We debriefed on the Gray Media/KCCI Republican gubernatorial debate, which Dave helped moderate. Four of five candidates participated — Zach Lahn, Adam Steen, Brad Sherman, and Eddie Andrews — with Randy Feenstra a no-show despite the debate being scheduled on a Saturday to accommodate him.
Lahn and Steen had the strongest showings. Lahn stayed on message with his four systemic issues, while Steen spent notable time invoking Rob Sand, positioning himself as the candidate ready for a general election fight. The H-1B visa exchange was telling — Dave tried to focus on legal temporary workers that Iowa industries depend on, but most candidates steered toward undocumented immigration instead. Surprisingly, none of the candidates went after each other much, and Feenstra was barely mentioned.
We also covered Governor Reynolds signing the Iowa MAHA bill with RFK Jr. in attendance. The bill has some bipartisan appeal — screen time limits in classrooms, food dye restrictions in school lunches — but also some sharp edges, including a SNAP waiver tied to Iowa’s quirky sales tax food definitions and a provision protecting pharmacists who dispense ivermectin without a prescription.
Fundraising numbers are coming next week, right before the primary. We’ll dedicate pretty much all of next week’s show to a primary primer. Stay tuned!
Auto-generated transcript below:
Dave Price: Hello, everybody. Well, welcome back to the Iowa Down Ballot podcast. I’m Dave Price, joined by Kathie Obradovich and Laura Belin. Hello to you on a Friday as we record this.
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Kathie Obradovich: Hey! Happy holiday weekend!
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Dave Price: Indeed, Memorial Day weekend, indeed. Hey, I’m gonna selfishly start with a topic that I was part of.
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Dave Price: Which is super arrogant, so I’m gonna, most of the time, sort of stop, step aside and let you two dive into this, but, my TV station group with Gray Media partnered with KCCITV in Des Moines, so we had this statewide debate. Four of the five Republican candidates for governor agreed to take part in this, unlike the Iowa Public TV debate.
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Dave Price: Where Zach Lahn protested and said, if Randy Feenster doesn’t come, neither am I. He gave up that protest and decided to take part in this, and, clearly got a lot more attention from doing the debate.
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Dave Price: 90 minutes, we did this, recorded it on a Saturday, and I just wanted to lay out
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Dave Price: why things worked the way they did. It was not because we wanted to record a debate on a Saturday and tape it and air it later, it was to give the best chance to get Congressman Feenstra to say yes, because he had not said yes to any of the other debates.
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Dave Price: in this cycle. So the thinking was, hey, let’s offer on a Saturday, even if he has to be in DC, he can fly back, which he comes home on the weekends anyway, so he could do it. But anyway, that didn’t work. But the other four said yes. So before I blather on about the behind-the-scenes stuff, Kathie, how about you lead off here? What was your takeaway? 90 minutes, what’d you think?
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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, so, first of all, I was glad that you had 4 out of the 5 candidates. I think it was a smarter, much smarter move for Zach Lahn to join, and certainly, Ed, as you said, I think you probably did get a lot more attention out of it. Couple of quick observations.
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Kathie Obradovich: We did hear some differences, among the candidates on a couple of issues, which is always, you know, makes it a little, you know, makes a little news, which is, you know, what debate organizers are always hoping for, right? A little bit of news. You know, they… a little bit of difference in terms of
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Kathie Obradovich: how you treat H-1B visas, so essentially guest workers, to come into the country and fill jobs, you know, especially, jobs where there’s a shortage. So a little bit of difference among the candidates on that issue, and then also, I think, a little difference
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Kathie Obradovich: Among how you go about water quality and, the farm chemicals related to Iowa’s cancer issue. And, so I, so we did hear some differences among those candidates. And the other… one other observation I’ll just mention, before we dive into any detail is, I think that, Adam Steen mentioned Rob Sand more than anybody
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Kathie Obradovich: He certainly mentioned it more than anybody else… him more than anybody else on stage, but also mentioned him more than he mentioned Randy Feenster, which I thought was interesting, that Adam Stein, at least as one candidate, seems to be looking beyond the primary already, to try to make some general election arguments. So I thought those three things stood out.
