’re a regular here, you know we usually, the three of us, assemble on a Friday, yak it up about what’s going on, kind of dig into some stuff.

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Dave Price: And then the new podcast episode drops on a Saturday morning, if you really care how the sausage is made. There were 500 million things that happened on Friday, and so our typical flurry of emails back and forth.

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Dave Price: Probably should have had, like, the emoji with hands up in the air, like, how in the heck are we gonna do this?

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Dave Price: And there was… there was no way to do it, so we are recording on a Saturday morning. It’s gonna have a whole different vibe here, right?

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Kathie Obradovich: For sure.

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Dave Price: I don’t know how that was gonna matter. But we sort of need… there were so many things yesterday, my partner at the Bureau for TV, when I laid out our coverage plans and stuff, I told her, I’m like, look, there are, like, 5 things on Friday, we literally can’t do all these things, so we’re gonna have to prioritize a few of them, and…

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Dave Price: to play catch-up on the other ones. Laura, coincidentally, you happened to go to…

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Dave Price: two of the things that we were not able to do. And of course, this gets into your sweet spot because it involves the courts. But how about do your morning first, Friday morning, the Ann Selzer.

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Dave Price: Lawsuit that’s been… this is… When did this even get filed? When was it? Last year or.

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Laura Belin: This was, well, the original lawsuit was filed in December of 2024, but this was related to the lawsuit that was filed, the kind of replacement lawsuit filed on June 30th, 2025, which is important because it was one day before.

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Dave Price: the devil.

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Laura Belin: Iowa’s anti-SLAPP law went into effect, which would have made it easier to get a suit like this dismissed. But we’re more than a year into proceedings on this, and this was a big hearing over whether the case should be allowed to move forward or whether it should be dismissed. So Donald Trump, joined by Marionette Miller Meeks and the former state senator Brad Zahn, are suing the Des Moines Register Gannett Corporation

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Laura Belin: and the former longtime pollster for the Register, Ann Selzer. And the defendants have two different lawyers, Ann Selzer is being represented pro bono.

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Laura Belin: by Robert Corn Revere of the nonprofit group Fire, which is a free speech oriented nonprofit. And then the Gannett Corporation and Des Moines Register have their own local council. And both had filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit on very, on similar grounds, but they were arguing differently. So it was a really long hearing. It went for more than two hours.

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Laura Belin: where the judge first heard from both sets of defendants on all their arguments to dismiss the lawsuit, then there was a short break, then Alan Ostergren, the attorney for Trump and the other plaintiffs.

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Laura Belin: made his best case for why the court should allow this suit to go forward, and then both of the defendants got time for rebuttal. So the judge said there are so many legal issues here. It’s gonna take him a few weeks to rule, but he’s gonna be deciding whether to dismiss the case right now for lack of any valid legal claims or whether to allow the it to go forward, which would mean that the plaintiffs can pursue discovery. They

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Laura Belin: They could try to seek to obtain internal emails from the register, from Gannett, from Ann Selzer. But either way this decision goes, it’s going to be appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court. So we have a long way to go. But just all that is to say that this hearing was not about the substance of the claims, like was the poll fraudulent or not? This was just about how is there even enough of a legal argument here?

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Laura Belin: that the case should be allowed to go forward under Iowa’s consumer fraud statute.

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Kathie Obradovich: And just to circle back, because I don’t think you actually said it, that this is over a pre-election poll that was run right before the general election in 2024. The poll showed that Kamala Harris was actually leading by like 3 percentage points, something like that. And then Trump ended up winning Iowa by 13 points. And so his argument is that the

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Kathie Obradovich: and it’s… it’s… they even said in court that this was a novel effort under this law. They… they’re actually suing under the Consumer Fraud Act and claiming that the poll was fraudulent, and that,

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, they even sort of implied that there was actually no poll, that the, that the, that the, the results were just made up. And,

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Kathie Obradovich: And so it’s super interesting. One, he’s not trying this under a defamation. This is the typical type of lawsuit a politician might file. The Consumer Fraud Act has different rules, et cetera. And one of the things that was really interesting to me was that they admitted in court, Ostergren admitted in court, they have no evidence that this was fraud.

