Iowa’s Second District doesn’t just grow corn and beans — it raises hogs. A third of the nation’s hog inventory, to be exact, and IA-02 alone ranks third in the country for hog and pig sales, backing a $10.9 billion industry that moves more than 47 million pigs a year. Out here, agriculture isn’t a talking point. It’s the whole economy.
It’s starting to look like a pattern, too. Iowa Field Report reported recently on Chris Jones, the Democrat running for Secretary of Agriculture, and his years of dismissing Iowa farmers as overpaid and underworked. Now it’s worth asking the same question about the Second District’s Democratic candidate — because Lindsay James has spent years voting and posting like she’d rather the industry didn’t exist.
Start with 2020. While Iowa pork producers were in the middle of one of the worst years in memory — plants shutting down, supply chains breaking, workers getting sick — Lindsay James used the moment to promote “Meatless May,” taking a swing at the meatpacking industry itself in the process. Timing is everything, and James picked the worst possible year to tell Iowa’s pork producers to take a hike.
Then there’s the voting record, which is where “openly skeptical of farming” turns into “actively works against it.”
In 2021, James skipped the vote to repeal Iowa’s death tax — a policy that hits family farms particularly hard when land has to pass to the next generation. Not a “no.” Not even a “present.” Just absent, on a vote that mattered to every multi-generational farm family in her district.
In 2019, she voted against expanding capital gains tax deductions for farmers — real financial relief for producers, and James said no. That same session, she also voted against legislation cracking down on activists who use deceptive tactics to infiltrate farms — the kind of groups that break onto Iowa operations under false pretenses to stage confrontations. Iowa producers wanted protection from that. James voted no.
Three votes, one pattern: when Iowa agriculture needed her, Lindsay James wasn’t there — or was there, voting against it.
“This year, the corn is chest-high by the Fourth of July, but it still can’t hide Lindsay James’ anti-farming record,” said NRCC spokeswoman Emily Tuttle. “Her agenda is a load of manure that no Iowa farmer wants. Lindsay James will have to answer for it this fall.”
Iowa’s Second District will decide this fall whether a candidate with this record gets to represent one of the most agriculturally significant districts in the country. Farmers already know what they think of a “no” vote on their own livelihood — and increasingly, it looks like Iowa Democrats up and down the ballot share the same blind spot.