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Dave Price: Laura, what’d you take away from this?
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Laura Belin: So as a former high school debater, I always look at this as who was most successful in coming in and getting out the messages that they want to get out, and I think Zach Lahn and Adam Steen definitely had the most successful debate.
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Laura Belin: Zach Lahn came in there in his opening statement, talking about the four systemic issues that he always talks about. Kids were top four in the country in terms of kids leaving the state. We’re losing family farms, we used to be number one for education and we’re not, and we have this fast-growing cancer rate. And then he was repeatedly able to bring answers to other questions back to some of these central
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Laura Belin: systemic issues that he talks about. And Adam Stein, what Kathie mentioned, it really struck me how often he mentioned Rob Sand, how he positioned himself as someone who knows Rob Sand because he’s seen him up close, because he’s worked in state government, and he can take on Rob Sand. So I felt like they both came in there and got the messages out. And regarding the water quality, Zach Lahn has been very open, and
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Laura Belin: cancer, he said, you know, these big ag companies have not been honest about their harmful products. And Adam Steen, it seemed to me very deliberate that he, on several occasions, was like, I’m not putting the blame on farmers, you know, farmers are trying to do the right thing. So I thought.
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Laura Belin: angling to get that rural vote. And I felt that Brad Sherman was trying, he mentioned several times that being a pastor and trying to bring God into this equation, but I just feel like that was an attempt to compete with Adam Steen, who has the endorsement of the family leader, and I don’t know that it was really successful.
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Kathie Obradovich: Brad Sherman, by the way, I think was… I could be wrong about this, but I think he was the only one who said that he wanted mandatory, conservation measures by farmers in order to try to control nutrients going into Iowa’s waterways. And I think he was the only candidate who said he, you know, he did… he did actually want
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Kathie Obradovich: some mandatory regulation there. So I thought that was interesting.
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Dave Price: And there was not… clearly, for this 90 minutes, there were not a lot of mandatory calls. Most of the things they talked about, whether it was
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Dave Price: ag-related, water-related, cancer-related, whatever, was… would be voluntary toward this. I thought, Kathie, you mentioned the H-1B visas, and Zach Lahn has a commercial specifically about that.
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Dave Price: I was listening to that, listening to them talk about this, I was thinking almost the disconnect, if you will, between what they were largely saying when it comes to immigration versus what the business community was talking about. And I’m not…
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Dave Price: Before we get some, messages on this.
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Dave Price: I’m not saying the business community, I’m not saying any of these for… nobody’s talking about violent criminals who are living in the country illegally, doing a bunch of bad stuff. We’re not talking about that stuff. And what I specifically asked about, because I was trying to tailor these in a certain direction.
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Dave Price: was I wanted to talk about the legal… those who are here legally with some kind of temporary legal permission to work here, and
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Dave Price: We have a variety of industries in this state that rely on those
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Dave Price: workers. Education, healthcare, ag, there’s probably something else I’m not thinking of, just business overall, I suppose. And so, when I talk to business folks, they want that pipeline still.
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Dave Price: I don’t know that these four on the stage, they were communicating that same thing. Now, maybe Eddie Andrews did a little bit when he was talking about, you know, he’s recruited tech workers as part of his professional career, but Lahn was very much…
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Dave Price: you know, Iowa universities are for Iowans, and we don’t want any of these people teaching.
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Dave Price: That, that to me was an interesting theme that came up throughout this.
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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, and Adam Steen also, you know, basically was saying he wanted to bar, the universities and other… it sounded like, most of government, or maybe all of government, from… from having H-1B.
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Kathie Obradovich: visas. And, you know, I think that that probably is about as far as you can go. You know, H-1B visa rules are really federal. We’re talking about federal legislation here.