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Kathie Obradovich: And part of their argument was, this case should not be thrown out because we have no evidence. We need to… you need to continue it so we can go through discovery and find the evidence that this was fraudulent. And so…

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Kathie Obradovich: So I thought that was really, really interesting. And then, of course, the lawyer for Ann Selzer, made, made, I think, you know, a pretty stark case that.

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Kathie Obradovich: Even if everything that the Trump side says is true, like all of their facts, such as they are, are actually true, that this case still can’t go forward under the law. That a newspaper poll, one, is not a consumer product that, you know, if the product is defective, there’s no, you know, you haven’t relied on it or

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Kathie Obradovich: acted on it in any way. Trump said he didn’t believe it from the very first, so he didn’t rely on it or act on it in any way. And hello, violation of the First Amendment all over the place. And the judge really did seem to be thinking about that. He made several comments about, you know, isn’t this a chilling effect on the First Amendment? Those types of comments. So

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Kathie Obradovich: I think that at the very least, the First Amendment argument was penetrating with this judge.

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Laura Belin: I think the judge seemed receptive to a lot of the arguments, including the First Amendment argument. But as you say, the attorneys were saying, even if you believe all of the conspiracy theories that this was just a fake poll concocted, it still fails because this wasn’t a consumer transaction. There’s no evidence that Donald Trump or the other plaintiffs ever relied on the poll. There’s no evidence that they bought the newspaper because of the poll.

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Laura Belin: They’re, they’re talking about money that the campaign spent in those last few days before the election responding to the poll, but Iowa’s consumer fraud.

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Laura Belin: Act.

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Laura Belin: allows consumers to get back the money that they spent on some there was some kind of fraudulent act or practice or transaction. It’s not something that some unrelated, some other entity spent. There’s no evidence that that the plaintiffs in this case were economically harmed at all. So it fails on that level too. And then just generally, they’re trying to say a poll is commercial speech, but the definition of commercial

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Laura Belin: commercial speech is more like an advertisement, that it has no purpose other than to facilitate some kind of commercial transaction. And a poll is not that. It’s more like a news or an opinion. And Alan Ostergren was trying to say, this poll, this purported to be a scientific fact.

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Laura Belin: And it was just fraudulent. But the poll, the judge even said, well, didn’t the article talk about a margin for error? So how can you say that it’s scientific fact? And in your own pleading, you acknowledge that the plaintiffs didn’t rely on this poll and that they didn’t believe this poll. So I felt that the judge across the board was pretty skeptical of the plaintiffs’ arguments here. And but the Iowa Supreme Court, they have

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Laura Belin: generally, you know, they’ve said that that you should assume that the what the plaintiffs assert is true, and that motions to dismiss should rarely be granted, but that doesn’t mean they should never be granted. So like, I said, either way, this is going to go up to the Iowa Supreme Court.

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Dave Price: What’s the timeline to have in mind on this kind of thing? It’s so unique.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, the judge said it would take him several weeks. He said he has a couple of other rulings that he has to get out before this one and that the briefs were just voluminous, I think was the word that he used. There were a lot of legal issues raised. So he said it would take him several weeks to rule. So I would guess he would rule maybe by the end of August or something. And then I think that the, the Iowa Supreme Court, I mean, I’m not sure whether they would consider it on an expedited.

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Laura Belin: schedule. It’s not like the election cases where obviously they have to consider on an expedited schedule. But I would think that the Iowa Supreme Court would just hear arguments. I mean, there would have to be a whole briefing schedule set. So I don’t know if they would hear arguments maybe sometime in the winter. I mean, there would have to be several months for the parties to file their appeal briefs and then their replies to that.

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Dave Price: But is, is Trump paying his legal bills on this or is somebody else doing it?

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Laura Belin: I don’t know that anybody’s really answered that question. I was wondering, of course, we’d all like to know how much money.

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Dave Price: Thank you.

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Laura Belin: They’re in so many different lawsuits, but this has been going and there are several different tracks because as I said, there was an original lawsuit filed in December of 2024 that was removed by the defendants to federal court. And then there was a bunch of fighting over whether Trump could withdraw that suit or get it moved back into state court. And so there was a lot of legal wrangling with the federal district court and the eighth circuit even.

