Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

There’s not supposed to be any crying in politics.

Only sometimes there is. My own tears, even.

Iowa Democratic Congressional candidate Lanon Baccam, born in Mount Pleasant and raised by his immigrant parents, spent part of a summer speech talking about the Iowa of our youth when this state soared. Immigrants and blended families were embraced. Vision and kindness and big-heartedness prevailed in the state under Governor Robert Ray as we absorbed abandoned kids and refugees fleeing violence.

At one point Baccam motioned to me in the audience.

“I’m looking at Doug Burns right now, because his family looks like my family,” Baccam said during a speech to the Iowa Farmers Union in Elkhart, rural Polk County.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Council Bluffs Mayor Matt Walsh, a Republican, joined others in his party and independents to support Democratic State Representative Josh Turek, a gold medal-winning Paralympian in wheelchair basketball, at a September 26 event in this southwest Iowa city. Former U.S. Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa icon, headlined the fundraiser for Turek, who captured his state House district by just six votes in 2022 and faces a challenging re-election bid in the November election.

Walsh said he crossed party lines for the event—and a public endorsement of a Democrat—for one reason: Turek is a respected and effective voice at the statehouse.

“While I am a registered Republican, I strongly believe the best candidate should win,” Walsh said in an interview at the Hoff Family Arts and Cultural Center. “Without a doubt in my mind that’s Josh Turek. He cares about Iowa, he cares about people with disabilities, and he cares about Council Bluffs. You can talk to Josh. Josh listens. Josh understands. Josh is responsive. He’s everything you look for in a candidate. Josh is that guy.”

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Tom and Ruth Harkin leaned forward in their Fleur Cinema seats in Des Moines in the early evening of July 17 as a film chronicling the civil rights journey of people with disabilities rolled across the screen.

They knew the activists, people with a range of physical disabilities, some here, some departed for decades. And the Harkins sat next to Democratic State Reprepresentative Josh Turek of Council Bluffs, Iowa’s first visibly and permanently disabled legislator that night in the theater. The old political warriors encouraging the new.

The Harkins, Tom, a defining Iowa voice in the U.S. Senate and House for 40 years before retiring a decade ago, and Ruth, a pioneering force for international development and the ascendency of women, have made advocacy for those with physical and intellectual disabilities a feature of their shared public service.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

A modern political Mason-Dixon line appears to be taking form north of Mason City and south of Albert Lea—somewhere around the Minnesota-Iowa border.

The clash of cultures is no accident. And now, the increasing divide will be exposed (and expanded, mostly likely) under a national spotlight in which Iowa and Minnesota are prime exhibits in what the still-living, but politically-late John Edwards would have called the “Two Americas” conversation.

Few leaders within an afternoon’s drive from each other have such starkly opposing views and agendas on American life and government than Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. If Iowa and Minnesota were the only states in the union, one would surely secede.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Two-term U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, a Red Oak Republican and the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate, said on May 29 that she will seek a third term in 2026.

In an interview in Carroll with Iowa Mercury and the Carroll Times Herald following an economic-development event, Ernst, 53, left the door open to a possible cabinet position in a second Trump administration if the former president prevails in November. Trump vetted Ernst in the 2016 cycle as a possible vice presidential running mate.

Asked directly if she planned to seek re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2026, and to rate her likelihood on a scale of 1 to 10 for a third-term bid (with 10 being most likely) Ernst said, “That is my intent. So I would say, yes, 10 very likely. I love representing the people of Iowa, and it really has been a very fulfilling position for me to be able to fight for rural America. Of course, important to me as well are our veterans and Armed Services.”

Ernst said she would wait until after the 2024 election cycle to get a “little closer” to 2026 before announcing.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Harold Beach, a northeast Missouri farmer who runs a row-crop operation and raises hogs and cattle, traveled to central Iowa on April 20 to urge one of the nation’s top regulators to stop a multi-billion-dollar takeover of a Lee County fertilizer plant he and other rural advocates say will further erode competition in agriculture and increase costs for one of modern farming’s essential inputs, nitrogen.

“I would like you to be fearless and courageous and be a Teddy Roosevelt,” Beach told Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

State Representative Josh Turek talks with 6-year-old Hayes Hofmeister in Des Moines during a recent summit on advocacy for people with disabilities. Photo by Douglas Burns.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Six-year-old Hayes Hofmeister of rural Cedar Rapids, a Springville, Iowa farm kid, can’t stop talking about Josh Turek — “that guy in the wheelchair” — the one who plays basketball and has Paralympics gold medals. The one who inspired him at Camp Sunnyside.

Born with Spina Bifida, Hayes, a bright-eyed kindergartner excitedly rolled his own wheelchair toward State Representative Josh Turek of Council Bluffs at the Easterseals Camp in Des Moines on a recent fall Saturday morning. They started talking, one on one, as Hayes’ mom and grandmother beamed.

This column first appeared in the Carroll Times Herald, where Douglas Burns is the vice president for news.

In the 1960 movie “Inherit the Wind,” a signature piece of filmmaking that dramatizes the Scopes Monkey Trial, Spencer Tracy’s character, the attorney defending the teaching of evolution in schools, in very animated fashion delivers one of the best lines in cinematic history.

“Why did God plague us with the capacity to think?” says Tracy’s Henry Drummond. “Why do you deny the one thing that sets man above the other animals? What other merit have we? The elephant is larger, the horse stronger and swifter, the butterfly more beautiful, the mosquito more prolific, even the sponge is more durable.”

Drummond is the fictional character based on legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow who squared off with populist/evangelist William Jennings Bryan in arguably the most significant debate in American history: the Scopes trial in 1925.

“Inherit The Wind” is one of Carroll educator James Knott’s favorite movies.