Eleven years ago, after multiple miscarriages, Nicole Baart of Sioux Center adopted the first of three children from Africa. An evangelical Christian who once headed Northwest Iowa Right to Life, she was raised to believe that "Christianity and Republican values lined up.”

But as the mother of black kids, Baart began to see subtle and not-so-subtle attacks on those she held dearest. It bothered her that her congressman, Steve King, kept a confederate flag on his desk. “I find it very disheartening that King calls himself pro-life but says things like, ‘We can’t rebuild our civilization with other people’s babies,’ ” said Baart in an interview. “I’m raising other people’s babies. That’s what adoptive families do.”

So Baart is voting for King's Democratic opponent, J.D. Scholten. She wrote of her decision in a recent letter to the Sioux County News.

Kirbee Nykamp has gone through a similar reckoning. As a registered Republican raised by conservative, evangelical Christians, she'll probably vote with her party in local races. But for the first time, there’s a yard sign on her lawn, and it’s for King's Democratic challenger. “I find myself completely at odds with the way (King) talks about everybody on the other side,” said the 32-year-old mother and violin teacher.

Many outside King’s district have long been appalled by his disparagement of people unlike him. He's compared immigrants to hunting dogs and said that for every Latino valedictorian brought over here as a child, there are 100 who are drug smugglers with “calves the size of cantaloupes.” He proposed an electrified fence across the border to shock people, saying it’s done with livestock. And yet he has kept winning elections.

Why?

It's not anything he's done for his district, say some. “Fifteen years without a major committee chair, 15 years with the renaming of a post office as his only legislative achievement, 15 years and Iowa’s most rural district has no representation on the farm bill conference committee,” Jeremy Granger of Sioux City wrote in a letter in last Sunday's Sioux City Journal.

Abortion opposition a key to King's success

Earlier this week, I toured Northwest Iowa's District 4 in search of an answer.

Many constituents delivered it in a word: Abortion. King opposes it. Politicians who are “entrenched in the moral aspect” do best, says Sarah Alm Weber of Orange City, a lifelong Republican and freelance writer, who's more fiscally oriented.

Also, King’s previous opponents never stood a chance, some say. In the last two elections, he beat Democrats by 23 points.They were perceived as too liberal or not representative of the district. But some Republicans say they can support Scholten because he has conservative Catholic values more aligned with theirs. Polls this year show a narrower race.

The Cook Political Report gives King an 11-point advantage; an Emerson College poll puts it at 10 points, and a poll commissioned by Scholten’s campaign and taken by Expedition Strategies of Washington D.C. has it at 6.

Has the district’s longstanding preference for incumbents reached a tipping point?

Millennials bring changes in attitudes

Maybe, thanks in part to millennials like Baart responding to cultural shifts like the #MeToo movement. She was deeply disheartened by the belligerent way she saw nominee Brett Kavanaugh in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings respond to Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault. And Nykamp says virtually all the women she knows, excluding herself, have been victims of sexual misconduct. She credits them with opening eyes. But King defended Kavanaugh at a meeting this week of the Carroll Chamber of Commerce. He called the hearing a circus and said he plans to urge Trump to stick with Kavanaugh.

Water quality, the state of farming and health care are all concerns mentioned by district residents. Kim Olson of Lake City says she spends all her earnings on health coverage for herself and her college-going daughter. She's got a political science degree and has been working for public libraries since 1993, but says she earns “about what the starting wage at Walmart is.” She can’t increase her hours from 21 a week because the library only has funding for two full-time staffers. And getting on her husband's public school teacher's insurance would cost them even more.

Health care is the region's No. 1 issue, says State Sen. David Johnson, a Republican-turned-independent from Osceola County. His constituents are frustrated with the state’s Medicaid privatization fiasco. “When Medicaid payments are delayed by one or more years, it affects clinics and hospitals” in rural parts of the state, he said. “If you lose a clinic or hospital, it is a death blow to the county.”

Scholten also calls health care his top issue. If elected, he says he'd vote to include a public option and let people buy into Medicare at 55. He also supports a higher minimum wage. That's significant because the financial well-being of King's district is often cited as a reason voters stick with him. But what about Olson, or Kimberly Koster, a divorced mother from Breda who, after 10 years working at a daycare center, earns only $8.45 an hour?