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Kathie Obradovich: You know, and so stopping a private business from, you know, sponsoring H-1B visas, I think, would be pretty difficult for an Iowa governor to do. You know, I think that, you know, certainly stopping… they certainly would have the power to stop state government from hiring, you know, H-1B visa holders, so…
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Kathie Obradovich: So yeah, it’s… I’m thinking this… we had a story this week about, a medical researcher from Ukraine who
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Kathie Obradovich: came as, you know, when the wars… when Russia invaded Ukraine, he was able to come to the U.S. during the Biden administration. He has a visa, working at University of Iowa Healthcare, and doing this, like, really high-level medical research.
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Kathie Obradovich: And, he ended up having to, leave the country.
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Kathie Obradovich: For, personal reasons, or maybe it was a university, trip.
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Kathie Obradovich: I can’t remember, but then he couldn’t get back in, and he’s been waiting, I think, you know, it’s, like, over a year and a half. His family’s here, he’s trying to get a visa to get back in, and this is, like, high-level research that, you know, we’re not… we don’t have, you know, an Iowan just waiting to step into that position. And so… so I, you know, I do think you have to be…
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Kathie Obradovich: You know, you have to really think about what… what exactly it is that we’re trying to accomplish with this, besides a political message.
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Laura Belin: Dave, I could tell that you were really trying to target your question to these legal
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Laura Belin: legal workers here for… but I felt like the candidates were just trying to answer the question they wanted to answer, which was about undocumented, and especially Adam Steen, who used that as an opportunity to talk about how he supports President Trump’s immigration policy. By the way, I just went back and looked at my notes about the regulation, and I think that… I think that Brad Sherman said that he would prefer just to do it through education, and that
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Laura Belin: making the information available that farmers would want to do the right thing. So I don’t know that he…
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Kathie Obradovich: Oh, okay.
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Laura Belin: I don’t know that he expressly said he wanted more regulation, and Zach Lahn was similar, that
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Laura Belin: He’d like to incentivize the good behavior rather than regulate and tell people what they can’t do.
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Kathie Obradovich: Okay.
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Dave Price: And I maybe should have said this in the setup, but I didn’t want to get too long-winded. When we were structuring this, and you know, you can have a philosophical debate, putting on a debate, I feel like… debate, debate, putting this thing together,
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Dave Price: the format, right? The way this was structured, and KCCI was the… was the home stadium here, if you will, home studio.
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Dave Price: This was structured with time limits, and they had assigned one-minute
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Dave Price: one minute for all these things. So, to your point, Laura.
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Dave Price: What I was trying to get from the candidates is, how do you summarize stuff they’ve already said before, and then try to push the conversation forward, right? Realizing that we only have a minute to do it, and we’re talking about really deep stuff.
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Dave Price: So, on the surface of it, perhaps that’s a little unfair to ask somebody to solve the cancer crisis in a minute, but…
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Dave Price: the more targeted we could make those questions, the more I thought we had a better chance of, A, seeing if
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Dave Price: these fellas had ideas for these things, and if there was any daylight and difference between the four of them. And we had the ability to do follow-ups, or…
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Dave Price: Or what have you, but that was the… that was the… what we were going for, and obviously they were all going to say that they’re against…
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Dave Price: undocumented people in the country committing a bunch of crimes and causing mayhem. That’s a given, right? Most people are going to say that. So we were trying to focus, because I have found
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Dave Price: it fascinating about, like, we had the, processing plant in Ottumwa that had a couple dozen, whatever it was, maybe it was more than that, folks who were there temporarily on legal visas, but the Trump administration rescinded them.
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Dave Price: They were awarded under the Biden administration, and they canceled that, and they had to leave, which then left the workforce shortage, too, so…
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Dave Price: It’s the legal side of this, the legal temporary side that I was trying to explore a little bit with them.
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Laura Belin: And now I’m sorry, I need to correct myself, because I just see that in responding to a later question, Brad Sherman did say that when people’s lives are at stake, the government may need to step in and regulate some of this behavior. So, he did sort of leave the door open to some.
