Happy Independence Day! We start with a federal court ruling striking down Iowa’s SNAP food restrictions this week, so candy and soda are back on the table. Kathie and Laura break down just how confusing those old rules were, and note the SunBucks summer program will keep going with the pre-waiver food list.

We also cover Cami Koons’ reporting for Iowa Capital Dispatch on USDA staffing cuts hitting Iowa’s county offices, including Polk County losing in-person help most days of the week. Farmers are feeling it on top of already tough market conditions.

We close with the numbers: a new Fox News poll shows Josh Turek up 4 on Ashley Hinson and Rob Sand up 9 on Zach Lahn, while the Times/Siena poll has both races much tighter.

To support our work financially you can click on the link above to become a paid subscriber, or the link below for a one time donation to the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative that helps fund our costs. Thanks so much to those of you who already have. Have a safe and happy 4th!

Auto-generated transcript below:

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Dave Price: Okay, here we go.

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Dave Price: Welcome, everybody, to the Iowa Down Ballot podcast on this first episode of July 2026. I’m Dave Price, joined by my Iowa Writers Collaborative

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Dave Price: That’s not even any good. I’m, like, stumbling all over Spencer, how about we don’t count that one? Plus, I felt like I had a thing in my throat the whole time. Take two, take two, take two.

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Laura Belin: Alright, okay, hang on.

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Dave Price: Sorry, Spencer.

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Dave Price: Hi everybody, welcome back to the Iowa Down Ballot Podcast. I’m Dave Price, joined by my fellow collaborators from the Iowa Writers Collaborative, Laura Belin and Kathie O’Brijovich, for our first show in July of 2026. How are you?

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Kathie Obradovich: Doing great. Happy 4th of July.

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Dave Price: Nepsi, 4th of July.

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Dave Price: And indeed. Kathie and I were talking about right before we started this, we both have pets who are not all that thrilled with fireworks.

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Dave Price: Unfortunately, our pet left a present in the corner of,

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Dave Price: my basement office here, while we were gone last night, I think, which I didn’t even notice, or it happened overnight. I’m not really sure when that happened, and she, like, never does that, so…

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah.

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Dave Price: Oh, I can’t wait.

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Kathie Obradovich: Mine just hides, luckily. Yeah, that’s what… My cat just hides.

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Dave Price: That’s what our dog usually does. There’s a corner she goes to all the time, but she doesn’t usually have…

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Dave Price: Accidents, those are really rare, so something must have really spooked her overnight, I guess.

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Dave Price: Okay, well, that was not how I meant to begin this week’s show.

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Dave Price: But it is… it is what it is. All right, there is, there’s a bunch we want to talk about. We’ll see how much we can squeeze in this week, but, Kathie, props to the Iowa Capital Dispatch staff.

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Dave Price: First of all,

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Dave Price: You have a couple of significant pieces here over the last couple of days, but let’s talk about, one, this follow-up, really, to this federal court ruling, and it impacts the Iowa law.

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Dave Price: when it comes to people who receive the SNAP benefits, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the federal benefits that come through there. And Iowa Republicans, like Republican counterparts in other states across the country, put restrictions on this to limit

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Dave Price: what types of food you can buy. Now, from the get-go, I remember working on these stories. Some of it’s confusing, right? Even for the people who are up at the State House 24-7, it seems like, like, granola bars, like, is…

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Dave Price: Is that a yes, is that a no? And certain things… certain foods that are kind of already… I don’t know what the right word is, but sort of already made, that you can go pick up. I know nationally there was this thing about rotisserie chicken or something, like, if you go buy it from the gas station. What’s your take on…

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Dave Price: the federal ruling, and now what Iowa has to do because of it.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, so because of the federal ruling, basically the Fed said, sorry, you states that have these waivers, your… this… this rule does not comply with the federal definition of food in the law. So, essentially, it’s saying to all these states, you can’t do this waiver because it doesn’t… it does not…

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Kathie Obradovich: conform with the law. So, what happened yesterday was basically the notification from Iowa Department of Health and Human Services that basically that waiver is now void. So, you know, things like soda and candy and, stuff like that that was banned under the waiver.

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Kathie Obradovich: you can now buy again with SNAP. And, you know, it didn’t surprise me. I figured they would have to do this eventually anyway. But also, they said that the SunBucks program, which is the summer, we call it… well, sometimes we call it summer EBT, electronic benefits transfer. You basically get a… families with kids that, are already on SNAP get an extra 40 bucks a month.