But Scholten will have to win over people like her and her friend Britney Randolph, a 32-year-old social worker who doesn't like King but doesn't plan to vote. “I don’t know that things will necessarily change," she said.

A former professional baseball player, Scholten doesn't fit the profile of a congressional candidate. He's never held office, sleeps in his RV in Walmart parking lots while touring, and doesn’t take corporate PAC money. The average person running for Congress, he told a Rockwell City town hall Sunday, is 58 and has a net worth of $1 million. “I’m 38 and a million dollars short.”

A fifth-generation Iowan, Scholten was living in Seattle in 2016 when his grandma in Iowa persuaded him to return to run the family farm. He's on his third 39-county tour in 15 months and what he's seen along the way has helped inform him. For instance, wherever he stops to fill up the RV, he notices a donation box for someone who's sick.

King refuses to debate Scholten.

Contacted for comment about some of the criticisms of King, his spokesman John Kennedy e-mailed a reference to King's support for three Tanzanian survivors of a bus accident in May who are recovering in a Sioux City hospital. Kennedy suggested Baart (though he didn't know her name) and I go to Sioux City "to ask the Tanzanian Miracle Kids their opinion of Congressman King."

Many people I approached for this column were reluctant to talk politics, saying they don’t know enough, or that it’s too divisive. I did, however, get a sense of what may be driving some King voters, from a friendly woman in her 60s at a bar in Storm Lake.

“I hate to drive down Storm Lake streets and see more Hispanic shops than what we had,” she said, refusing to give her name. “All these names you read in the paper and you can’t even say them, and they’re making trouble. …

"I’m totally not racist but … we have people who don’t live like we do and don’t have our morals. They move in and everything’s falling to pieces.”

Storm Lake Police Chief Mark Prosser says it’s a myth that any ethnic group is committing disproportionately more crimes. In fact, he said, “We believe our immigrant population is involved in crime at a lower rate.” Serious crime has decreased every year for the past 10, and is at record lows, Prosser said.

Noting the growth in school enrollments and businesses, he said there's “a really dynamic immigrant population here.” That mirrored my observations. Often the only open businesses in small communities I passed through were immigrant-owned restaurants, bakeries, boutiques or grocery stores.

Undocumented immigration in the spotlight

Undocumented immigration, however, is a political hot button, and one King has stoked. His website calls for "cracking down on employers and illegal workers" and opposes a pathway to citizenship as "amnesty." So Ryan Lizza's recent Esquire magazine piece about NuStar dairy farm in Sibley was ironic. The family of U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California) owns the farm and moved it in 2007 from Tulare, California, to Iowa, Lizza wrote. He reported that most dairies in the area rely on undocumented labor, and quoted two unnamed sources saying NuStar does, too. One works there currently and the other helped supply them undocumented labor for four years, Lizza reported. “It’s an open secret that the system is built on easily obtained fraudulent documents," Lizza wrote.

Anthony Nunes III, Devin's brother, who manages the farm with his father, wouldn't talk to me and threatened me with arrest for being on his property. Lizza reported he was similarly threatened by Anthony Jr., Nunes' father. But King has to know, contends Johnson, that “agriculture in Iowa or the U.S. could be severely crippled if we didn’t have immigrant labor.”

Devin Nunes has not publicly commented on the allegations.

Ignacio Romero, a Mexican-American restaurant owner in Sibley, told me he knows undocumented dairy workers who use forged papers. He said the employers know but “The white people don’t want to work so many hours.” They work 60 hours a week, 12 hours a day for $14.50 an hour, Romero said.

Significantly, King has accepted contributions from Devin Nunes, who campaigned for him in 2010 in LeMars, and from Wells Dairy, which buys NuStar's products.

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Travels in District 4 introduced me to decent, trusting people and charming small-town life. It also exposed tensions between generations over changing cultures and values, which King has exploited. (As a state legislator, it was gay people he targeted.)

Sowing divisions has long worked for him, but it won't last forever. His constituents deserve better.

Rekha Basu is an opinion columnist for The Des Moines Register. Contact: rbasu@dmreg.com Follow her on Twitter @RekhaBasu and at Facebook.com/ColumnistRekha. Her book, "Finding Her Voice: A collection of Des Moines Register columns about women's struggles and triumphs in the Midwest," is available at ShopDMRegister.com/FindingHerVoice