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Laura Belin: And then this second lawsuit was filed. So, I mean, a lot of legal work has been done on this suit. There was arguing over whether Marionette Miller-Meeks and Brad Zahn could be added as co-plaintiffs to that original suit as well.

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Dave Price: Okay, so there’s… that’s one piece of the court activity on Friday, and then we have this other long-going, ongoing saga with the Libertarian candidates.

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Dave Price: Which… That in itself is going to be a Netflix special, but… So more…

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Dave Price: I’ve already used the word unique about the Trump lawsuit, but this one is too, right? Because there’s so many just twists and turns with this.

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Laura Belin: So there are three separate libertarian cases.

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Dave Price: Yeah.

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Laura Belin: pending now. We’ll start with the one on Friday. So Marco Battaglia, the candidate, libertarian candidate for the third congressional district, the state appeal, the state objection panel ruled that he cannot be on the ballot because Marco Battaglia is a fictitious name. And so he, Mark Anderson, using his real name of Mark Anderson, he filed an appeal in district court and the first hearing in that was on Friday.

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Laura Belin: But one of the issues that has to be resolved before they can even go forward with that is Alan Ostergren, again, representing a Republican voter in Linn County, filed an appeal of the state panel’s decision to keep the Libertarian Rick Stewart on the ballot in the second congressional district, and the state and the Republicans want to consolidate those two cases because they both are

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Laura Belin: somewhat connected to the candidate’s name. The libertarians would prefer for those cases to proceed on separate tracks. So the first thing the judge needs to figure out is.

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Laura Belin: Are these Rick Stewart and Marco Battaglia cases similar enough that they can be all heard at the same time by the same judge?

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Laura Belin: Or are they different? And then there’s this whole separate libertarian case involving their ticket for governor and lieutenant governor. There was a lengthy court hearing on that on Tuesday morning, and that one won’t be consolidated because the legal issues are so different. But an evidentiary hearing is going to be held later in July where they’re going to hash out a lot of the factual disputes in that case over whether did the libertarian candidate for lieutenant governor.

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Laura Belin: attempt to submit paperwork, was it rejected, was there a mistake by the Secretary of State’s election staff, and so on.

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Dave Price: And,

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Kathie Obradovich: Me ne.

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Dave Price: And Rick is… his name’s Richard, right?

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Laura Belin: So the, the issue, the reason…

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Dave Price: Get out, Rick.

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Laura Belin: He… his petitions, which he told me that volunteers filled out petitions on his behalf, that he didn’t even go out and collect signatures, but the issue was

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Laura Belin: All of his petitions said Richard Stewart. And then when he signed his affidavit of candidacy, he said he wanted to appear on the ballot as Rick Stewart. And so Alan Ostergren, representing this Linn County voter, went to the state objections panel and said, look, you know, this he he could have put Rick Stewart on his petitions, but he didn’t. And these are different names. And the panel unanimously said, no.

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Laura Belin: Rick Stewart is acknowledged. It’s a shortened version of his legal name, Richard. And they unanimously said, we’re not going to kick him off the ballot for that reason. And so that decision is being appealed. So they both are related to candidate names.

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Dave Price: Yeah. Okay.

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Laura Belin: The majority on the panel, with Rob Sand dissenting, said that Marco Batalia should be kicked off the ballot because Marco Batalia has no… it’s so different from his legal name of Mark Anderson.

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Kathie Obradovich: Right, except that, and as we’ve talked about before, he has run under the name Marco Battaglia several times. He uses that name professionally, and it would be, I think, a lot more confusing to voters at this point if he appeared on the ballot under some other name. And, you know, he has been kicked off the ballot before. It has gone to the Supreme Court.

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Kathie Obradovich: And the court case that was heard was, you know, the state objection panel versus Marco Battaglia. So, I mean, that name has been, you know, it’s really more his real name than Mark Anderson in terms of his running for office. It’s really, this is a, it’s a really interesting case. It’s interesting that they’re listening to

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Kathie Obradovich: They want to listen to Marco Battaglia and Rick Stewart at the same time. It makes me wonder, you know, if this case had been, you know, going on in a year when Chuck Grassley was running for office.