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Kathie Obradovich: To cover meals over the summer. And Iowa had stopped doing it for a couple years, because Kim Reynolds said it wasn’t healthy. You can get healthy food. So…

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Kathie Obradovich: But they started doing it this year because of the waiver. And, I… you know, they even talked about, in the legislature, dropping the program if that waiver did not continue. You know, if kids could buy candy with SNAP dollars, they didn’t want to do it. And, in fact, HHS announced yesterday that SunBucks will continue.

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Kathie Obradovich: With the food list from before the waiver. So, you can buy candy now with the… with the Sunbucks as well as Snap. I think, you know, this… this sort of abrupt seesawing may cause problems for some, you know, retailers, grocery stores. It was confusing anyway, because it was based on… it was kind of based on sales tax.

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Kathie Obradovich: And so, you mentioned the thing with granola, it’s like, you know, if you pay sales tax for it, then, you can’t get it with SNAP, and so that includes, like, prepared food, but now people are making the point, you know, a cup of fruit.

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Kathie Obradovich: cut up fruit. You know, you… you can’t get that, but you can get a granola bar that’s full of fat and sugar. So, it was definitely an imperfect program. I… the governor vowed to continue to try to

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, make Iowa’s program, conform with her idea of what’s healthy. So, I think we haven’t heard the last of this.

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Laura Belin: Well, the whole thing is so weird, because I thought, and I’m gonna have to go back and read this bill again, but I thought that under one of the laws Governor Reynolds signed this year, Iowa cannot continue in that summer meals program if they don’t have a waiver from the USDA, so I was very confused.

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Laura Belin: by the press release, and the summer meals, or sun bucks, whatever you want to call it, it covers a lot of people who aren’t on SNAP. It’s any family who has a child on… eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch. So it’s about 240,000 kids where they’re getting an extra 40 bucks a month for the three months of the summer. So it’s significant for people’s budgets. But these rules, the Iowa Hunger Coalition had really good coverage

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Laura Belin: earlier this year about how confusing the rules are, because things with flour and dairy are not taxable, but other kinds of candy are, so you get these things like, you can’t buy a Snickers bar, but you could buy a frozen Snickers bar, because it has ice cream, which is dairy, which means it’s not taxable. So the idea that this waiver was

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Laura Belin: Stopping people from buying unhealthy foods is a little bit of a canard.

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Dave Price: The whole… this makes me think of this entire… the entire Maha movement, and what is the best way, at the end of the day, to help people eat healthier and to get healthier. And we are seeing different approaches about it, and it now, following this court ruling for the questions that we were facing for months, wondering how this was all going to shake out.

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Dave Price: it shows that it was not gonna all shake out. There were gonna be problems with this, which is some of the questions we were asking for months, because some of the stuff

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Dave Price: as you mentioned, Laura, with the Iowa Hunger Coalition, it is hard to logically explain, you know, like, for us, as reporters, you…

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Dave Price: get all this information, and then you have to spit it out in some form so the public can consume it, right? So you’re… in television, you’re doing a minute and a half, maybe minute 45 long live shot, and your example about Snickers, like, try to make sense of that. Like, that’s hard. You’re like.

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Dave Price: Well, if it’s not frozen, then this. If it is, then, like, it’s illogical.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, and what Kathie said about the fruit cup, and I already forgot the difference, but whether the fruit cup, whether you can buy it, it depends on it comes… whether it comes with a fork or a spoon, or without a fork or a spoon, because there are some containers of cut-up fruit that were okay to buy, but I can’t remember whether it was okay with or without the spoon. I mean, this is the…

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I think…

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Laura Belin: It’s ridiculous.

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Kathie Obradovich: It has a spoon, it’s like an individual serving that you would consume, and so that… that counts as a prepared food, you know, as opposed to if you buy a whole watermelon that’s cut up, I think that that would not be taxed, probably.

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Laura Belin: I think one of the best ways to incentivize healthy eating is something that they did include in the standings bill, that last appropriations bill that passed on the last day of the legislative session, where there was a million-dollar appropriation to a program that’s called Double Up Food Bucks, which means that if you have food assistance, and you use it to buy fruits or vegetables, and that could be at a regular grocery store, or it could even be at a farmer’s market, you can get double your money

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Laura Belin: and there’s some state appropriation for that, so it goes twice as far if you go and buy fruits and vegetables. And everybody agrees that fruits and vegetables are healthy, so that would be one avenue to do it, rather than restricting things with this waiver that doesn’t apparently conform to the federal law.

