“At the end of the day, we’re all pissed off and we’re tired of what’s going on and we need a change,” Nathan Sage told the packed room at Big Grove Brewery and Taproom in Iowa City on Monday night.
A steady drizzle of rain that grew into a booming thunderstorm didn’t discourage people from turning out to listen to the first Democrat to announce a run for the Senate seat currently held by Joni Ernst. It was Sage’s first campaign stop in Iowa City since launching his campaign on April 16.
“We’re tired of doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result,” Sage told the crowd. He was referring to the politics of both the Democratic and Republican parties, and the leadership of elected officials from both parties.
“It seems like we get the same candidates every single time that come to our locations, tell us exactly what we want to hear and then nothing changes,” he said.
This is Sage’s first run for office, and the first time he’s been involved in a political campaign.
“From 2003 to 2013, I was in the military,” Sage said, speaking to Little Village after the event was over. Those years included three tours of duty in Iraq. After that, Sage attended college in Kansas, working nights to support his family. When he graduated from Kansas State University, Sage moved back to Iowa and worked for radio stations in Indianola and Knox, first as a news director and later in sales and marketing.
“As a news director you want to stay neutral,” he said, and the same was true when he was in sales.
For the past two years, Sage has been the executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce. In the announcement video he released when he launched his campaign on April 16, Sage called Knoxville “one of the many places that’s being abandoned, hurt by corporations, billionaires and the politicians they own.”
One of those politicians is “scandal-ridden, corporate-funded Joni Ernst,” as Sage called the two-term Republican incumbent in the video.
“The economy is rigged, and those in power don’t give a damn,” he continued. “They’re the ones doing it.”
While most politicians strike an upbeat tone in videos at the launch of their campaigns, Sage’s had a confrontational, economic populist tone. “Small businesses, family farmers and the working class are being ground into the dirt while profits soar for a tiny handful of enormous corporations. We are entering a new Gilded Age — and it’s time to fight back.”
In his speech at Big Grove on Monday, Sage said the problem is the lack of lawmakers with working class backgrounds who understand the struggles others have and are willing to address them.
“We don’t have proper representation in Washington D.C., we don’t have people fighting for what we believe in, and what we want to happen in our state and our country,” Sage said.
He started his speech talking about growing up in a trailer park in Mason City.
“My dad was a factory worker, he worked in a place called Minnesota Rubber,” he recalled. “My mom was a daycare teacher, she worked at a place called Charlie Brown Daycare in Mason City. I didn’t see my dad a lot, because my dad worked double shifts. He worked from 7 o’clock in the morning to 11 most nights.”
Sage said that as a child he understood “we didn’t have it good — I wore hand-me-down clothes, we shopped at thrift stores, trying to do what we could to survive.” As he got older, his future was uncertain to him, until he saw a path forward in the military. After graduating from high school, Sage joined the Marine Corps.
Sage served as a mechanic, and did two tours of duty in Iraq as a Marine. Leaving the corps, he returned to Mason City, where he worked as a civilian mechanic. Dissatisfied, he looked into reenlisting and was told the Marines weren’t interested in prior enlistees. But the Army was, so he joined and was sent to Iraq for another tour of duty.
After the Army, Sage attended college on the G.I. Bill, and decided to follow his sports interest into a career in sports journalism, which led to radio work in Iowa. Talking to Little Village, Sage said it was when he moved to the sales side that he began to see just how badly small businesses were struggling.
“I literally would work after hours to help [small business owners] keep their doors open,” he said.
That extra work led to Sage being offered the executive director position at the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce.
While Sage was at Big Grove Monday night, Sen. Joni Ernst was participating in a telephone town hall hosted by her Republican colleague Rep. Ashley Hinson. During the town hall, Ernst received questions about her support for Elon Musk and DOGE. Ernst, a vocal supporter of Musk, is a founding member of the Senate DOGE Caucus.
The senator conceded that there’s “a little pain involved” in cuts DOGE has made and “there have been a few hiccups,” but she still supports the Musk-directed work.
“Even Elon Musk will say you can’t bat, you know, a perfect score every time, but if we identify things that maybe haven’t gone as smoothly as possible, we go back and we make sure that those errors are corrected,” Ernst told listeners. “But so far, what Iowans are telling me is they are really grateful that we are taking the time to audit all of these agencies, to ferret out the waste, fraud and abuse.”
