When a campaign has a real case against an opponent, they lead with it. When they don’t, they lead with a stock chart and a straight face.
That’s the situation Josh Turek’s Senate campaign finds itself in this week, rolling out an ad accusing Congresswoman Ashley Hinson of “enriching herself” in office. It’s a serious-sounding charge attached to a non-existent scandal -the financial equivalent of accusing someone of grand theft auto because their spouse sold a car.
Where’s the fact check?
If this ad were running against a Democrat, it would already be sitting in the Des Moines Register’s fact-check section getting torn apart line by line – “misleading,” “lacks context,” the whole treatment. A congresswoman’s husband sold a business he built years before she was ever elected, and somehow that becomes a “stock scandal”? No inside deals, no favors traded, no legislative fingerprints anywhere near the transaction. This is the kind of claim that collapses under thirty seconds of scrutiny.
But the fact-checkers are conveniently asleep at the wheel on this one. Funny how that works when the target has an “R” next to her name instead of a “D.” Iowans have watched this movie before – the same outlets that will spend a week workshopping a headline about a Republican’s tweet suddenly develop total indifference when a Democrat’s Senate ad plays fast and loose with the truth.
Why this, why now?
Because the alternative is running on Turek’s actual record, and that record doesn’t exactly sell itself. This is a candidate who had every opportunity, sitting in the Iowa Legislature, to build the kind of reform credentials he’s now pretending to be outraged about the absence of. Congressional stock trading reform, government accountability, ethics legislation – none of it required a U.S. Senate seat to pursue. It required showing up.
And that’s the part of this ad that’s almost impressive in its audacity: a candidate whose own legislative attendance record is the stuff of local legend is out here casting stones at a colleague’s work ethic and integrity. If Turek wanted to lead on government accountability, the State Capitol had a chair with his name on it. He just didn’t sit in it very often.
Thin file, loud ad
This is what it looks like when opposition research comes up empty and the campaign decides to run the ad anyway. You can’t out-message a good record, so you manufacture a bad-sounding headline, count on friendly silence from the press, and hope nobody reads past the headline. It’s not a strategy so much as a confession – an admission that after months of digging, “her husband sold a business” was the best they had.
Iowans deserve a Senate race fought over records, not recycled innuendo dressed up by a press corps that only reaches for the red pen in one direction. Ashley Hinson has a record. Josh Turek is going to need to find one – preferably before the next ad buy, and before some enterprising reporter finally asks him about his own attendance sheet.
But that seems unlikely.