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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I think that’s what… that’s what our reporter picked up on, probably. But yeah, and… and to… and to Dave’s point, you know, there’s no perfect way to structure a debate. There’s always going to be trade-offs, you know? And, you know, sometimes,
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Kathie Obradovich: with an hour and a half, you know, you could… you could trade up formats a little bit. You could have a segment that is a little bit longer, you know, answers, and a little, you know, some segments that are a little shorter, lightning round, as we’ve talked about. But the fact is that if candidates want to
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Kathie Obradovich: play along, they will. And if they don’t want to, you know, good luck, because
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Kathie Obradovich: As… I think as Laura mentioned, you know, one of the… I think one of the tenets of, being interviewed anywhere is you answer the question, you know, if you’re a politician, you answer the question you wish you had been.
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Dave Price: Yes.
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Kathie Obradovich: Right? You don’t… you don’t necessarily always answer the question. And, you know, it is helpful when you have those follow-ups and… and can redirect, and I think that you guys use those pretty effectively to say… but we’re ask… what we’re really asking about is, you know, this topic, yeah.
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Dave Price: A couple of things. I was maybe a little surprised with how little they talked about Feenstra, and to your point, I’m pretty sure…
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Dave Price: I think only Steen mentioned Feenstra, and that might have been once, and it was in this…
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Dave Price: I think a bigger swipe lumping him in with Rob Sand and being too tight with China.
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Dave Price: And one of the things he mentioned, I don’t know if anybody else said anything about Feenstra at all, which maybe surprised me a little bit.
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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, he said, he said that Feaster and Rob Sand, don’t like, private schools, or something like that. Yeah. They wanted to control who private schools can have for students, I think is what he said. Yeah. So, so yeah, lumping those two together, on that particular issue.
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Laura Belin: Which is definitely not… doesn’t reflect what Randy Feenstra said, but I… I also made note of that. I don’t think any of the other candidates even mentioned Randy Feenstra at all.
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Dave Price: And I thought, this is hard to do on the fly, but…
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Dave Price: I guess… I wasn’t sure how aggressive… because going in there, you have to prepare for everything, right? Like, we script out all these questions, we have way more than we have time for. We had two commercial breaks built in, because it was largely three 30-minute segments with the… at the end of the first half hour and the end of the second half hour, you had the commercial breaks. So you have it all structured, so you have to kind of go through your head about, alright, we gotta have time for… to get through all four, maybe there’ll be some follow-ups, maybe they don’t
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Dave Price: followed the clock, all that kind of stuff. But, and they largely stuck to the clock, which I was…
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Dave Price: especially thankful for. They were very respectful of, respectful of the time. They did not come after each other, really, in any way, and I didn’t… I guess I wasn’t really expecting anybody to be…
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Dave Price: you know, super aggressive, like, you know, you suck kind of thing. I thought there might be more, maybe, nuanced ways where I grab what you just say and say, you know, I don’t know that that’s the way to go, this is what I would do, or something, to show more of a contrast, but, that really did not… that didn’t happen.
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Kathie Obradovich: I expected Lahn and Steen to go.
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Dave Price: did I.
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Kathie Obradovich: each other a little bit more. And maybe they’ve been told, or maybe their, you know, supporters are telling them they don’t like that, you know, that they don’t want people, you know, punching each other’s teeth out in a debate, when in fact.
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Kathie Obradovich: You know, you don’t want a wounded nominee going in to face up against Robert Sands. So it’s possible that they’ve had that feedback, that their supporters just don’t like it.
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Dave Price: But yet they do, especially online, some of them will go after Feenstra that hard. Rhino Randy, No Show Randy, all kinds of stuff like that. I totally know what you’re saying there, but I guess I’m…
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Dave Price: I thought if they’re willing, so it’s okay to go after Feenstra, but not each other, was kind of the takeaway for me.