“I’m here because Joni Ernst has sold out Iowa, and does everything for Elon Musk and major corporations, not for working-class individuals,” Sage told the crowd at Big Grove.
“I’m here because I want clean water,” he continued. “I want clean air. Iowa is the second-leading state in the country in cancer rates, and both my parents passed away from cancer.”
Sage’s father died at the age of 54, his mother at 67.
“Way too young,” he said. “… We need to make a change, worry about our environment and make changes now.”
On his campaign site, Sage largely focuses on economic issues. That was also the focus of most of his remarks on Monday.
“One area that I truly believe unites people is the kitchen table when you can’t afford groceries,” he said. “The cost of living in our state and our country.”
“Everybody wants a better life, everybody wants better opportunities, everybody is tired of struggling the way we’re struggling in Iowa. We’re all struggling together in the richest country in the world. There’s absolutely no reason that we should be living this way, but we’ve all just been fed this lie that this is how it’s supposed to be.”
That lie is told to benefit “people who make 330 times the average worker,” Sage said.
The candidate talked about the need to raise wages for workers, lower healthcare costs and provide affordable childcare. He also talked about two issues Republicans typically use to bash Democrats: immigration and reproductive rights.
“I am an advocate for secure borders,” he said. “Why? We lock our doors at night, right? We don’t want strangers, people, coming in our house. However, there are a lot of people in our state and in our country that have done a lot of good while they’ve been here, trying to live their best life, just like all of us in the working class. … And now they’re in this funk of just trying to make it to their house without someone picking them off the streets. I think that’s insane.”
Sage said reform was needed to make a pathway to citizenship “more realistic.”
“We need to make an opportunity for the people that are here to get a path to citizenship that makes sense, makes things easier for everybody. Because that’s what we need. We need people continuing doing the jobs they’re doing, continuing paying the taxes that they’re already paying. And contributing to society, contributing to the economy and being a part of our family. Because that’s what they are.”
When he spoke about reproductive rights, Sage started by saying he is “a huge feminist” and is firmly pro-choice. Turning to a personal story, Sage’s voice was choked with emotion.
Sage has two teenage daughters from his first marriage, but last year he and his wife Amanda were expecting their first child together. The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Months later in November, as Sage and his wife were watching the election results and Trump’s victory became clear, she began crying. Sage said he tried to reassure her — they had survived Trump’s first presidency — but she told him he didn’t understand. Trump’s win meant the aggressive policing around pregnancy Republicans support was only going to increase. Choices could become crimes, miscarriages might be considered suspicious.
Despite being pro-choice, Sage said it wasn’t until that moment he really understood the pressure and fear women feel as reproductive rights continue to be stripped away.
“We shouldn’t be living like this,” Sage said.
He said he’s confident he’ll be able to connect with Republicans and independent voters, because Iowans, regardless of voter registration, are facing the same struggles. And talking to Little Village, he mentioned that his work in Knoxville and even his relatives have prepared him for working with people on the other side of the partisan divide.
“In Marion County, we’re a hardcore Republican county, and I work with business owners who are hardcore Trumpers,” Sage said. “My father-in-law is a hardcore Trumper. I learned how to have those conversations.”
But it’s not just Republicans whose minds Sage wants to change. He also wants the Iowa Democratic Party to change.
“I want a Democratic Party that people like me want to be a part of,” he told the crowd at Big Grove. “… Let’s open the door to the people who are on the fringe, and don’t really know what the Democratic Party stands for.”
After the speech was over, Sage sat and talked with the people who came to the event, answering questions and asking them about the issues they are most concerned about. Near the beginning of his speech, Sage explained he considered the meet-and-greet tour he’s on as both a chance to introduce himself and to learn from the people at his events.
“My big thing is that I know that I’m not an expert,” he said. “But I know that I’m here to listen. I know and understand a lot when it comes to the working class and what the struggles are, but I don’t know what everyone else is going through.”
“So, I want to go around the state, and I want to talk to these rooms like this, and have these conversations where we can understand what we’re going through and what needs to be fixed. And what needs to be fixed now, not five years from now, not 10 years from now, but right now.”
