“Here’s my pitch,” J.D. Scholten said in a video posted online Monday, in which he announced he’s running for U.S. Senate. “I’m a baseball-playing, monopoly-busting, beer-drinking, Bible-reading, working-class proud prairie populist, who is sixth-generation Iowan from right here in Sioux City. And I fundamentally believe that we deserve more than a GoFundMe broken healthcare system, a JBS food system and a Dollar General economy.”
As one of Iowa’s few high-profile Democrats, Scholten has long been expected to run for office next year, either for the Senate seat currently held by Joni Ernst or for governor. In an interview with the Des Moines Register, Scholten explained that he had been planning to announce his Senate run later this year, but decided to do it Monday after hearing Ernst’s dismissive, “Well, we all are going to die” response to concerns about Medicaid cuts during a Butler County town hall on Friday.
Scholten told the Register he first heard Ernst’s remarks while he was headed to a funeral.
“And just sitting there, contemplating life like you do at a funeral, I just thought I need to do this,” he said. “And so then when she doubled down on Saturday with her, I felt, very disrespectful comments, I was like, ‘OK, game on.'”
Scholten is in his second term representing Sioux City in the Iowa House, but it was his first run for elective office in 2018 that gained him a national political profile. That year, Scholten was the Democratic challenger facing incumbent Rep. Steve King in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District. At the time, national Republicans were trying to distance themselves from King, whose connections to far-right groups in Europe and use of white nationalist rhetoric were considered too much even by the loose standards of the first Trump administration. King, however, still had the solid backing of Gov. Reynolds, Sens. Grassley and Ernst, and the Iowa Republican Party. Scholten came within 3 percentage points of beating King.
Scholten ran in the 4th District again in 2020, but this time he faced Randy Feenstra, a member of the Iowa Senate, who state Republicans coalesced behind after suddenly dumping King. Feenstra beat Scholten by 22 percentage points.
In 2022, Scholten ran for the open Iowa House seat in District 1, which encompasses Sioux City. He was unopposed in both the primary and the general election. In 2024, he was reelected with 53 percent of the vote, defeating Republican Josh Steinhoff.
“I’m the only Democrat serving in the state legislature from a Republican stronghold across 42 counties in northwest and north-central Iowa,” Scholten said in his video.
J.D. Scholten was born in Ames, and his family moved to Sioux City when he was 4. After graduating from Sioux City Eastern High School, he attended Morningside College, where he played pitcher on the school’s baseball team. After two years, he transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he continued his academic and pitching careers.
After graduating in 2003, Scholten first played professionally for the Saskatoon Legend of the Canadian Baseball League. After the league folded, he returned to his hometown to pitch for the Sioux City Explorers, an American Association of Independent Professional Baseball team. He later played for a variety of independent teams, both in the U.S. and other countries.
After his years in baseball, Scholten became a paralegal. In addition to his work in politics, Scholten started Working Hero Iowa, a nonprofit aimed at increasing awareness of the earned income tax credit and how it can help working families.
During his first term in the Iowa House, Scholten’s baseball career was suddenly revived when he was signed by the Twins Oosterhout, a Dutch professional baseball team in need of a pitcher to complete their season. A year later, in July 2024, Scholten received an emergency phone call from the manager of the Sioux City Explorers, whose starting pitcher was injured and who didn’t have anyone on the roster to replace him. Scholten pitched six innings as the Explorers defeated the Milwaukee Milkmen, 11-2. Scholten, now 45 years old, is still with the team.
Scholten told the Register that continuing to play baseball as he campaigns for the Senate, calling it “a way of being able to get out there and talk to voters of all different backgrounds and get my foot in a lot of doors.”
Scholten worked hard to connect with independents and Republicans during his two runs for Congress. He crisscrossed the 4th District in an RV called “Sioux City Sue,” stopping in small towns to talk with voters. Scholten says he plans to get another RV, and take Sioux City Sue 2.0 around the state.
Although he will be reaching out to Republicans and independents — something necessary for a Democrat in Iowa, where the party lags behind both those groups in the number of registered voters — Scholten stakes his claim as a progressive Democrat in his video, quoting two men he calls his heroes.
The first is Berkley Bedell, who represented Iowa’s 6th District in Congress from 1975 until his retirement in 1987. (The 6th used to cover part of western Iowa, including Sioux City, until it was eliminated in the redistricting after the 1990 census due to Iowa’s population decline. Iowa’s 5th Congressional District was eliminated after the 2010 census.)
“Does the 1 percent now own your government? Does the 99 percent have a chance?” were questions Bedell always asked, Scholten said.
He also quoted early 20th century progressive reformer and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “We can have a democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.”
Scholten is the second Democrat to enter the 2026 Senate race. Nathan Sage, an Army and Marine Corps veteran and the executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, launched his campaign in April.
Sen. Ernst has not officially said if she is running for reelection next year, but it is widely expected that she will. Currently, the two-term senator is receiving national attention, not just for her callous dismissal of concerns about the impact of Medicaid cuts in Iowa, but also for Instagram videos posted the day after those remarks, in which she mocked the people she offended as naive children who believe in the Tooth Fairy, suggesting they “embrace” Jesus to enjoy eternal life.
On Monday, a reporter approached Ernst in a U.S. Capitol hallway and asked her if she wanted to “clarify” her town hall comments. As she hurried away from the reporter to an elevator — for the use of senators and their staff only, which reporters are prohibited from entering — Ernst said, “I’m very compassionate. And you need to listen to the entire conversation.”
Video of the entire town hall is available online. In it, Ernst defends the Medicaid cuts in the GOP budget bill passed by the House two weeks ago as reforms that remove Medicaid from people who don’t deserve it. Iowa is estimated to lose more than $518 million in federal funds for Medicaid as a result of the bill, causing roughly 112,000 Iowans to lose healthcare coverage over the next decade.
“We want to protect the most vulnerable,” Ernst remembered to add as the elevator doors closed.
“Ultimately, this race is not about Joni Ernst and it’s not about me,” Scholten said in his announcement video. “It’s about the people in Iowa, who deserve better. Better representatives who fight against the billionaire elites and special interests who hurt us.”
