U.S. Senate candidate Ashley Hinson is back in Iowa after a quick trip to Dallas for the first-ever Republican Party convention in the middle of a president’s term.
“I had a bunch of meetings and saw a bunch of our supporters, Iowans down there who are ready to cheer on our midterm convention,” Hinson said, “and hopped on a plane last night so I could be back here meeting on the ground with more Iowans today.”
During a convention speech last night, President Trump promised a $5000 check to every adult citizen if Republicans maintain majority control of both the House and the Senate after this November’s election. Hinson told reporters this morning that she’s focused on providing “real relief to working families” and “driving down costs for everyone,” but isn’t saying whether she’d vote for Trump’s proposal. “I never say what I’m going to support until I’ve had a chance to look at the details of it,” Hinson said.
Last year President Trump used general Pentagon appropriations to give U.S. service members $1776 bonus checks. During his first term, congress passed and Trump signed two batches of $1200 stimulus checks for low and middle-income Americans to stimulate the economy in the early months of the pandemic. Hinson, while discussing Trump’s latest proposal, said Republicans already delivered “historic tax relief” to Americans last year with the bill that gave employees who earn tips or work overtime a tax deduction of up to $25,000. “Absolutely I’ll be looking at every proposal that’s going to help make sure we’re protecting resources for working families, but I’m also lazer focused on reducing costs because I think just across the board costs are too high. We want to make $5000 go a lot further.”
President Trump has said he’ll be traveling the country before the November 3rd election to support 35 Republicans running in competitive races for the U.S. House and Senate. Hinson said she “hasn’t had a conversation” with Trump to see if he’ll be making a trip to Iowa on her behalf. “When I’m running I treat every race like I’m 10 points down, so every race to me is competitive,” Hinson said. “I’m going out and earning Iowans’ votes talking about what they need in their lives and that is to make life more affordable for working families, life easier for our farmers.”
Hinson spoke with reporters late this morning after touring a child care center in Carlisle. Hinson indicated the owner hopes to expand, but faces some regulatory barriers and difficulty in lining up financing for renovations on a brick building that’s 78 years old. “If we want to increase the number of families that we have in this country and certainly here in Iowa, we need access to affordable child care,” Hinson said, “and so we had a conversation about some of the overlapping regulations and what we might do there to simplify things (and) access to funding to finance a project like this.”
Hinson, who’s served in the U.S. House since 2021, faces Democrat Josh Turek in this year’s race for one of Iowa’s U.S. Senate seats. A spokesperson for Turek’s campaign has Hinson “has repeatedly raised costs on Iowans” and cited her failure to vote to block Trump’s tariffs “that are making everything more expensive” or support legislative efforts to end the war in Iran “that is sending gas prices soaring.”