Iowa Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst dared Democrats to play the phony war on women card on her while addressing the Iowa GOP convention on Saturday.
Ernst, an Iraq War veteran who serves in the National Guard, has led in three straight polls since winning the nomination and now leads her opponent, Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA), in the RealClearPolitics average of the polls after having trailed him throughout the campaign.
“I have been to war, and if the Democrats are going to use that war, they had better do it to honor those men and women because those men and women have fought every day to defend our freedoms,” she said.
Ernst said the campaign that could decide whether Republicans control the Senate would be between “our Iowa values versus Bruce Braley’s liberal Washington ways.”
“In Bruce Braley’s America, hard work and sacrifice don’t mean a thing. The more you work the more the government will take from you,” Ernst said. “That trial lawyer is running against a farm girl from Iowa.”
She ripped Braley for telling “out-of-state trial lawyers that if they gave him money he would be their voice” instead of representing Iowans. She said Braley’s remarks in which he demeaned Iowans to out-of-state lawyers were more than about insulting Grassley.
As Breitbart News has reported, Braley “was caught on video denigrating Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as ‘just a farmer from Iowa’ who was not smart enough to be Chair of the Judiciary Committee,” and “longtime Iowa political observer David Yepsin said Braley’s ‘elitist’ remarks would ‘hurt’ him in the fall.”
Those remarks have already hurt his poll numbers, and his campaign made it worse when a top surrogate insulted farmers by referring to castrating hogs as “animal mutilation.” In addition, the Braley campaign released a false attack ad on Ernst’s record in which she was compared to a baby chicken – a chick – that was resoundingly criticized by neutral observers in Iowa and across the nation.
Ernst also attacked Braley’s liberal record, blasting him for having raised taxes on Iowa’s hard-working families because “Nancy Pelosi told him to do it.”
“She can count on Bruce Braley because he votes with her nearly 100% of the time,” Ernst said, mentioning Braley’s support for cap and trade and his refusal to support the Keystone Pipeline.
Referring to Braley as the “loudest cheerleader for Obamacare,” Ernst also said it was “shameful” to pass on debt to children like Braley and Democrats are intent on doing.
Ernst successfully navigated the GOP civil war and received endorsements from Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, as Breitbart News reported, because Republicans thought she would give the GOP the best chance to win statewide. When she endorsed Ernst, Palin specifically mentioned that Democrats would not be able to play the “war on women” and the “income inequality” cards against a candidate Iowans now know grew up on a farm castrating hogs and has promised to similarly cut excessive spending in Washington, D.C.
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