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Dave Price: Yeah.

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, what, what would happen, because, of course, Chuck, his actual legal name is Charles, and he never uses Charles. He runs by, he runs under Chuck all the time.

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Laura Belin: I mean, as long as his petitions say Chuck Grassley, as long as his petitions say the same thing as his candidate affidavit, I think that was the issue they raised with Rick Stewart. But there’s a precedent. Again, it’s a different case. I think it goes back to the 1970s. There’s some kind of precedent that it was the Divine Wonderlic where there was a write-in candidate, but they ruled that, like, if somebody wrote Frank Divine or Francis Divine, that those were the same, that those

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Laura Belin: votes could be counted because that’s basically the same name. It’s versions of the same name. So I think that this Rick, I highly doubt that courts would find that Rick Stewart shouldn’t be on the ballot because his petition said Richard.

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Kathie Obradovich: No, but this puts a cloud under his candidacy. And, you know, we only have, you know, a few months for somebody to campaign. You know, I think that all of this, you know, the Republicans do not want these Libertarians on the ballot siphoning votes potentially away from their candidates. And the more time you can keep them tied up in court or put their candidacy under a cloud, the better it is for.

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, Joe Mitchell and Zach Nunn.

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Dave Price: This is a reminder for me that, to not have my mom fill out my petitions, because she’s, like, about the only person who calls me David.

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Dave Price: other than people who don’t really know me very well. So the Dave and David thing could be an issue for me. But as you all are talking, I was thinking, and I don’t know the answer to this, but like, I remember when former Speaker of the House ran for Governor. He had largely gone by Christopher, but in the race for Governor he went by Chris.

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Dave Price: and Busolo originally was Michael, and then started to go by Mike, and I know some of his friends had called him Mike. I don’t know how they all filled out their paperwork, but I was just thinking in your grassland analogy is even better, because he’s he’s far more known, far more more known.

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Dave Price: So it feels like the steward thing and the battalion thing are kind of two separate things. You can see why they would want these things split up.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, and that’s what the libertarians were saying, that even though they’re both about names, they’re raising very different legal issues. And the libertarians in the Marco Batalia case are also raising this other legal argument. There’s this legal theory of estoppel, which means that if somebody’s been allowed to do something several times before, you can’t stop them from doing it now, or it would be unfair to do so. So as Kathie mentioned, Marco Batalia has been on the ballot several times.

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Laura Belin: And so, you could argue, it’s possible that a court might even find that, yeah, Iowa, you should use your legal name, but the fact that he has already run for office several times, like in this case.

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Laura Belin: They they can’t block him from running again as Marco Batalia. But the court could also say the statute doesn’t specify legal name. It says the candidate’s name is the candidate wants it to appear on the ballot. And the court might say if the legislature wants to go back and amend the statute and say it and specify candidates can only use their legal names or a shortened version of their legal name, then they can amend that statute as they’ve done many times before.

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Dave Price: Okay, we have two other dinners. One we can look ahead to, and not really. Since we’re talking Saturday morning.

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Dave Price: and you folks are probably listening to us at some point on Sunday, then the Iowa Democratic Party’s Liberty and Justice Celebration Dinner may or may not have yet happened. It begins late afternoon.

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Dave Price: Pete Buttigieg, who we think might have won the 2020 Democratic caucuses, there still may be some uncertainty there, and maybe he’s gonna run in 28, but anyway, he’s kind of the headliner for that when that takes place.

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Dave Price: On Sunday, there’s also another big event that happens on Sunday that Kathie’s gonna mention before we come to a close this week, so that’s my verbal reminder to the gang here so we don’t forget. The other political one, though, is Friday night, the Lincoln Dinner, the Republican Party of Iowa.

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Dave Price: And I’m gonna use Unique for the third time during one podcast, which is probably not allowed.

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Dave Price: But the event was unique.

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Dave Price: We had some political speeches. We had Kim Reynolds dancing. We had some tears on stage from both the governor and her granddaughter. And I think this would be the oldest granddaughter who’s about to go off to college. I mean, it had Zach Lahn out there doing his speech. We saw Derek Wolf. I haven’t really seen him out. He had his cowboy hat on. I mean, there was a lot of stuff.

