Former Iowa State Sen. Jim Carlin, who hopes to unseat U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, criticized the incumbent Republican’s voting record during an interview with Fox News Digital last week.
Carlin said Ernst “may be a Republican, but she doesn’t vote like one,” pointing to her 42% Heritage Action for America score, which is the figure the group awarded the lawmaker for the 118th congressional session. While Carlin only mentioned the 42% statistic, Ernst’s lifetime score from the conservative group is 63%.
Back in 2022, Ernst was one of the 12 Senate Republicans who voted with Democrats to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, which was ultimately signed into law by then-President Joe Biden.
The law prohibits refusing to recognize another state’s records “pertaining to a marriage between two individuals, on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals.” In a landmark 2015 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court demanded that states allow same-sex marriages and recognize those marriages from other states.
Carlin, who said he would not have voted for the 2022 measure, labeled Ernst a “Log Cabin hero,” in an apparent reference to the Log Cabin Republicans. The group, which represents “LGBT conservatives and straight allies who support fairness, freedom, and equality for all Americans,” according to its website, includes Ernst on a list of congressional allies. Ernst and several House Republicans participated in an event with the group’s Washington, D.C., chapter in June.
If Ernst, who has served in the U.S. Senate since 2015, officially announces a re-election bid, Carlin’s bid may be a long shot. Sen. Chuck Grassley trounced him in the 2022 GOP U.S. Senate primary in the state.
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“Good luck trying to take on this combat veteran. Senator Ernst has a proven record of conservative leadership—cutting waste, securing the border, and making Washington squeal to keep Iowans’ hard-earned money in their own pockets,” Ernst campaign manager Bryan Kraber said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“And she delivers for our families, farmers, and veterans. Iowans already saw through Carlin’s last failed campaign, and they’ll reject his desperate attempt at relevance again in 2026,” he added.
Carlin, who believes the national debt poses a “national security threat,” according to his campaign website, called for auditing the Federal Reserve and even said that he would support abolishing it, suggesting to Fox News Digital that there either needs to be some accountability or the U.S. needs to look into eliminating it.
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He floated the idea of a return to the gold standard.
“We have to stop this free fall in the valuation of our currency,” he said, calling it a “national security threat to us, as the world’s reserve currency.”
Hawkeye State agriculture “needs to be weaned off of federal subsidies,” he said, opining that the practice “is hurting it more than helping it.”
Carlin said he believes that “foreign aid is appropriate” in some cases, but that “it needs to be more measured than what it is … currently.”
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