UPDATE: Jay Brown announced in late December 2023 that he was withdrawing from the race and endorsing Melton. Original post follows.

A two-way Democratic primary is shaping up in Iowa’s fourth Congressional district. Ryan Melton, the 2022 Democratic challenger to U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra, announced on July 4 that he plans to seek the office again. And last week, first-time candidate Dr. Jay Brown launched his campaign.

Disclosure: Brown grew up in the house next door to mine in Windsor Heights, and our families have been close friends for decades. Bleeding Heartland will not endorse in this race. As with any competitive Democratic primary, I will welcome guest commentaries by the candidates or by any of their supporters.

IOWA’S REDDEST U.S. HOUSE DISTRICT

IA-04 covers traditionally Republican territory across northwest Iowa, and following redistricting, extends south to include all the counties near the Missouri River. The only solidly Democratic county among the 36 counties in the district is Story (including Ames).

According to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, this district is R+16, meaning that it votes about 16 points more Republican than the U.S. as a whole. (Iowa’s other three U.S. House districts lean Republican, but have PVIs of R+3 or R+4.) The Daily Kos Elections team calculated that in the 2020 presidential election, voters in IA-04 preferred Donald Trump to Joe Biden by a margin of 62.2 percent to 36.2 percent.

Voter registration totals have always favored Republicans in this part of the state, and the GOP advantage has grown in recent years. As of January 2022, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the IA-04 counties by nearly 85,000. The latest official figures from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office indicate this district contains 129,035 registered Democrats, 227,317 Republicans, and 174,328 no-party voters.

National election forecasters rate this race “safe Republican.” As of June 30, Feenstra’s campaign had more than $1.5 million cash on hand.

“I’M PROUD OF WHAT WE ACCOMPLISHED IN OUR LAST CAMPAIGN”

Feenstra defeated Melton in the 2022 general election by 186,487 votes to 84,230 (67.3 percent to 30.4 percent), with about 2.2 percent of voters choosing Liberty Caucus candidate Bryan Jack Holder. The incumbent raised more than $2.8 million and spent about $1.85 million on that race, whereas Melton spent just under $50,000.

Melton acknowledged during last year’s race that he decided to run for Congress largely because no other Democrat stepped up. During a September 2022 appearance on the Iowa PBS program “Iowa Press,” Melton said running for office was “never been part of my life plan,” given that he has “a strenuous full-time job” at a Fortune 100 company as well as a wife and two kids. He became a candidate because “I thought it was absolutely untenable that there wouldn’t be a Democrat on the ballot” in his district.

Melton explained in a July 4 Facebook post announcing his new campaign,

I was compelled to run last time because Democracy was on the line, and it needed more defenders. I’m running a second time because our democracy is under even more threat. The representative of anti-democracy, Donald Trump, is again at the head of the pack for the Republican nomination, and Congressional Republicans have doubled down on their support for him. My opponent, Randy Feenstra, is still on Team Trump, as he has remained silent regarding Trump’s being found liable for sexual assault in a court of law, hasn’t commented on his indictments for the misuse of classified documents, and hasn’t rejected Trump’s endorsement.

When democracy is under attack, so too are our people. The wealth gap continues to grow, public education is under attack, our environment continues to degrade, corporate power continues to grow at the expense of the rest of us, minorities and women continue to lose rights, and the LGBTQ+ community has continued to face an increase in threats and attacks and a decrease in legal protections. My opponent has helped to exacerbate these issues and celebrates that fact.

I look forward to fighting the good fight on your behalf.

Melton told Bleeding Heartland, “I’m proud of what we accomplished in our last campaign.” He gained about 1,000 more votes district-wide than Deidre DeJear, the Democratic nominee for governor, and only about 10,000 fewer votes than Mike Franken, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate whose campaign spent millions. By his calculation, he received more votes than about 70 percent of the U.S. House major-party nominees who spent less than $75,000 on their campaigns.

Feenstra refused to debate his opponent (which is why Melton appeared solo on “Iowa Press”), but the Democrat argues that Feenstra altered some of his stances in response to his campaign. For instance, Melton has long been a vocal opponent of the proposed CO2 pipelines, and especially of using eminent domain to seize land to build those projects. He noted that before he announced his 2022 campaign, Feenstra had written an op-ed supporting such pipelines (which are backed by the biofuels industry). But the incumbent was quiet on the issue later in the campaign.

Melton also cited a law known as the PACT Act, which sought to address veterans’ exposure to toxic chemicals from burn pits or other hazards when serving in the military. Feenstra voted against that bill the first time it came before the House, for which Melton and his supporters harshly criticized him. He voted to approve the bill when it returned to the chamber due to a procedural snag.

Melton told Bleeding Heartland, “We accomplished all of this despite getting into the race much later than everyone else once it was clear a Democrat wasn’t going to be on the ballot, and despite my entering the race with no name recognition, pedigree, connections, or money.”