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Dave Price: So many parts of this. Kathie, you want to lead off? I know you watch from the comforts of your home, I believe, thanks to C-SPAN that broadcast some of this. What was your takeaway from this? What did you think of this?

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, so we had a reporter in the room and basically because it was an evening event and already going long that we decided to focus on the political speeches. And so Zach Lahn, you know, his good timing, he was able to announce from the stage that Donald Trump had in fact endorsed

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Kathie Obradovich: him that day. Nobody mentioned from the stage that Donald Trump had already endorsed his primary opponent, Randy Feenstra, who lost.

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Kathie Obradovich: So he actually had something he could, could announce and then he, you know, he spent most of his speech, you know, kind of lauding Kim Reynolds legacy and kind of pledging to continue it. And then, and Ashley Hinson was the other kind of big political headliner. She spent some of her time rapping Josh Turek and, and kind of continuing the primary

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Kathie Obradovich: argument that Zach Walls made against him, that he’s a creature of Chuck Schumer and, you know, dark money, et cetera, et cetera. Interesting, though, I thought what was interesting about her remarks, though, was she talked about Democrats see Iowa as a huge opportunity. And in fact, I think that that is the one thing she said that Democrats

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Kathie Obradovich: agree with.

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Kathie Obradovich: So, so interesting, you know, political speeches. I’ll, I’ll let somebody else talk about Zach Lahn’s long, long anecdote about former President James Garfield, which we don’t, we don’t even have time to talk about. But the other thing, they did a tribute to Kim Reynolds. The party has been doing events like this around the state. It was kind of like, this is your live camp.

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Kathie Obradovich: Reynolds, they brought in her little brother and her daughter, two of her.

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Dave Price: Daught.

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Kathie Obradovich: or three daughters and one of her granddaughters and did, you know, kind of some. And it was cute. And C-SPAN still has a video up, so I’d encourage people to go back and watch it. But Kim, I think, has sort of started to let her hair down a little bit.

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Dave Price: I agree.

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Kathie Obradovich: She was very animated. She was, she sort of was acting out a, you know, going to a basketball game with her daughters and, and apparently they all are screamers and they, they, they yell at the players and, and, and the thing I thought was really funny and was that Kim said, and none of our husbands will sit with us. So I thought that was kind of, that was cute.

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Dave Price: There were a series of…

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Dave Price: there were a series… we can talk about the political speeches. Zach Lahn’s… I always kind of watch the crowd. I wasn’t sure all the crowd was sticking with Zach Lahn on his long story, but…

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Dave Price: it was different. We’ve seen some of the tribute videos at other things before, from some of the tribute videos they played. Now, Governor Reynolds couldn’t see them where she was positioned, but…

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Dave Price: So she was really trying to strain and look around, but they had Nebraska’s current and former governor, they had South Dakota’s governor, they had Sarah Huckabee in Arkansas, they had Brian Kemp in Georgia, they had Linda McMahon, the education secretary, they had the former education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

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Dave Price: They had Terry Branst.

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Kathie Obradovich: Rollins.

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Dave Price: Yeah, Brooke Rollins, thank you. Yeah, the so you had speeches and stuff.

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Dave Price: that you would expect to this, and Zach… Zach Nunn led it off, and to Nunn’s credit, he was sick Friday, and I was with him on several events. He really powered through the day. Sometimes I wonder how these people do it, but…

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Dave Price: He did an event with the American Cancer Society. He had something earlier. They had the return of remains of a former Iowan.

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Dave Price: and then there was a procession for… for him later. He had a couple other events, and then he had this event, too, so I know he was really fighting it, but…

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Dave Price: he made the same point that Hinson did about this, Iowa’s gonna be a top target, so that was sort of the political side.

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Dave Price: Hinson was talking about the dark money and did not mention all the dark money that’s going to benefit her. That will be tens of millions of dollars. And the both parties do this. They always they bash the dark money and the outside money. But all of these raises are going to have a gazillion dollars that don’t come from Iowans.

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Dave Price: And it’s like, you either like, you either believe in that stuff or you don’t. But anyway, that’s a whole other thing. I feel like we could talk a whole podcast though.