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Laura Belin: I’ve thought the same thing that I expected, because as I’ve been saying all along, I feel like Zach Lahn and Adam Steen are the biggest threat to each other, in terms of trying to consolidate that non-Feenster vote, but I also think with four candidates on the stage, that’s harder than if it’s just one-on-one.
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Laura Belin: then it’s like a zero-sum game, and any points you score against your opponent, you benefit. But if people just don’t like the bickering, they could go and support Brad Sherman or Eddie Andrews, so you don’t really want to drive
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Laura Belin: Potential supporters away to a third candidate.
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Kathie Obradovich: It also just feels more personal when they’re standing there on the same stage, as opposed to, a TV ad, or an online ad, or, or even.
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Dave Price: Lord Warrior.
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Kathie Obradovich: You know, kicking an absentee candidate.
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Dave Price: Yeah.
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Kathie Obradovich: You know, I think… I do think it’s, it has more impact, I think, when you’re standing there next to somebody and saying, you know, you know what you’re talking about.
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Dave Price: May I also just say how deflating it was afterwards that… and, you know, we recorded this on a Saturday, it aired on Tuesday, so there are a couple of down days in the middle there, which is, you know, unusual, because you kind of want to know how it’s gone over, and what people take away from it, and all that stuff, so it airs on… it airs on Tuesday.
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Dave Price: We put a lot of… obviously, you put a lot of thought into the questions, a lot of thought into, okay, what do I think he’s gonna say here? How do we respond? How do we get specific answers here? What gets left on the cutting room floor?
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Dave Price: How do you assemble the whole thing, blah blah blah blah blah. It was set up to be policy-focused, because I thought that would be…
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Dave Price: the most valuable to primary voters, rather than a bunch of fireworks or, you know, kind of leading questions that almost…
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Dave Price: illicit explosive-type results, you know, whatever. So you go through all of this, I thought it was very civil. There was a… there was a moment before we… before we started where Zach Lahn asked Brad Sherman to lead the four of them in prayer.
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Laura Belin: Hmm.
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Dave Price: And they did, so they all gathered, behind the podiums there. I didn’t take any video of it, I’m like, this feels like an intimate moment, I’m not quite sure if I’m intruding or not, and we were also getting our microphones on and all that kind of stuff. But that’s a pretty powerful moment. I was thinking afterwards that… they could have…
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Dave Price: probably done that during the debate, really, but it showed that, I think, the faith commitment of all four of them, and it was truly…
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Dave Price: what do you want to say? A peaceful moment? I’m not really sure what the right words are there. Like, sometimes I think you envision a debate where it’s gonna be this caustic, we’re gonna fight the whole time. I mean, they were very…
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Dave Price: as my son would say, they’re all very chill, you know, and they all got together, they did the prayer, and they all… I mean.
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Dave Price: it was like that the whole time, during commercial breaks, before recording, during recording, after recording. Anyway, so you go through all this, we get through a bunch of questions, clearly we didn’t get through a few more topics, which is always disappointing, but I had somebody I ran into.
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Dave Price: who’s a Republican activist, who I felt a little aggressively, but whatever, told me this was not a debate. And I go, what?
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Dave Price: This was not a debate at all.
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Dave Price: And I said, oh, okay, there was no back and forth, there was no nothing. No yelling, no screaming, no… and I said, well, it wasn’t set up to be that way. And I think with the time limits like that, it made it even harder. And I know you’re not… you can’t…
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Dave Price: take… make your feelings based on one person, but may I just say, that was so stinkin’ deflating, where you intentionally worked to make a civil conversation, sort of so that people know what these guys stand for, and I have this one very,
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Dave Price: Very aggressive person who went out of her way to tell me how it sucked, and it was a waste of time.
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Dave Price: I was like, okay.
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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, well, thanks for watching.
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Dave Price: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
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Kathie Obradovich: That’s always my, you know, my default response. Well, thanks for reading, thanks for watching.
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Dave Price: That’s what.
