Democrat Abby Finkenauer, a former one-term congresswoman, is running for a U.S. Senate seat.
And she is hoping her blue-collar credentials will propel her forward in a state that has grown more conservative over the years — and help her oust longtime Republican Party leader Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-I.A.
The 32-year-old former state lawmaker, who announced her candidacy by video Thursday morning, would offer a stark contrast to the 87-year-old Grassley, who was elected to his first term in the Senate eight years before Finkenauer was born.
“I’m running … to make sure that Iowans and, quite frankly, our country has someone sitting in the United States Senate representing them and working for them every day who actually understand working families,” Finkenauer told The Associated Press in an interview before the video release.
Finkenauer, despite losing her House seat in 2020 after one term, remains a youthful prospect in the Iowa Democratic Party, which has struggled to produce a new generation for statewide office.
Along with 38-year-old Democrat Dave Muhlbauer, a farmer who previously announced his bid for Grassley’s seat, she is hoping Grassley’s slipping poll numbers provide an opening to revive a shrinking segment of the party’s once diverse electorate: rural voters.
Grassley has said he will announce by November whether he will seek an eighth term, though he talks regularly with campaign aides and reported this month having $2.5 million in his campaign account as of the end of June.
Despite job approval that’s ebbed in the past decade, Grassley would be the favorite to win reelection and faces a nominal primary opponent in state Sen. Jim Carlin. State and local Democratic officials have said the party has receded in the onetime battleground state, particularly from the industrial river towns they once claimed as bastions, notably in Finkenauer’s former northeast Iowa district.
Republican Donald Trump easily won the state in 2016 and in 2020.
Finkenauer accuses Grassley of showing too much fealty to Trump, citing his near-silence on the former president’s controversial claims of widespread election fraud before the Jan. 6 Capitol Building riot.
Grassley condemned the January Capitol riot as “an attack on democracy itself” but hasn’t publicly rejected Trump’s claims. When pressed at a recent public meeting in Iowa to call out denounce Trump’s controversial statements, Grassley declined, stating simply, “Biden is the president of the United States.”
Finkenauer won in 2018 when Democrats reclaimed the House majority, stressing her union household upbringing. She defeated two-term Dubuque Republican Rep. Rod Blum.
That profile was little help in 2020 as working-class voters who once fueled Iowa Democratic Party strength along the Mississippi River leaned toward Trump and lifted Republican Ashley Hinson over Finkenauer.
The Associated Press contributed to this article