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Dave Price: on…

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Dave Price: the difference in Kim Reynolds right now. Like, part of this, I think originally I wasn’t thinking this through, right, about sort of this… the Legacy Tour and the Goodbye events and all this stuff for her, because there’s a part of it that, like, seems weird.

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Dave Price: Like, we’re still in July, she doesn’t leave office until January, but it does feel like they’re doing a bunch of this stuff now before they really go knee-deep in all the campaign stuff.

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Dave Price: So I’m like, okay, I guess I… I guess I understand that, but it feels like a long goodbye, but she is so animated right now.

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Dave Price: And like playful, like some of this reminds me of.

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Dave Price: Maybe pre-COVID stuff?

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Dave Price: I don’t know that she ever really let her hair down this much, but, she already talked about this, so I think it’s fine that she’s mentioned this twice. She went to the Journey concert.

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Dave Price: And we all have a mutual friend who’s a reporter who went to the Journey concert as well. So, as we’re waiting to gaggle after this event on Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever the heck day it was, when the governor announced the America’s Harvest Festival that’ll take place in October.

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Dave Price: As part of the America 250 stuff. It was out in the blazing sun, and I had suggested to them, hey, why don’t we go move over there? It’s in the shade a little bit, so we’re not all flop-sweating and everything.

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Dave Price: And so we’re waiting for her, and our friend is talking about the Journey concert. So the governor walks up, and I was thinking, I bet she went. And I said, hey, did you go to Journey?

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Dave Price: And she’s like, oh yeah, and they’re going on about how great the concert was, and the governor’s, like, moving around. Very, very animated. And she’s like, you can’t use all that stuff, you know, whatever. And we’re like, you know, whatever.

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Dave Price: Well, she basically replicated it at the dinner on Friday night. And she’s up on stage, like, you can tell she was just truly loving it. She’s got her family there, her little brother from Colorado came.

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Dave Price: There was a moment where they were on stage where she… she started this, but she’s like, was I bossy as a kid? And he was like, well, you know, like, there were a lot of, like, very genuine moments. You already mentioned two of the three daughters were there. I think these would be the younger two.

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Dave Price: And they all must share this.

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Dave Price: super passionate fandom where, you know, if they’ve got a kid out there on the court, they go crazy and their spouses don’t want anything to do with them. And I’ve never seen that side of the governor. She had, years ago, one of her grandsons played in the same baseball league my son did, so we would see them, but I never saw her going.

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Dave Price: crazy like that or whatever, but then she’s recreating the Journey concert, and she’s dancing all over the stage and moving her arms around, and I thought the most powerful moment was with her granddaughter when Avery was out there.

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Dave Price: And Jeff Kaufman, the party chair, said to her, you know, what is it like to have Kim Reynolds, you know, your grandma be the governor? And she said, well, she’s my best friend. And you can tell it choked up the governor, it choked up Avery, it choked up her mom. I mean, that was a pretty cool moment.

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Kathie Obradovich: It was a cool moment.

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Dave Price: All right. So, Laura, you’ve watched some of these speeches, right?

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Laura Belin: Yes. I wanted to say something about Ashley Hinson because she brought up something that this is a relatively new talking point that I saw the Senate Leadership Fund, which is one of those big outside groups. This one is pro-Republican that’s going to spend a lot of money on the Senate race. And I saw other people raising this issue and she highlighted that Josh Turek missed a lot of votes in the legislative session that they.

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Laura Belin: They claim that he missed 60% of the votes in the legislature, which I have not independently confirmed. I assume they’re only talking about this year’s session because before this year, I don’t think that he was absent that much. But he did miss a lot of votes as many legislators do when they’re running for higher office. So there was a story that the Senate Leadership Fund was pushing this week that he still collected his per diem payments even though he missed a lot of votes.

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Laura Belin: votes. So she brought that up, Jeff Kaufman brought that up, that when he bothers to show up for work, blah blah blah, that he’s a liberal, that he’s just like Chuck Schumer, and so on. So I think we’ll be hearing a lot about that. I don’t know.

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Laura Belin: how much voters care. I feel like that was an issue that was raised against Abby Finkenauer in 2018, that she missed a bunch of votes, but I can’t remember whether it was only raised during the Democratic primary or also during the general. But anyway, that was something new that I heard from Ashley Hinson at that dinner.