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Kathie Obradovich: Great man.
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Dave Price: of Fox News, that’s the way he responds to people on Twitter when they’re really ugly about a bunch of stuff. When they say they’re never gonna watch him again, he’ll say, well, thanks for watching as long as you did, you know, and have a good day, or whatever. And it’s such a… it’s like killing him with kindness, like a little knife right through him.
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Dave Price: But that’s probably pretty… I really had no response. I just said, well, that wasn’t the goal. We weren’t trying to get people to yell at each other.
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Kathie Obradovich: I thought you were gonna say it wasn’t technically a debate, because people, like to, like to, you know, get pedantic, too, about the technical definition of a debate. We used to get that all the time when sponsoring a debate that was really probably
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Kathie Obradovich: you know, technically a forum, you know, but, you know, we call it a debate, you know, if the candidates are all on stage at the same time answering the same questions, I think, you know, that’s generally understood to be a debate.
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Dave Price: Appreciate that.
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Laura Belin: it was a debate. I mean, you… it… I mean, the fact is, they agree on a lot of issues, but it’s still… you were able to tease out some differences among them, so I felt it was a debate.
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Dave Price: Okay, speaking of, Governor Kanas, let’s talk about the current governor. She stood next to RFK Jr. this week, twice, for two different events, so we basically had Maha…
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Dave Price: Maha nationally met Maha, Iowa.
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Dave Price: And it started with the MAHA bill signed into law by Governor Kim Reynolds. That was a ceremony at the State House, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the HHS Secretary, was there and spoke for a bit, as well, along with a couple of the legislators that were involved with the process. That was probably…
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Dave Price: Might be about the biggest crowd I can remember in the governor’s office in a while. They really had them packed in there, and they had some families in there, and lobbyists, and other supporters and stuff. And then, a couple hours later, they took the show on the road, and they went to Gilbert, just outside of Ames.
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Dave Price: where RFK Jr. announced, some new guidance from the Surgeon General about screen time use, for kids, and that was part of the Iowa Maha bill as well. I was…
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Dave Price: I was thinking afterwards about, man, the Trump administration is committed to Iowa.
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Dave Price: They are keeping the people coming.
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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, well, Iowa is still first in the nation for presidential campaigns, so that
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Kathie Obradovich: definitely makes a difference. Also, I think it reflects on the… you know, the Trump administration has to be concerned if Ruby Redd, you know, pro-Trump Iowa starts, electing Democrats, so I think that won’t be…
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Kathie Obradovich: the last we see of Trump administration officials coming, to campaign in Iowa, even though there wasn’t really a campaign event associated with RFK Jr.’s visit. Technically. So, yeah, but, you know, two things. One.
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Kathie Obradovich: For, you know, making America healthy again, RFK Jr. sounded like he had a terrible cold.
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Dave Price: You know, bad timing, maybe.
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Kathie Obradovich: You know, we… he didn’t sound healthy, so, you know, making RFK healthy again, maybe, would be part of, part of the strategy here. And then secondly, you know, there were some, you know, some bipartisan parts of the bill.
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Dave Price: And…
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Kathie Obradovich: And, and I think that the screen time, which was emphasized then with the Surgeon General’s, advisory, which is not a…
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Kathie Obradovich: It wasn’t any kind of prescriptive thing. And, you know, he praised Iowa for, limiting screen time,
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Kathie Obradovich: you know, limiting cell phones during classroom time last year, and then this, Maha bill, limited… limited the amount of digital instruction that could be done, or screen time instruction that could be done in schools. And I think that… that part of it was fairly bipartisan, but there were also parts of it that were absolutely not bipartisan, including
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Kathie Obradovich: codifying the SNAP limits on food that has a sales tax on it. I won’t say unhealthy food, because
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Kathie Obradovich: there’s unhealthy food that is still allowed on SNAP because it doesn’t… is not sales taxed. So, so that part of it, there were… there were other, you know, so that I think that the, you know, taking food, certain food dyes out of
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Kathie Obradovich: school lunches was probably… it probably has some bipartisan support, but on the other hand, they also wanted to have waivers for federal nutrition guidelines, including for sodium, which I thought was odd, you know, why…
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Kathie Obradovich: why do we want to allow more sodium in, in school lunches? But, you know, there are parts of it that definitely were not bipartisan, and, but I thought that the event
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Kathie Obradovich: With the focus on screen time, kind of tried to… tried to…
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Kathie Obradovich: Emphasize the part… the bipartisan part of the bill.
