King, who was first elected to Congress in 2002, has won reelection nine consecutive times, mostly by healthy margins. But while many of King’s voters have pointed to his likability when explaining their support, the Republican lawmaker has a long history of inflammatory and racist remarks, from his infamous 2013 comment in which he compared undocumented immigrants’ calves to “cantaloupes” to his tweeted assertion in 2017 that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” More recently, congressional Republicans stripped King of his House committee assignments for comments he made to The New York Times about white supremacy. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” King told the Times. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Read: Steve King’s improbable ascendance

To understand why King keeps getting reelected, it helps to understand just how conservative Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District is. Stretching from Ames to Rock Rapids, the large, mostly rural region hasn’t been represented by a Democrat in Congress since 1986. Its residents—who are mostly white—are both highly religious and highly suspicious of the federal government. Even if they don’t agree with King’s most incendiary comments (although, of course, many do), as I reported last year, they see him as otherwise ideologically aligned with the district.

“We’d elect Attila the Hun if he was pro-life and had Republican behind his name,” Art Cullen, the editor of The Storm Lake Times, a small newspaper in the district, told me in an interview.

In 2018, as the controversy surrounding King grew, Scholten saw an opening. The 6-foot-6-inch young Democrat, promising to “stand tall for all,” ran against King as a kind of midwestern populist, and struck a middle-ground approach on several social issues, including abortion (he is against a federal ban but, gesturing to his Catholic faith, said he would like to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies) and gun control.

We spoke yesterday following the weekend’s two mass shootings: one in El Paso, Texas, where at least 20 people died, and another, hours later, in Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were killed. Asked how the government should address the prevalence of this violence, Scholten told me that gun bans aren’t the answer, but that strict background checks should be required.

The suspect in the El Paso shooting allegedly posted a manifesto in which he described “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” as his reason for the killings. Racist rhetoric from elected officials such as Trump and King has been criticized for promoting this kind of white-supremacist ideology. “Words have consequences,” Scholten told me yesterday. “The hatred and racism that has become too commonplace in our country does fuel violence.”