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Dave Price: Correct me if I’.

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Laura Belin: Launched on C-SPA.

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Dave Price: Go ahead, Kathie.

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Kathie Obradovich: I should say, you know, if you to be.

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Kathie Obradovich: The context there is that there were people running for higher office of both parties that missed a lot of votes, you know, during the legislative session. And you have to account for that. Also, during the primary, Zach Wells had brought up some specific votes that Josh Turek had missed. And Turek pointed out that he was ill during some of those related

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Kathie Obradovich: to his condition, which was spina bifida, which is why he uses a wheelchair. And, you know, he kind of, he pushed back pretty hard on, you know, kind of, it’s kind of despicable to, you know, hit me for, you know, being sick, you know, but, but yeah, I mean, I, there were a lot of absences and frankly, actually a lot of lawmakers who were, who were, who were sick for the entire

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Kathie Obradovich: legislative session or almost the entire legislative session. But also, if you look at those who were running for higher office, there were definitely a lot of absences there as well.

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Dave Price: Yeah, okay.

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Laura Belin: I mean, he’s one of 33 Democrats in the Iowa House. So in no way was his missed vote ever decisive on anything during the legislative session. But I understand the argument that if you’re representing people that you should show up. I certainly saw Josh Turek a lot during committees and subcommittees. So it’s not that he was absent for the whole session.

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Dave Price: Okay, there’s one other thing I’m going to save for next week, but… because it’s going to get… it’s going to go on a long tangent here, but it’s about Zach Lahn. But we’ll do… we can do that next week. Because I want to leave time at the end here for this promotional announcement by Kathie Obredovich.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yes. So we don’t do commercials here, but this is close. Iowa Capital Dispatch is a not-for-profit. So a lot of what we raise for reporters to cover, travel to cover stories, our internship, we actually, one of our staff positions, which is on a fellowship.

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Kathie Obradovich: We raise the money that the fellowship doesn’t cover. The freelancers who help us cover the elections, et cetera, all of that stuff we raise, locally from our readers and, and donors and subscribers. And we have a benefit concert going on, Sunday. So if you’re watching this on Sunday, the 12th at the,

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Kathie Obradovich: Uptown Garage Brewing Company, Uptown Garage Brewing Company in Ankeny. We had it, we had the same setup last year and it was really fun. There’s a band called Home Brewed out of Iowa City and what they do is benefit concerts and they’re fantastic. It’s blues rock and it’s super fun.

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Kathie Obradovich: So,

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Kathie Obradovich: People can look at our Facebook page. We have an event on Facebook, Iowa Capital Dispatch, or you can look at, you know, if you if you can’t make it but still want to donate, we have a donate page on Iowa Capital Dispatch dot com. So we hope to see you out. It is really fun. I know there are some conflicts.

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Kathie Obradovich: with the, big Democrats dinner, this year, but, but I, I guarantee if you, if you make it out, you’ll have a good time.

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Dave Price: And support.

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Kathie Obradovich: Or local news.

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Dave Price: Exactly. Hey, can I, I want to close this out. I think we collectively as journalists.

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Dave Price: are terrible at self-promotion, which I hope is actually a positive attribute. A former professor of mine, who I’ve been friends with for 30-whatever years, has talked about that, inherently, this is sort of what works against journalists these days. You know, to try to

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Dave Price: To try to bust through and all that stuff, and honestly, just…

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Dave Price: just doing the podcast which is always super fun to do with all of you each week but at some point in here I try to make this pitch about and if you can subscribe and help us you know that’s not like it feels like you’re doing a telethon or something so that I wanted to point out so I know you know doing fundraising pitches for you Kathie is not is not something that comes second nature to you the one thing though that I wanted to compliment you on and this is because I’ve been

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Dave Price: reading a lot about, we in journalism need to do a better job of showing how the sausage is made.