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Dave Price: I’m gonna segue to the next topic, which has something to do with food and agriculture, but bear with me here for a second as we get there. I do some side work for a project called the American Farmland Owner.

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Dave Price: And, focused heavily on food production and agriculture and farmland and all that kind of stuff. And so, with that, over the last two and a half years as I’ve worked with that, we’ve had a lot of coverage on the federal cuts since Trump came back into office.

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Dave Price: with different programs that could pay local producers for meat and produce to provide their products in their local vicinity. And some of it was an expansion during the Biden administration, and the Trump administration cut a lot of that stuff.

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Dave Price: And it’s always interesting to me when I hear, like, you’re talking about the Double Up Food Program, Double Up Bucks, whatever the heck it’s called.

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Dave Price: we talk about how are we going to support our farmers, because it’s going to be hard for a small family farmer to compete anyway when you’re going up against these giant conglomerates to begin with. But we have, on the federal level, eliminated some of the programs that helped to do that.

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Dave Price: I believe these aren’t… it’s not quite apples to apples, but Mike Neg at the State Department of Agriculture, they’ve expanded some programs here.

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Dave Price: recently that could do some of this, but Laura, when you’re talking about connecting people to healthy food and fruit and vegetables and all that, I’m gonna be curious, especially in the governor’s race with Zach Lahn and Rob Sand.

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Dave Price: how are… whether they’re going to lean into… because they both talked about, like, local, buying local, those kind of things. There… it seems like some smart person could find a way to create a better system

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Dave Price: to connect our local producers with the people who need that healthy food, regardless of whether they are receiving food assistance or not. That’s my soapbox for this week. Just seems like there’s got to be a way to make that happen.

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Dave Price: Okay, maybe I’m gonna use that in my gubernatorial campaign that I’m gonna announce next week, so stay tuned for that. Okay, so this is, like, celebrating the Capitol Dispatch Week, but.

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Kathie Obradovich: Oops!

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Dave Price: Yeah, Kathie, talk about Cami’s story.

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Dave Price: Where she looked at some of this data.

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Dave Price: And let me set this up this way, that the Trump administration did a bunch of changes, obviously, in this second term. Part of it was Doge-related, and we had wondered how these pretty major staffing reductions were going to impact people.

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Dave Price: In that, a lot of these things didn’t seem to be done selectively, it was like a…

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Dave Price: you know, big, big old chunks all at once, so there was clearly going to be some fallout. Regardless of whether you think, big picture, this is the right decision, wrong decision, whatever, it was going to get… it was going to be rough when you eliminate so many people so quickly.

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Dave Price: So, on the agriculture side with USDA, there are a couple of different agencies under USDA in particular that CAMI looked into.

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Dave Price: And fairly substantial staffing cuts.

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Dave Price: And we knew that some of these things were going to happen. CAMI is the first one I’ve seen in our state to lay out what they mean in our state. But we’re also now hearing from the local farmers who have then lost access

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Dave Price: To some of these resources they used to be able to have more readily available to them in their county.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, so, first of all, Cami started…

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Kathie Obradovich: Oh, gosh, last year, or early in the year, maybe over the winter, trying to figure out, you know, where these staffing cuts were going to be, and how they would land in these, in these, USDA offices. And, she kept being told.

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Kathie Obradovich: oh, we’re not gonna have… we’re not gonna lose any staff. I mean, it was… it was… it was sort of a blatantly nothing-to-see-here kind of message.

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Kathie Obradovich: And then this, this organization called the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition came out with a report that basically said that across the country, roughly 20% of staff in state and county-level offices were being cut through USDA. The report focused on the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

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Kathie Obradovich: or NRCS.

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Kathie Obradovich: They’re the ones that administer a lot of the, well, I mean, it’s in the name, conservation programs for farms. And then also the Farm Service Agency, they had fewer cuts, but still, significant.

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Kathie Obradovich: And, and so, you know, looking in Iowa, for example.

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Kathie Obradovich: the people who were cut most often in Iowa were county program analysts, and these are the staff that producers rely on to help them with pro… with their programs and paperwork. Farmers that we talked to said, you know, that the thing that they feel like they lose the most is, you know, you’d be able to come into your county,

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Kathie Obradovich: SDA office, and, you know, somebody would be there that you’ve dealt with before, who knows your farm, or at least knows the topography of the region, and can help you with these programs. And now, you know, Polk County has no one left. They’re bringing in somebody from Boone County for one day a week. The office is open.

