Watch: Christina Bohannan defends abortion rights in Iowa
Candidate for Iowa’s 1st Congressional District Christina Bohannan held a press conference in Iowa City on Monday, July 29, as Iowa’s six-week abortion ban went into effect.
Democratic congressional candidate Christina Bohannan went on the attack again in a new campaign ad titled “Far Away,” accusing U.S. Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks of “rigging the system” to the detriment of the working class and accepting large sums of money from lobbyists and special interest groups.
Bohannan, the Democratic candidate in southeast Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, rebukes Miller-Meeks for her stance on abortion in her first ad, released a week earlier. The ad is part of a “multimillion-dollar television and digital campaign,” according to Bohannan’s campaign team.
“I grew up in a town of 700 people as far away from Washington lobbyists and special interests as you can get,” Bohannan said.
Miller-Meeks is the incumbent of the 1st Congressional District, against whom Bohannan is running.
More: In her first campaign ad for 2024, Christina Bohannan criticizes Mariannette Miller-Meeks for abortion
An ode to the rural surroundings
An actress portraying young Bohannan is seen firing a shotgun and wiping down a countertop in the video, while Bohannan explains that she has “cleaned houses” and “worked as a waitress,” which she said is her way of “doing whatever it takes to help.”
“Back then, hard work was a way to get ahead,” Bohannan said in the ad. “But today, politicians like Marianette Miller-Meeks, who rig the system for greedy corporations, make that impossible.”
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Verification of the claims
In a statement accompanying the new ad, Bohannan’s campaign accused Miller-Meeks of “accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry and receiving $1,000 from an insulin manufacturer’s PAC on the same day she voted against a bill to cap insulin prices.”
The campaign cited reports from Iowa Starting Line.
On August 12, 2022, Miller-Meeks received $1,000 from the Eli Lilly and Company PAC, which represents an Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company, Federal Election Commission data show. The PAC donated almost evenly to Democrats and Republicans during the 2022 election cycle, to the tune of about a quarter of a million dollars per party, OpenSecrets data show.
Miller-Meeks voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, which caps the prices of some drugs, including insulin, on August 12, 2022. That same day, she received money from the Eli Lilly and Company PAC.
No Republican voted for the bill.
Bohannan also claims in his new ad that Miller-Meeks has raised “over a million dollars from special interest groups,” but does not verify the source of that figure.
Miller-Meeks has raised significant sums of money through donations from hundreds of political action committees (PACs) during her campaign and while in office. The FEC’s most recent quarterly report revealed that Miller-Meeks accepted more than $325,000 from PACs, but not even $1 million.
According to the FEC’s quarterly report, Bohannan also received about $100,000 in donations from PACs.
In an earlier statement, Bohannan’s campaign accused Miller-Meeks of raising “more than $250,000” in pharmaceutical donations, “more than any other member of Congress in Iowa.”
Data from OpenSecrets, a campaign donation tracking website that uses FEC data, shows that Miller-Meeks received over $196,000 in donations from “pharmaceuticals (or) health products” and another $68,000 from “pharmaceutical manufacturing.”
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Miller-Meeks campaign reacts
The Miller-Meeks campaign responded to Bohannan’s new ad in a statement to the Press-Citizen.
“If lying were an Olympic sport, Christina Bohannan would win a gold medal. Dr. Miller-Meeks grew up in poverty and worked her way through school to become a respected doctor in Iowa,” the statement said. “In Congress, she fights for lower prescription drug costs and calls out greedy pharmacy benefit managers. She has repeatedly stood up to lobbyists for big pharmaceutical companies.”
“Meanwhile, Bohannan is raising money from ActBlue and New York billionaires and passing it off as ‘grassroots donations.’ The name of Christina’s ad is apt: Iowans will vote to keep her and her policies ‘out’ of Congress.”
Bohannan’s donors are predominantly from Iowa, although she also received support from California and New York. The latest campaign finance data show that Bohannan has raised more donations from Iowa than Miller-Meeks and has slightly more cash on hand overall.
Multiple individual campaign contributions from each candidate amount to $2,000 or more.
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Ryan Hansen covers local politics and crime for the Press-Citizen. He can be reached at [email protected] or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @ryanhansen01.
