It was the bottom of the fourth, in a scoreless night game between the Sioux City Explorers and the Lake Country DockHounds, and time for a tall right-hander named J.D. Scholten to start limbering up. But first, Scholten had additional business to attend to in the bullpen: Iowa governor Kim Reynolds had vetoed a pipeline bill earlier that day, and Scholten, who is not only a 45-year-old pitcher for his hometown minor-league ball club, but also a state representative serving Iowa’s First District, had to telephone in to a last-minute Democratic caucus meeting.
“My life,” he told me as he put his earbuds in for the call, “is weird right now.”
And it was only getting weirder: Scholten—who gained national attention for his two promising but ultimately unsuccessful runs for the United States House, in a part of the state where there are hardly any elected Democrats—had just launched a Senate campaign to oust Republican Joni Ernst. Now he would have to balance his duties as both a state lawmaker and a professional baseball player with running a long-shot bid for a seat that the GOP has held since Tom Harkin, a five-term senator, retired a decade ago. It meant making donor calls on the team bus between games, fielding interviews in the clubhouse, and, on this evening in mid-June, hosting a Vanity Fair writer who’d driven in from Chicago on a kind of scouting trip: Could this state representative from Sioux City actually help the Democrats end their slump with a two-seam fastball and some economic populism?
It had been a slow night at Lewis & Clark Park, a no-frills stadium surrounded by strip malls. A hot, hazy day had given way to a cool night and the wind was blowing toward home, carrying the faint scent of manure and keeping fly balls from going deeper than the middle outfield. Neither the Explorers—the X’s, to their fans—nor the DockHounds could get much offense going. Fans on this Wednesday evening—who might’ve fit relatively comfortably into the stands of a local high school field—shivered in the unseasonable cool, while a handful of kids shagged foul balls that soared over the press box, bounced into the parking lot, and thumped off the hoods of cars.
Scholten had spent much of his life at ballparks like this. Born in Ames and raised in Sioux City, where his father coached the Morningside University baseball team, Scholten played four years of minor-league ball in his 20s—for the Saskatoon Legends, of the independent Canadian Baseball League, and for the Explorers, then of the now defunct Northern League. (The X’s currently compete in the American Association of Professional Baseball, a High-A–level partner league of Major League Baseball.) After years as a paralegal—and failed congressional runs in 2018, against Steve King, who was apparently too racist even for the MAGA GOP, and 2020, against now representative Randy Feenstra—he returned to the game in 2023, playing in the Netherlands. By 2024, Scholten was back in Sioux City serving as a state lawmaker, and he attended an Explorers game as a fan. The team got routed, and he emailed the manager to offer up his services—almost as a lark, in his telling. The next day, three hours before game time, he got called in to start.
Scholten threw 6.2 innings in an 11-2 victory over the Milwaukee Milkmen, and signed a contract with the X’s the next day.
Now, in the second season of his comeback with the team, Scholten is more than 20 years older than some of his teammates, many of whom are out here trying to play their way into affiliated ball, where there is a direct path to the major leagues. These are long-shot bids too. But places like Lewis & Clark Park, where you can buy a ticket with pocket change and get $2 beers if a specific player on the visiting team strikes out, are places of perpetual hope, of optimism against the odds. A similar romanticism can run through an underdog political campaign—a kind of civic purity that stands in stark contrast to the cynicism of this particular moment in America. It might not work. But you get on the bus anyway and keep showing up—ballpark after ballpark, stump after stump. Baseball is the “best experience I could’ve ever had to prepare me for politics,” Scholten would tell me later. “These seasons are a marathon. It is a grind every single day…. It is grueling, but I love it.”
It wasn’t so long ago that Iowa was purple. Barack Obama won the state twice—by nearly 10 points and then by almost 6—a little over 15 years ago. But Donald Trump has won it each of the last three presidential cycles; like many states Democrats used to win or at least compete in, it has become reliably red.
Ernst—who took office in 2015, just months before the onset of the Trump era—hadn’t had much reason to sweat heading into her 2026 reelection campaign. But an event late last month opened up a potential new vulnerability: After constituents at a town hall raised concerns that people could die due to the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, Ernst replied, “Well, we are all going to die.” When backlash ensued, Ernst released an “apology” video—recorded in a graveyard. “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth,” she said. “So I apologize.”
It was the kind of thing that, in another era of American politics, might’ve ended a career. Scholten had been thinking about running against Ernst, he told me, but hadn’t been sure. However, when Ernst doubled down in her apology video, “it was game on,” he said.
