About 60 people filled the Spring Valley Ballroom of the Hotel Pattee Tuesday night to greet Lanon Baccam of Des Moines, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from the third Congressional district, which includes Perry.
The Mount Pleasant native was joined by several local Democratic candidates, including Joe Shelly of Perry, a candidate for the Iowa House of Representatives, Margaret Liston of Ogden, a candidate for the Iowa Senate, and Meggan Guns of West Des Moines, a candidate for Dallas County Attorney.
Baccam’s parents came to Iowa from the Southeast Asian country of Laos in the 1970s, when Iowa’s Republican governor, Robert D. Ray, welcomed immigrants, an attitude that Baccam contrasted with today’s Republican scapegoating and demonizing of immigrants.
Baccam said he deplored Donald Trump’s strangling in its cradle a bipartisan immigration bill that had strong support in Congress early in 2024 “because he wanted to use immigration as a political issue,” he said.
“There has to be a humane immigration processing system,” Baccam said. “There are a lot of people here whom we have to pay attention to. And there’s got to be a way to find a path to citizenship for a lot of these folks. For our communities, we know this. Here in Perry, we know this. What you hear on Fox News is not the same thing we hear and feel in our communities. It’s not the same. So we have to find a way for the folks who live and work and go to church with us and have their kids in school with us, we have to find a way to bring them into the fold here and do it legally.”
Baccam, an eight-year veteran of the Iowa Army National Guard and a 10-year worker with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said he is running against Rep. Zach Nunn, a first-term Republican Congressperson from Bondurant who wants to abolish the $35 price cap on insulin and raise the retirement age to 70.
“My focus is clearly on the people,” Baccam said, “on our communities, and making sure that we can make things more affordable and strengthen our ability for people to retire with dignity, so I’m in it. I’m with you. We’re going do it. We’re going to change things.”
Along with the issue of immigration, Baccam spoke at length about education, which he said was once a “legacy of our state, something we can be proud of,” but Iowa’s Republican governor and legislature in recent years have attacked Iowa’s public school system by busting the teachers union, passing an unpopular school voucher program, gutting the Area Education Agencies (AEAs) and rejecting $29 million in federal food assistance for 240,000 Iowa children through the summer EBT program.
“They’re really pushing a national agenda on all of us that none of us have asked for,” Baccam said. “We went from being third-best schools to being 24th. We cannot be satisfied with being in the middle, folks. We can bring this back, and this room right here is going to make that happen.”
The voters also heard from Meggan Guns, a native of Dubuque who earned a bachelor’s degree from Loras College and an MBA and J.D. from Drake University. She worked under Dallas County Attorney Wayne Reisetter from 2010 to 2017 and then took a position in the Polk County Attorney’s Drug and Gang Unit. She is now back in Dallas County, seeking to lead the Dallas County Attorney’s office.
Guns answered a question about voter suppression and the purging of voter rolls, a practice her opponent, former Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, tried in the 2010s, spending about $250,000 in pursuing imaginary election fraudsters before voters drummed him out of office. Iowa’s rightward turn toward MAGA anti-immigration now offers a more inviting climate for Schultz’s brand of politics, which he practiced more recently as Madison County Attorney before resigning in March 2023.
Margaret Liston, a five-term Ogden City Council member, told the assembled voters she aims to use her voice in the state senate to fully fund Iowa’s public schools and vocational programs and stop their downward trend, to defend Iowans’ rights to make their own healthcare decisions, to stop eminent domain abuse and to bring new business opportunities to Boone, Greene, Guthrie, Dallas and Story counties.
Liston has spent her career in the healthcare field. She has a bachelor’s degree in nursing and a master’s in public administration. She is running against first-term Sen. Jesse Green, a Boone Republican representing Iowa Senate District 24.
Joseph Shelly is a Las Vegas native. He is serving his first term on the Perry City Council and is a member of the Dallas County Hospital Board of Trustees. Shelly is a semi-retired pipefitter and fiercely loyal labor-union supporter who still gets calls from across the country on jobs requiring the most expertise.
Shelly is challenging two-term Rep. Carter Nordman, a Republican from of Panora and one of the youngest lawmakers in the U.S. Shelly said he opposed Nordman’s votes for school vouchers, for local deportations and for the fetal heartbeat bill, all measures passed in the current session of the Iowa Legislature. Nordman also led the effort to bring firearms into the public schools in the wake of the January shooting at Perry High School.