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Laura Belin: So that screen time provision was not part of the governor’s original bill that she introduced, and I remember I was in the House chamber the day they were debating that, and the Democrats were a little bit surprised. That was something that the Republican State Representative Samantha Fett and Democrat Heather Mattson had
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Laura Belin: been talking about that, and I don’t know, I can’t remember whether Heather Manson had introduced a bill, but anyway, they… the Democrats were quite surprised when that was part of the Republican amendment that was added to the bill. But I just have to say that with these… the SNAP waiver, that this…
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Laura Belin: this law requires Iowa to request these waivers for both the main food assistance program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, and then that summer EBT, or Sunbucks that has different names, the Summer Meals for Kids. And nobody really questioned during the event that the governor was saying, hey, yeah, this is going to make sure that people eat healthy food, but as Kathie alluded to, I mean.
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Laura Belin: there are the taxable regulations, there’s all kinds of weirdness, and people have… the Iowa Hunger Coalition had a great blog post about this months ago, where it’s like, regular Snickers bars, not allowed, but frozen Snickers bars are allowed because they have dairy, and then, like, cake is allowed because it has flour in it, but not other kinds of candy. So anyway, it’s…
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Laura Belin: it’s really… I mean, there’s prepared food. I mean, if you buy, like, a cut-up fruit salad, I guess it depends on whether it comes with a fork or a spoon. That determines whether it’s taxable or not. They’re all healthy, right? So, I think this is not necessarily the way you want to get at incentivizing people to eat healthy foods, but
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Laura Belin: It does take away the power of the next governor to decide whether this is a waiver that they want.
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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, isn’t there kind of a poison pill in there, too? Did they pass that, that law saying that if Iowa doesn’t get that waiver, going forward, that they just won’t participate?
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Laura Belin: Yes, As part of the summary.
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Kathie Obradovich: Right. Yeah, so that’s.
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Laura Belin: So that means that if there’s a Democratic administration in Washington and they don’t want to grant the waiver, then Iowa would not be taking that money for the summer meals for the kids who qualify for free or reduced price lunch. I also thought it was interesting at the event, I don’t think anybody mentioned the ivermectin part of the bill that says… I don’t think so.
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Laura Belin: pharmacists can dispense. It was different from a bill that some House Republicans had introduced that would have required pharmacists to dispense ivermectin. The way it’s written in this bill is that pharmacists
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Laura Belin: couldn’t be punished or disciplined for dispensing ivermectin without a prescription, but I thought that was interesting that everybody seemed to be downplaying that part of the bill.
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Dave Price: I just find the whole… the whole Maha movement has…
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Dave Price: to me, it’s difficult to describe. There are parts of it… that I feel like…
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Dave Price: Where, you know, if you’re on the left, you like…
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Dave Price: on the right, you’re like, now this bill has a little bit of a lot of things in there. The ivermectin thing, you know, obviously that… that one doesn’t fit in there. You start talking about food dyes, you start talking about screen times. Kathie, I looked through the guidance from the Surgeon General. I don’t think there was a specific…
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Dave Price: because I’m thinking of my 10-year-old 4th grade daughter, 4th grade for only another week, but, you know, so what’s the guidance on how long she’s allowed to be on her iPad? I didn’t see a time limit on there.
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Kathie Obradovich: -
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Dave Price: So I, you know, I did see in this law, I believe it’s an hour of digital instruction per day for elementary students, if I’m remembering correctly.