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Kathie Obradovich: So…

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Kathie Obradovich: So it does have an impact. It is something that, you know, when you talk about farmers already being under stress, that, you know, having trouble dealing with the paperwork, you know, having to deal with new people who don’t know the background, that just adds to the stress that farmers are also feeling because of the cost of inputs and the

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Kathie Obradovich: the market uncertainty and, you know, all of that kind of stuff that has been going on. So it’s, you know, it is something that, you know, I think that we’re not hearing a lot about it yet, but it is something I think that just sort of adds to the worries that farmers have.

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Dave Price: We had…

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Laura Belin: Such great reporting, Kathie, really excellent reporting by Cami.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, she’s great.

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Dave Price: It really is, because when you hear… at the beginning, it was very difficult to get any kind of concrete information about what these staff changes were mean, and when you’re assured that farmers are still going to be able to access the resources they need.

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Dave Price: At the beginning, you know, it’s hard to know at the beginning, because the changes are just happening, so you don’t really have any tangible way to show yes or no.

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Dave Price: these are happening or not happening, and so Cami’s is the first one I’ve seen that… that shows that the…

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Dave Price: The num… now shows the numbers, but also has the… the concrete…

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Dave Price: interviews with people saying that, yeah, this is what’s disappeared. I’m gonna be curious if, now that it’s out in the public domain, if anything changes, how will, especially Senators Grassley and Ernst get involved in this? Will they try to restore some of this?

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Dave Price: And USCA is also doing this major relocation effort, where they’re moving quite a bit of their staff out of DC to different hubs across the country, sort of organized by specialty, if you will.

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Dave Price: And so that’s going to create a bunch of upheaval, too. Another one of these massive changes that really we won’t know until probably down the road, whether people are better or worse off from it. Supposed to bring some of the staff closer to the people they serve, but we’ve now seen these staffing reductions on the state level that are removing some of the people.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, and part of the… part of the issue, too, is a lot of these people are not going to relocate. For sure. They’re going to find other jobs, so… so you’ve got, you know, you’re losing experience, you’re losing, institutional knowledge, and all of that, you know, yeah, you know, I think…

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Kathie Obradovich: What farmers here are worried about more is the local people that they know, who know them, as opposed to somebody in DC, but it still all trickles down.

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Dave Price: Let’s close out this week with a little horse race stuff. Laura, the Fox News has a U.S. Senate poll.

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Dave Price: In Iowa. And on this podcast, we don’t make too big a deal out of polls, because they are, as we know, just a snapshot.

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Dave Price: in time, and we’re also talking in July, and the election’s not till November. But as you look at some of these numbers from this Fox News poll, it has the Democrat Josh Turek at 50, it has the Republican Ashley Henson at 46.

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Dave Price: that’s about… that’s about the margin of error or so. So, it… yet another indication that this is a battleground race in a more…

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Dave Price: Maybe a less deep reddish-looking state right now.

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Laura Belin: Well, I said yesterday, it’s kind of like choose your own adventure with the Iowa polls, because the New York Times-Siena poll of Iowa that came out this week had a very tight race for governor, with Rob Sand only ahead of Zach Lahn by one point.

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Laura Belin: And Ashley Hinson leading Josh Turek by 2 points, and then this Fox News poll that you mentioned has Sand ahead of Lahn by 9, and has Turek ahead of Hinson by 4. So clearly.

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Laura Belin: they are modeling different electorates. I mean, it could be something as simple as just random sample, right? That you could just get a different sample, but different methodology, different assumptions about what the electorate will look like. I was trying to… I was going back and forth with

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Laura Belin: the… one of the people involved with the Fox News poll yesterday, and they did not want to give me, like, the overall aggregate number of what it… as they weighted their sample, what did it look like in terms of remembering in 2024 whether they voted for Harris or Trump? Because…

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Laura Belin: The New York Times-Siena poll has… that respondent poll has an electorate that favored Trump by about 8 points. Of course, he won Iowa by 13 points, but you can’t assume that the electorate that’s going to vote this November is going to be exactly the same composition as the people who voted in 2024. So, they seem to be making some assumptions about Democrats being more energized.

