Democrats see midterm hope in reliably red Iowa as Trump approval ratings sag

IOWA — Connie Klug didn't leave the Republican Party. The party left her, she said. She was raised in the GOP, considers herself a fiscal conservative and married a registered Republican. But decades ago, Klug said, she felt the party drifting. The isolation she felt intensified more recently, as she watched her former political comrades turn a blind eye to what she views as President Donald Trump 's abuses of power. "It's astonishing to me how the Republican Party is just looking the other way. Trump continues to stretch the law, and no one's doing anything," Klug said from the kitchen of her home in Adel, Iowa, down a long dirt road about a 30-minute drive west of Des Moines. Klug was hosting several friends for a roundtable with Sarah Trone Garriott, a Democratic state senator and one of a handful of candidates who have at least a fighting chance of flipping Republican-held U.S. House seats in the former swing state that is now reliably red. Trone Garriott is running in the 3rd Congressional District, which includes Des Moines and its suburbs, as well as much of the southwestern part of the state.