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Laura Belin: K through 5, yep.
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Dave Price: Okay, K-5, yeah, so we’ve got one more year that she’ll be in 5th grade, but, so I didn’t see specific side of that, but I’m… I find the whole Maha thing just fascinating. So you’re gonna get… because even the vaccine thing can go… that’s not…
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Dave Price: you’re gonna have some people on the left who don’t believe in vaccines, you have some people on the right who don’t believe in vaccines. This thing altogether, it’s just a…
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Dave Price: I’m curious how far this goes. I mean, big picture, we have… our obesity’s too high, we have… chronic disease is way too high, cancer’s way too high, so what’s the… you know, how do we get after some of this stuff?
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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, it’s… I do think it’s interesting the way it does… it’s always interesting in today’s politics whether… whether… if there’s an issue that cuts across partisan lines, and, you know, that…
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Kathie Obradovich: it sort of created its own coalition, which, again, you know, makes you wonder sort of what, RFK Jr. might, you know, have in mind for his political future. It’s… and whether there’s enough people who are.
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Kathie Obradovich: sort of on board with that approach, to actually make, you know, a viable political movement out of it. Seems… it seems like there’s at least the start of that at this point. Then Iowa would be a good place for him to test that message.
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Laura Belin: So when my kids were little, 20-some years ago, and I knew a lot of parents of babies and toddlers, and I felt… I just perceived, anecdotally, it just seemed to be more evenly divided, the people who chose not to vaccinate.
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Laura Belin: many were more progressive and many were more conservative, but I have seen some studies or polling that, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Laura Belin: It’s really swung the anti-vaccine movement is much more heavily conservative.
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Laura Belin: than it used to be. And I forgot to pick up earlier on what Dave said. This Trump administration really wants to help prop up Republicans in Iowa. It’s interesting, and I think it’s logical, but considering that Kim Reynolds pretty aggressively campaigned for Ron DeSantis, it’s interesting that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to hold a grudge over that, because.
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Dave Price: Hmm.
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Laura Belin: holds a lot of grudges against a lot of other Republicans, but it seems like he’s decided to let bygones be bygones when it comes to the Reynolds administration.
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Kathie Obradovich: Well, except, potentially, the fact that she’s not running for re-election has something to do with that as well. And, you know, who knows what…
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Kathie Obradovich: you know, what she assumed might happen, if she decided to run, and Trump, you know, potentially endorsed somebody, a Republican challenger. So… so yeah, I mean, I think he’s not, he’s not holding it against Iowa, whether… whether it’s, you know, whether he, is…
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Kathie Obradovich: For, you know, particularly being friendly to the, Reynolds administration, I don’t know.
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Dave Price: This seems like a good place to wrap up. We’ve got some fundraising numbers that came out, maybe we can save that for next week, because we’re kind of hitting our sweet spot here. And as we’re recording on a Friday afternoon, one of the three of us in particular has her heavy lift as the editor of the Iowa Capital Dispatch, so it is always
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Dave Price: appreciative, by the rest of us especially, that Kathie does this right during crunch time, so, how about we…
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Dave Price: we pause and talk about, some of the fundraising stuff for next week. And that’ll be, that’ll be our pre-election show, right? I mean, that’ll be right from a week from now, we’ll be right before the election, so we’ll… we’ll have much to discuss to set that sucker up.
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Kathie Obradovich: Excellent.
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Dave Price: Hey, thank you to all of you who have become new subscribers, and thank you to those who have become new paid subscribers, we appreciate you.
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Dave Price: making that commitment to help us on the production side of this to keep distributing and producing this podcast each week. We very much appreciate you. And if you would, please share this with your friends and family, coworkers, people in your neighborhood, all that stuff, to allow us to continue to grow, and
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Dave Price: Widen our audience and widen this conversation.
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Dave Price: Have a great week, and we’re gonna talk big-time primary election next week. Have a great week ahead.
