Jerome Scheuring, registered Republican and Grinnell resident, was an active participant in this year’s local election cycle. On Jan. 15, 2024, Scheuring and his wife, who declined to be interviewed and featured, participated in their first caucuses as Iowa residents, along with his wife. The pair moved their family to Grinnell in 2018, but were unable to attend the 2020 caucuses due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the 2024 caucuses, Scheuring was presented with the opportunity to get involved with his local party as they were searching for volunteers to represent Grinnell at the county convention. From there, he and his wife continued on to the state convention and would have attended the national convention had they known about the required paperwork ahead of time.
At the county convention, the two faced strong encouragement to get further involved in the Poweshiek County Republican Party. During this general election cycle, Scheuring staffed the Poweshiek County Republican Party headquarters and canvassed for local candidates, while his wife designed the new Poweshiek GOP website and mailers.
“It’s just a matter of getting progressively more involved,” Scheuring said. “I mean, the more you show up, the more people rely on you.”
As a newly active member of the local Republican Party, Scheuring learned a lot about how local party politics work in Iowa.
“One of the things that surprised me was that in a non-swing state like Iowa, the national party barely notices that the local parties exist, and it isn’t a tight organization,” Scheuring said.
In his time campaigning, Scheuring noted that all campaign activities are self funded. Unlike the Democratic Party, which fiscally supports the campaigns of local candidates, the national Republican Party does not even give money to the local parties to advertise the national candidates.
“It really is grassroots […] it’s not the way you hear in the news the Republican Party says X, right? Well, that’s not the experience that I’ve had,” Scheuring said.
“The Republican Party is more of an identity than it is of organization, right? We sometimes report to the state party, and that’s it. The local party doesn’t have anything to do with the national party. We couldn’t even get yard signs from the campaign, from the Trump campaign.”
All the funds for the signs, and other campaign activities, came from local donations at county committee meetings, regular donors, and a donations jar in the campaign headquarters.
“We held a fundraiser and Chuck Grassley and Ashley Hinson sent videos to be played back at the fundraiser saying, ‘You guys are doing a cool job’ and everything, but that’s as close as it gets to them remembering that the local party here even exists,” Scheuring said.
Scheuring has also found little participation in local politics by his constituency. Scheuring noted that his daughter is one of the few people who regularly attend city council meetings, to the point where she was mistaken as a news reporter by members of the council. “And they’re like, ‘What paper are you with?’ And she’s like, ‘I’m not, just an active citizen.’” Scheuring said.
Even a community dialogue hosted by The Listening Project focused on discussing the upcoming election found a concerning lack of awareness of the political process.
“Like how does what you do in the voting booths translate into actual policies that hit you when you were walking down the street?” Scheuring said. “We’re voting people into these offices to enact policies. We’re voting people that we are going to trust with what Max Weber called, the state’s monopoly on violence to see to it that certain things get done.”
“I don’t remember the source of the quote, but it was basically in any functioning republic, your vote for city council should be more important than your vote for president because those are the people who are going to be making the decisions that affect your daily life.”