Since launching his campaign, Melton has traveled widely across the district, speaking at some political events like county meetings and the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding in Clear Lake. He has also attended non-political events such as county fairs, an Iowa Farmers Union summer gathering, and last week’s Iowa Utilities Board’s hearing on Summit Carbon Solutions’ CO2 pipeline permit application, where he live-tweeted the proceedings.

Melton’s website describes his campaign focus as “putting people first”:

I will fight to provide for the needs of the people in the 4th district in a sustainable way, so they can live fulfilling lives, unburdened by stresses that we have the power to reduce or eliminate. To accomplish this, we’ll focus on providing for the holistic wellbeing of each person from birth through every stage of life – in their homes, at school, at work, in public places, and in the civic arena. To fund these efforts, I’ll advocate for such things as reasonable tax policy reform, such as the addressing of tax loopholes and deferrals, which have allowed the wealthiest Americans to accrue wealth at rates much faster than the rest of us, while paying a disproportionately low tax rate when compared against their wealth per year than the rest of us. My efforts will also help to spur job growth by removing obstacles blocking our people from employment opportunities, career growth, and financial independence.

To keep up with Melton’s campaign: Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), website

“WE HAVE BIG PROBLEMS, AND AS A DOCTOR, I FEEL THEY HAVE BEEN MISDIAGNOSED”

Brown has undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Iowa and has been an allergist in Ames and surrounding areas through the McFarland Clinic since 1994. He founded and served as medical director for the Ames Free Medical Clinic, which he estimates provided around 27,000 patient visits from 1998 to 2013. (A federally funded clinic for the underserved took its place.)

Brown filed Federal Election Commission paperwork last week and held a kickoff event in Ames on August 26. In campaign literature provided to Bleeding Heartland, Brown said, “We have big problems, and as a doctor, I feel they have been misdiagnosed.” In particular, “Money and power have been concentrated in the hands of a few. Three people in this country have the combined wealth of 165,000,000 Americans. I don’t care what your party is; that can’t be ok.”

Brown considers himself a “fan of capitalism,” but feels “capitalism is not operating efficiently right now” in the U.S. He noted,

The main inhaler my asthmatic patients are using costs $436 at HyVee and the Canadian pharmacies sell them for $24. I’ve had to rewrite that line a few times. A few weeks ago, it was $385, last week, $392 and now $436. Our capitalistic system is broken in a way that would horrify Adam Smith. There is not the competition there needs to be.

Speaking to the Des Moines Register’s Stephen Gruber-Miller, Brown suggested that the political discourse is misdirected.

“I feel as though we are not talking about the issues we need to talk about,” he said. “And specifically we’re talking about these hot-button social issues, bathrooms and the like, when we really ought to be talking about improving the upward mobility of our population.”

In a campaign pamphlet, Brown mentioned that he has interacted with thousands of Iowans as a doctor and regularly plays poker with all kinds of people. He criticized the divisiveness in our society: “In addition to both parties demeaning our people, calling us libtards and deplorables, we have a media industry centered on disseminating fear and loathing. While all of our leaders should be scrutinized, let’s not lose sight of the fact that we are all a decent people, and the problems may lie with our leadership, but not with us as individuals.”

Brown knows the district favors Republicans and frames many issues in terms of freedom. “I want Iowans to make their own choices in life. Be it their medical decisions or how their land gets used, personal freedoms are central to good governance.”

He plans to engage with voters who disagree with him.

I want to hear their perspectives and share mine. I have great conversations with people labeled as “deplorables” who I know are nothing of the sort. We can and should disagree about strategies for making this a better state and country, but hating on each other is not the way. I share many core values with my conservative friends: a love of this country, the importance of hard work, a passion for fairness, honesty, frugality, and transparency. Problems need to be solved with scientific methods coupled with compassion and an appreciation that we are all in this together, rich, poor and everyone in between. I believe I can present this perspective and perhaps reverse some of the zeal people have developed for a particular orange monster. The folks in the Fox News bubble haven’t heard the whole story.

Curbing the control of our government by the organized money that has controlled our government has a single remedy: elect people that will not tolerate putting special interests ahead of the average citizen.

I am financially conservative and hate waste. I am more than tolerant of others; I love meeting folks nothing like me, and that tolerance of each other is good for business in addition to being good for our souls. Evil doers want us talking about who should be allowed to use a bathroom or play a sport. These are not the issues that will determine our future. I want to talk about a tax code that favors the working folks and investments in ourselves that favor the long term future of the greatest country in the history of the world.

Other issues that will be priorities for Brown include reproductive rights (he “believes passionately in a woman’s right to choose what’s best for her body and her future”), clean air and water, mental health parity, health care access for all, and investing in education. He opposes all efforts to ban books or limit access to information.

Brown doesn’t have a campaign website or Facebook page online at this writing, but I will update this post as needed.

Top image: Ryan Melton (left), in screenshot from his September 2022 appearance on the Iowa PBS program “Iowa Press.” Jay Brown (right), in cropped photo provided by the candidate.