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If the president came to Iowa, Hinson said, she'd welcome him to northeast Iowa.
She might also have some advice.
"I would like to see him lead by addressing the nation and call for everyone to come together," Hinson said in an interview. "I don't have all the details of what happened, obviously, but I've seen the pictures and the video of what happened in Washington, D.C. I don't believe people in a peaceful protest should be cleared for a photo op."
The GOP's uphill battle to retake the House, which got a boost last month with the victory of Rep. Mike Garcia in California, has found the party recruiting diverse candidates with compelling stories. This week's primaries continued to validate the strategy, as Hinson, Iowa legislator Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Pennsylvania businesswoman Lisa Scheller won nominations in three swing seats where, in 2018, Republican men had come up short.
But this hasn't been the election, or the national climate, that anyone expected. Republicans are hoping a younger, diverse crowd of candidates will help it navigate a landscape that changes daily, and often faster. Issues that looked set to define the election - impeachment , abortion , socialism - were replaced by a pandemic, then by civil unrest. Ads that ran just a few months ago, touting a booming economy and tying Democrats to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., look as if they tumbled out of a time capsule.
The national party has done some of the work to cut out its most controversial candidates. Rep. Steve King of Iowa, whose political alliances with white nationalists annoyed the party for years, was pulled off his committees last January, helping state Sen. Randy Feenstra defeat him this week . The party cut off Ted Howze, who'd won the nomination in a California seat the party hoped to take back, after researchers found his name on racist social media posts.
This has all happened quickly, as skeptical Democrats point out - King was a co-chair of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds' campaign in 2018, months before the committee purge. And the party has not matched the level of recruitment or fundraising that powered Democrats in 2018's House races, its model for this cycle. Democrats won 41 seats in largely suburban districts throughout the country two years ago, with even long-shot candidates sometimes raising millions of dollars.
(Of the 22 Republicans elected to the House in 2018, just one was not white, and just one was female. White men make up a supermajority of Republican House members, but are outnumbered in the Democratic conference.)
"It's basically the Democrats' 2018 playbook that we're using," National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Emmer told The Washington Post's Mike DeBonis last month, touting the number of women, veterans and nonwhite candidates recruited for 2020. Garcia, who won last month's special election in California to replace scandal-plagued Democrat Katie Hill, proved to be a far stronger candidate than the white former Los Angeles Police Department officer who'd previously held the seat for the GOP.
If they hold all the seats they currently have, Republicans need to flip just 19 seats to win the House, when the Democrats' current majority and the new maps in North Carolina are factored in. Winning two-thirds of seats carried by the president in 2016 would pull that off, and party strategists approach the 2016 number as a standard; if Trump won it before, he would carry it in 2020, boosting the rest of the ticket.
"He's running well in Iowa still. He's still very popular. He's likely to win all four districts in the state again," said NRCC spokesman Bob Salera. "There may be a few at the margins that could go either way. We're talking about a couple of districts that Trump only won by a point or two, or that Hillary Clinton only won by a point or two, that could slip one way or the other . . . but that 2016 baseline is more or less we're expecting."
In competitive races, Republicans who might have tied themselves closely to the president are building their own brands.
Voters in Iowa's 1st District backed Trump by four points, after resoundingly voting for Barack Obama. Asked how she'd have voted differently than Rep. Abby Finkenauer, Hinson emphasized the Democrat's vote for a pro-union bill that would end right-to-work laws and "raise payroll taxes on workers" and said she'd work harder to "bring jobs back from China."
"You look at all of the additional things that were put in that bill, and that is why we need to change the leadership in Congress," Hinson said. "There was a lot of what I call Washington, D.C., pork in there. I'm from Iowa. We love Iowa pork, but we don't like Washington, D.C., pork. And from my perspective, some of those negotiations would've gone differently, and that bill would look different, if Republicans ran [the House]."
Outside of the most Republican districts held by Democrats, like Minnesota's 7th District, Republican candidates are not walking every step behind the president. The response to the George Floyd killing and its aftermath has clarified that, with candidates echoing some of the president's remarks without endorsing his threat to break up protests with military force.
"We have the constitutional right to protest in peace," Garcia had said in a statement. "We do not have a right to incite riots, promote violence, damage property or harm our fellow citizens. Anyone who decides to compromise the lawful protests with such illegal activity will also be held accountable by the full weight of the justice system."
Wesley Hunt, an African American veteran and West Point graduate who was one of the party's earliest recruits, responded to the unrest Thursday by saying "the lawlessness we've witnessed must end," without referring to the president's response. (Clinton carried both Hunt's Texas district and Garcia's California one in 2016, as the GOP vote receded.)
In the past 24 hours, as former defense secretary Jim Mattis and a number of Republican senators criticized the president's response to protests and unrest, a potential theme began to emerge for House Republicans. Some Democrats were bowing to pressure to cut funding for the police, and some universities were scrapping police contracts. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the Republicans' main House super PAC, attacked Garcia's May and November rival Christy Smith on Thursday, not for her response to the protests, but because Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti would cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the police budget.
Dan Conston, the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, said the party had recruited enough strong candidates to put the House in play and to take advantage of any unexpected Democratic problems or overreach. But their fate was also linked to the president.
"Our map is strongly in Trump country, and conservative-leaning, and independent, conservative-minded America. So the president is clearly an asset there," Conston said. "House races are so subject to the whim of the national political environment."
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