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Laura Belin: But the Fox News poll had even better numbers for Democrats, and they… I was just told that they don’t release those numbers. Typically, those aggregate numbers, like how many people in this sample voted for Harris and how many voted for Trump. But they did release the breakdown of their poll by party ID, and their sample for the Fox News poll had 48% Republican.

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Laura Belin: 41% Democrat and 12% Independent.

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Laura Belin: So, if you… it suggests that Rob Sand is getting quite a bit of Republican crossover vote, and maybe Josh Turek is getting some too, and it also suggests that both Democrats are doing very well among the independents. And if you’re asking, why only 12% independent.

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Laura Belin: because there are so many registered voters who are independents in Iowa, the turnout for independents really goes off a cliff in a midterm election. So you’re much more likely to vote in a non-presidential year if you’re affiliated with a Democratic or Republican party compared to being a no-party voter. So that’s why, even though independents may be more than a third of the Iowa electorate, we can be pretty certain they won’t be more than a third of the people who cast

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Laura Belin: ballots in November.

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Dave Price: Kathie, we don’t see a lot of horse race coverage on the Capitol Dispatch. Why not?

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Kathie Obradovich: Because I still miss Ann Selzer. I was just gonna say, thank you, Laura, for trying to look into the methodology of these polls, because it is super important. I learned, over years of, learning from Ann Selzer, the Des Moines Register’s former, former political pollster.

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Kathie Obradovich: that, you know, when… when polls start trying to predict what the electorate is gonna look like, it introduces all kinds of potential for… for error, and… which is why she never did it. I mean, she… she would wait…

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Kathie Obradovich: the sample for demographics only, and not for, you know, whether somebody voted last time, or, you know, whether their, hair is gray, or, you know, whatever. And they… but pollsters do that, and then they don’t disclose what they did, and that is the… that’s the part

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Kathie Obradovich: where I start to get really suspicious is, well, how did you cook this, you know, sample so that you, it looks like how you think the electro’s gonna look like? You know, people… people change, you know? They can…

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Kathie Obradovich: change their mind. They can… they can say that they’re a Democrat and vote Republican. They can, you know, these things happen. And, polling is such a…

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, it’s such a difficult thing, political polling. It’s why Ann Sulzer’s not doing it anymore. Political polling is so difficult now, that, you know, when you just… when you have secret methodologies, I just… I…

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Kathie Obradovich: I worry about it. Now, it helps me that we’ve got sort of similar, I mean, not really the same results, but at least they’re sort of in the ballpark.

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Kathie Obradovich: with these polls, you know, what I take out of it, though, bottom line, these are close races, and we knew that already.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, I mean, Henson is not at 50% in any poll that I’ve seen. Hinson is in the mid-40s in about all of the polling, so that tells you something. But to… I’m just trying to remember which state it was, but the New York Times, they gave their raw survey data to 4 different companies in 2024, and the polling firms came up with 4 different results for Harris and Trump.

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Laura Belin: With the exact same survey responses, based on assumptions they were making about the electorate.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, it’s crazy. You know, I think it’s definitely reader or viewer beware when it comes to these polls. You know, you don’t want to put, as Dave said, you don’t want to put too much stock in them, especially not this early.

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Dave Price: And that’s hard, because there’s such a lack of information about a lot of these, and you do just get the top-line numbers, and those are the easiest things to report in a lot of traditional media sources.

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Dave Price: And so you see candidate X up by 2 in this one, but down by 3 in this one, and tied in this one, and you’re like, well, what the heck does this stuff mean? But…

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Dave Price: those assumptions that they bake in that you talked about, Kathie, could make the world of difference.

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Kathie Obradovich: And then what’s more interesting…

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Kathie Obradovich: I think the more useful information from these polls anyway is the why, telling us why people are supporting one candidate or another, you know, what is it that makes the difference? Because, you know, ultimately we’re going to know who wins on election day. You know, that one… that one has a finite answer, but, you know, we don’t have the ability to interview every voter to find out exactly why they’re supporting somebody.

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Kathie Obradovich: studying.

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Dave Price: That used to drive me crazy when the register would have a new poll out.

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Dave Price: What I loved about the polls is that you could then have one of the reporters follow up with one of the poll respondents to get that extra layer of the why.

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Dave Price: like, who is this person, and why did you support the person you did? So then we’re stuck with… we get, as the media organization that didn’t sponsor the poll.

