US Representative Mark Pocan, the Wisconsin Democrat who is widely recognized by strategists in both parties as one of the most politically savvy members of Congress, has been arguing for months that the way to upend GOP control of the House and Senate is by simply allowing his conservative colleagues to reveal their own cruelty. “When they show up for actual town meetings, which is not very often, they can’t help themselves. They’re condescending, and they say things that are incredibly out of touch,” explains the former Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair, who has been working with grassroots groups since February to pressure Republican representatives and senators to hold town hall meetings.

Pocan’s not trying to trap Republicans in unfair circumstances. He just wants them to be themselves. Why? Because, Pocan contends, when voters witness the overt callousness and cynicism of congressional Republicans, they will start to question whether their GOP representatives and senators are on their side. And if the offending Republican members of Congress cling to their cruelty, with arrogant excuses for wrongheaded statements, that will finally open up the debate that the United States should be having about a GOP strategy to shred the safety net in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires. Could such a debate influence the direction of the 2026 midterm elections? Could it end up defeating enough toxic Republicans to flip control of the US House? And potentially the Senate? “Sure,” he says. “If they keep defending things like Medicaid cuts, they’re going to beat themselves.”

A test case for that theory emerged last week. Prominent Republicans, recognizing the threat that their own words and deeds pose to their reelection prospects, have tended to avoid traditional town meetings. For the most part, they’d prefer not to face engaged voters who can, and often do, ask tough questions. But Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst decided to take a calculated risk on holding a session in north-central Iowa’s overwhelmingly Republican Butler County. As it happened, Ernst’s wildly inappropriate remarks from the session went viral—in Iowa immediately, and then nationally. The GOP senator’s casual dismissal of sincere concerns about Medicaid cuts caused jaws to drop. Unsatisfied merely to lie to voters by mouthing poll-tested GOP talking points—“we don’t need to see illegal immigrants receiving benefits,” “we are going to focus on those that are most vulnerable”—Ernst mocked her constituents for griping about the loss of lifesaving care by telling them they were all “going to die” anyway.

Ernst’s remarks drew instant rebukes from Democrats and headlines in Iowa media. Suddenly, the Republican aversion to town meetings seemed to make a lot more sense. Still, there was a prospect that the senator could clean up the mess she’d made with a sincere–or, at the least, seemingly sincere–expression of regret for ill-chosen words.

Ernst delivered something else altogether.

The senator added insult to injury by filming an “apology” video in what looked to be a cemetery and suggesting that Iowans who fretted about well-documented GOP threats to the social-safety net were simpletons who still await visits from the tooth fairy.

Current Issue

June 2025 Issue

What happened in Butler County didn’t stay in Butler County. It became the talk of Iowa, a state where local and national Republicans had expected Ernst to coast to reelection in 2026. And it caught the attention of Democrats well beyond Iowa, who recognized that the list of state with competitive Senate races might just have expanded.

Here was a top Republican revealing the reality that, in their headlong rush to cut taxes for the billionaires who fund their campaigns, Trump’s congressional allies couldn’t care less about who gets hurt. “Republicans have now said the quiet part out loud,” observed House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). “The extremists are taking your healthcare away. And they don’t care if people die.” On the ground in Iowa, state Senator Zach Wahls mused, “Yes Joni, we are all going to die, but it shouldn’t be our SENATORS who are killing us.”

The most devastating response came from Ernst’s colleague Senator Tina Smith, of the neighboring state of Minnesota. Smith posted a video of the Iowan’s tone-deaf statement and wrote, “I thought my job as Senator was to try to keep my constituents alive.”

This essential premise—that senators should be enthusiastically on the side of the people they are elected to represent—is hardwired into the American political sensibility. It runs deep, especially when it comes to the preservation of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. So deep that it has the potential to create real political trouble for politicians who, like Ernst, display open disdain for the well-founded fears of home-state voters.

That doesn’t guarantee that Ernst, a favorite of corporate political action committees and wealthy conservative donors, who is running in a state where Republicans have been on a winning streak in recent years, will lose in 2026. But it does mean that she’s more vulnerable now than she was a few weeks ago.

After last week’s meltdown, Nathan Sage, an Iraq War veteran and popular Iowa sportscaster who was the first Democrat to challenge the incumbent, announced, “Senator Joni Ernst has stepped in it—and we can beat her.” Over the weekend, Sage was being invited to appear on national cable television programs to shred the incumbent. By Monday, a second Democrat, state Representative J.D. Scholten, had entered the race against Ernst. “After her comments over the weekend…I just said: This is unacceptable and you’ve gotta jump in,” Scholten, a former congressional candidate with high name recognition in western Iowa, told the Sioux City Journal. “I don’t think there’s anything worse that you could do than cut Medicaid, cut SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits for everyday Iowans just so you can give billionaires bigger tax breaks. That is not Iowa in my mind.”

Building on the theme, Scholten is arguing that, in fact, “We don’t all have to die so billionaires can have an extra tax break.”

Suddenly, national Democrats were speculating that Ernst, one of the most lamentable Republican political careerists in Washington, might have given them a fresh route—through a heartland state that twice voted for Donald Trump but that used to send populist Tom Harkin to Washington—for building a Senate Democratic majority in the 2026 election cycle.

The Iowa Democratic Party simply posted images of the front page of Iowa’s most widely circulated newspaper from the morning after Ernst’s Friday fiasco.

That made political sense, because the Des Moines Register headline was more politically devastating than any Democratic meme.

How so? If you’re running for reelection to the Senate, there are good headlines and there are bad headlines. And then there are those rare nightmare headlines that invite your constituents to ask: How soon can we replace this miscreant?

Ernst inspired a nightmare headline; Saturday’s front page of Register featured a sprawling photo of the senator with a block-letter recounting of her glib response to a constituent’s expression of concern that “people will die” because of the GOP’s assault on Medicaid. “Well,” read the headlined Ernst quote, “we all are going to die.”

At a critical juncture in the national political debate, Ernst made herself Exhibit A for the Democratic argument that soulless Republicans intend to trigger more than $500 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare in order to fund tax cuts for the billionaire class—no matter the consequences for working Americans.

Then Ernst doubled down on the offense by posting the eerie apologia, in which she sneeringly suggested, “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this earth. So, I apologize. And I am really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.” Ernst’s sarcasm was part of a pattern of embarrassing statements and actions that began with a bumbled town meeting appearance and spiraled out of control. In combination, argued rival Nathan Sage, they gave a signal to the voters who will determine Ernst’s political future that “she doesn’t give a shit about Iowans.”