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Dave Price: And, to kind of lifting the veil about how do we make decisions and coverage plans and all of that. And I appreciate that you gave a little insight to the Lincoln dinner on Friday night because in totality there were, at least in my opinion, there were tons of interesting ways you could go for coverage. I mean, I just went rambling on about the, the Kim Reynolds moments on this stage with that in

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Dave Price: itself was fascinating to me, and Hinson with the dark money, and Nunn’s acknowledgement about, hey, this is going to be close, and all those kind of things, and Lahn’s speech, and Lahn’s avail that he did afterwards. But I appreciate how you gave us

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Dave Price: little glimpse about how you do the decision making of Friday night with your staff. And what’s the how you decide what your coverage focus is going to be, Laura, you’re in. I feel like one thing you do uniquely is that you’re able to take something and then kind of expand it by digging in. Do you know what I mean? Like your whole thing is not a

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Dave Price: Here are five nuggets of the day that have happened in a digestible form that you can read in a minute. You can’t read any of your pieces in a minute.

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Laura Belin: That’s.

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Dave Price: Like, you can eat your entire dinner while you’re doomscrolling it through on your phone, not doomscrolling, while you’re scrolling through on your phone, you know? Like, that’s the way you approach it, too. But, so I think maybe from time to time, I wonder if it’d be valuable if we kind of opened up a little bit on the podcast about how we make our decisions, but… Oh, absolutely. Anyway, I’m all caffeinated up.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, I.

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Dave Price: A bunch of different ways.

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Kathie Obradovich: Okay.

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Laura Belin: No. But it’s true. But and I really appreciate Iowa Capital Dispatch because I can only do so much. But a lot of times, if I see that Iowa Capital Dispatch covered a story, then I say, okay. Well, I’m gonna cover a different story, or I’m gonna cover it from a different angle from what Iowa Capital Dispatch did. But it it’s very helpful, and it’s it’s coverage that I rely on for sure.

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Kathie Obradovich: Part of what we do is we share our stories. So we, you know, part of our mission is to not only, you know, cover the news and give it to readers without a paywall and without advertising, but also to share it for free with other media who might not be able to come to Des Moines and cover five events in one day. We were lucky that there were only five big events on Friday because we have

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Kathie Obradovich: We have with an intern this summer, we had five reporters who could do that. I’m impressed that Laura got to, you know, more than one of those things.

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Dave Price: Just showing off.

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Kathie Obradovich: It was hard to… it was really hard to get somebody to every one of those things, and and so…

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Kathie Obradovich: So, yeah, fundraising is part of it. It’s not what any of us were really trained to do as journalists.

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Dave Price: Yes.

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Kathie Obradovich: But that is the reality of the world today.

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Dave Price: One thing we did not get to was, I couldn’t get to the court, and Laura handled both of those. Hinson had an event in Marshalltown with the Agriculture Secretary, Mike Nagin. There were farmers in there, and it’s all about to save our bacon, and we can talk about this in a future show, right? But it was a newsworthy.

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Kathie Obradovich: I had to go to that one.

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Dave Price: Yeah, you pulled that off. And it was a newsworthy thing, and I had been to Josh Turek’s sort of farm-related thing earlier in the week, so I really wanted to go, but it was 9 o’clock in Marshalltown, and there was a soldier send-off at the airport at 10 o’clock. The math, like, just did not…

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Dave Price: There are just too many things in one day. It’s like Friday, which is normally a slow news day, but there were so many things happening. But anyway, okay, so I must now offer this fundraising pitch if you’d like to support the Iowa Down Ballot podcast. And we did have a fundraiser this past week at Julie Gammack and Richard Gilbert’s house. We very much appreciate those of you who showed up at that.

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Dave Price: And some of you who are not able to come to that will.

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Dave Price: We’re also kind enough to make financial contributions online to support.

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Dave Price: this podcast production, so we very much appreciate that. You can do that anytime when this is… when this drops, you’ll see the link on there that enables you to subscribe at whatever level you want.

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Dave Price: So we very much appreciate that. And we also appreciate when you just share this. Obviously, we appreciate when you join us every week, but if you can share this with the folks you know in your circle.

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Dave Price: that helps us grow, so we very much appreciate it. Alright, we went a little long this week, probably because I’m… I’ve got too cap… too much caffeine in me today, and rambling too much, but…

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Dave Price: Thank you both for being so flexible with the taping schedule, recording schedule. Have a great weekend, and we will talk to everybody next week.

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