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Dave Price: We get, essentially, the top-line numbers and some other stuff, but we don’t have the people, and it’s the people that add all of the substance to those numbers. So I used to… that’s why I always loved…

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Dave Price: reading the… the write-ups on it, where you could find out that Mary and Creston did… used to be this, and instead she’s now going this way, and Frank up in Cedar Rapids is doing this, and whatever. That was probably my favorite part of the poll, honestly, beyond the top numbers.

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Kathie Obradovich: we call those people poll talkers, and sometimes it’s kind of terrifying. I remember one time I was calling poll talkers.

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Kathie Obradovich: And, it was in a… it was in a previous gubernatorial race, you know, years ago. And, the person I got on the phone had voted in the… or had, you know, given an opinion in the governor’s race, had agreed to speak to a reporter, and I said, so, you know, why did you choose the candidate you chose? And she said, no, who’s running for governor?

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Kathie Obradovich: again.

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Kathie Obradovich: And I was like… Okay. Well, you know what, thanks so much, nevermind.

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Dave Price: Yeah, exactly. This is not gonna go far.

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Laura Belin: I’m a groupie of the focus group podcast that Sarah Longwell does for the bulwark, because she does these focus groups. They aren’t necessarily giving you a representative slice of the electorate, but they can be so illuminating. So she will pull a focus group of a very specific segment, like people who voted for Trump… for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024. And she’s done a lot of groups with those

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Laura Belin: people to try to figure out what it was, or people who say they voted for Trump in 2024 and they don’t approve of his work now. Of course, the majority of people who voted for Trump in 2024 are still with him, but by really drilling down with these groups of people who say they don’t approve of Trump, it’s so fascinating to know what stories have broken through, what political news… because when you’re so immersed in the political news.

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Laura Belin: forget that most voters are not. Like, they are maybe only hearing about a small fraction of the political news that we’re immersed in every day.

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Kathie Obradovich: Exactly.

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Dave Price: And so many of these issues are so multi-layered and so complicated that unless you’re willing to really invest the time to dig into it, you maybe only know bits and pieces, or maybe know virtually nothing about it. You know, like you talked… like we just talked about the polls.

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Dave Price: If you don’t have a way to invest like you do, and you’re not normal, clearly. And we say that in a complimentary way, but right? Like, people aren’t…

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Dave Price: Most people are not gonna reach out to the…

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Dave Price: Fox News pollsters to try to figure out how they put together their poll. Like, people don’t do that. You’re gonna look at the 50 to 46 and go, oh, okay, Turret can win, maybe.

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Dave Price: But, and with all the other issues that are involved in everything, we talked about the residency thing on here with Zach Lahn, is that the thing that’s gonna stick? That ad that Republican governors have on against SAN, saying that he didn’t do his job?

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Dave Price: Essentially, and I’m paraphrasing, but, you know, like, what is the stuff that’s gonna stick? What’s not, and they all try stuff to see which one goes, which one doesn’t, but those focus groups are so fascinating to see what is it that, like…

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Dave Price: that connects with you? Is it the price of gas? Like, do we overthink all kinds of other stuff?

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Dave Price: Like, we can talk about the reflecting pool and all kinds of stuff, and this and that, and January 6th, and all that stuff, but are some of the Trump people gonna leave because they’re pissed off about gas prices, and they’re like, this guy said he’s gonna make my life cheaper, and he did, and I’m out. Like, you know what I mean?

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Dave Price: It’s so basic.

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Laura Belin: That is a big part… that’s a big takeaway from a lot of the Sarah Longwell groups. I mean, especially the Biden to Trump voters. It was like, things are too expensive, I was doing better when Trump was president.

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Dave Price: The first time.

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Laura Belin: And to a slightly lesser degree, immigration was a motivator for some people, but… and the Trump voters who now disapprove of him, it’s very strong, this idea that he said he was going to bring the prices down and everything’s still very expensive.

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Dave Price: Indeed. Alright, good to catch up with you, as always, ladies. Have a great weekend. Enjoy the 4th. Best wishes to your cat, Kathie.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, he’ll… he’ll be fine.

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Dave Price: Thank you all for supporting us here at the Iowa Down Ballot Podcast. Thanks to all of you who have contributed as paid subscribers. We greatly appreciate you. This allows us to keep doing this week after week, so thank you very much, and thanks to the rest of you

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Dave Price: who are also willing to not only just consume this in whatever form you do, but to share this and to send it to your friends and family. That helps us grow week by week. We very much appreciate that as well. Have a great weekend, and we will talk to you next week.

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