Jim Carlin is running for the Senate again. The Sergeant Bluff Republican ran against Sen. Chuck Grassley three years ago. Grassley defeated Carlin in the 2022 Republican primary, winning 73 percent of the vote and carrying all 99 of Iowa’s counties. This time, Carlin is challenging Sen. Joni Ernst.
“Joni Ernst said she would go to D.C. and make them squeal,” Carlin said in a news release announcing his candidacy on Friday morning. “After a decade, it’s clear it was a clever campaign commercial, not conviction. Rather than making them squeal, Joni has joined The Swamp.”
Carlin is a Massachusetts native who moved to Iowa in the ’80s, after serving two years in the Army. He is an attorney, with a practice focused on medical malpractice and personal injury lawsuits. After losing to Grassley in 2022, Carlin founded the Iowa Liberty Network “to help recruit true constitutional, conservative candidates to the Iowa Legislature,” according to his news release.
Carlin served one year in the Iowa House and five years in the Iowa Senate representing parts of Woodbury County, before deciding not to run for reelection in 2022 to challenge Grassley instead. He was one of the more far-right members of the Republican caucus during his time in the legislature.
In 2021, he introduced a bill to create a school voucher program to divert money from public schools to private schools, but it stalled. At the time, such a policy was considered to be an extreme break with Iowa’s tradition of supporting public education. It would be another two years before Gov. Kim Reynolds was able to push her version of a voucher bill through the legislature.
In 2022, Carlin sponsored a bill restricting which bathrooms trangender Iowans can use in a school building. Even though that was the same year the legislature banned transgender girls and women from participating in school and college sports on teams matching their identities, most lawmakers still considered a “bathroom bill” too extreme. It never got a committee hearing. But just as with the voucher bill, something previously considered too extreme was now acceptable to the Republican majorities in the statehouse in 2023. Gov. Reynolds signed a bathroom bill into law in March 2023.
Other causes Carlin took up during his time in the state Senate — such as reintroducing the death penalty (which Iowa abolished in 1965) or requiring the Board of Regents to report the political party affiliation of everyone employed at Iowa’s three public universities — still lack legislative momentum.
Carlin’s campaign site promises he will be a Trump ally, which is not surprising given that Carlin has always been a hardcore Trump supporter and has promoted the baseless conspiracy theory that the outcome of the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate and Trump actually won.
“This whole thing was planned and orchestrated for months before it ever took place. We have to deal with that reality,” Carlin said at the Stand With President Trump rally in Orange City, shortly after the 2020 election. “We’re dealing with dishonest people who want to control and manipulate, define and shame us into silence and submission at the cost of our constitutional freedom and self-determination.”
“Jim Carlin stood with Trump before it was easy,” his campaign site says. “He will support President Trump’s America First agenda every step of the way.”
“Joni Ernst? She took selfies with every candidate in the caucus cycle—except Donald J. Trump. That says it all.” [Bold type in the original.]
Elsewhere on his campaign site, Carlin criticizes Ernst for voting for military aid to Ukraine to help it defend itself against Russia’s invasion. “Jim Carlin will vote to defend America—not Ukraine, not NATO, not the United Nations,” the site proclaims.
Interestingly, Carlin doesn’t mention Ernst’s dismissive reply of “Well, we all are going to die” at her Butler County town hall last week, in response to a person shouting out concerns about cuts to Medicaid causing preventable deaths. Nor does he mention Ernst’s subsequent video mocking anyone offended by that reply and suggesting they worship Jesus in order “to see eternal and everlasting life.”
There are no references to Medicaid in Carlin’s news release or on his campaign site.
Ernst has not yet formally announced that she is running for reelection, but this week she did announce the hiring of a campaign manager.
“I’m thrilled to have Bryan Kraber leading my re-election campaign,” Ernst said in a written statement on Wednesday.
This will be Ernst’s third run for the Senate, and as Carlin pointed out in his announcement, during her first run for Senate in 2014, Ernst pledged she would only serve two terms.
“I have also publicly stated that,” Ernst said when asked if she would limit herself to two terms in the Senate during a televised forum for candidates in the Republican primary.
Ernst, then a state senator, went on to say she wanted to amend the Constitution to prevent U.S. senators from serving more than two terms.
Two Democrats, Nathan Sage and J.D. Scholten, have already launched campaigns for Senate. There is also another declared Republican candidate, Joshua Smith of Indianola.
“During the last election cycle, Smith ran for president as a Libertarian candidate but failed to get the national party’s nomination,” the Des Moines Register reported in late April. “He next ran as a Libertarian candidate in 2024 in Iowa Senate District 16 against incumbent Sen. Claire Celsi, D-West Des Moines, and secured 30%of the vote to Celsi’s 70%.”
According to the Register, Smith “says he has since been reenergized by the MAGA movement” and changed his party registration to Republican.
