Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Soon we will find out how Iowa feels.

Rep. Steve King will face a primary challenger come 2020. State Sen. Randy Feenstra announced Wednesday that he will challenge the incumbent Republican.

King came to Capitol Hill in 2003 and has been a loser ever since. This is of his own doing. The congressman has become a political pariah because of his bad habit of palling around with the European far-right and his nativist preferences. Democrats have pointed to these positions for years. Republicans have recently caught on.

In October Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, condemned King for his “white supremacy and hate.” And before the 2018 reelection, the NRCC cut off all financial aid to the congressman, a surprising development only in so far that it didn’t happen sooner.

King can best be known by the company he keeps. He has supported Marine Le Pen, the French politician who compares Muslims to Nazis, and he has backed Viktor Orban, the Hungarian autocrat who has strangled everything from the courts to the media to maintain his grasp on power. More recently, King decided it was a good idea to endorse an alt-right candidate for Toronto mayor named Faith Goldy.

The congressman doesn’t do this in secret. He does it right out in the open — like the time he used a trip to Europe financed by a Holocaust memorial group to sit down for an interview with a neo-Nazi publication. White Europeans, he lamented, were being replaced by immigrants and, he concluded, “Western civilization is on the decline.”

King doesn’t behave much better stateside. For every child of illegal immigrants “who is a valedictorian,” he once said, “there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Cutting to the chase during the midterms, King simply wrote off Mexican immigrants as “dirt."

These aren’t just the comments of just another politically incorrect politician. They are the ugly distractions that keep King from doing anything productive in Congress. As Philip Klein argues, it isn’t just enough for conservatives to fight or to annoy the Left. They need to actually win. Hence the line of attack from Feenstra.

“The President needs effective conservative leaders in Congress who will not only support his agenda, but actually get things done,” Feenstra argues in his announcement. He adds “we don’t need any more sideshows or distractions, we need to start winning for Iowa’s families.”

Iowa has a number of corn-fed conservative brawlers in Congress. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh owe their seats on the Supreme Court in large part to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley. That senator has focused on political fights with consequences. The state would be better served if they replaced King with someone similar.