Sen. Joni Ernst makes an appearance at RNC
Iowa's Joni Ernst, whose Senate seat is in danger, supported President Trump at this year’s Republican National Convention.
Video Transcript
JONI ERNST: Hello everyone, and thank you for inviting me into your home this evening. It's truly a privilege. My name is Joni Ernst. I was raised on a small family farm here in Iowa, where I learned the importance of faith, hard work, and service.
I worked my way through college then dedicated my life to serving my country as a local official, a battalion commander in the military, and as a US Senator. Service-- it's more than a word to me. It's a mission, a way of life. It's what brought me to Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 2008 when I was in the National Guard.
We saw historic floods that swept through the communities. We lent a helping hand to our fellow Iowans who were literally underwater. We thought we had seen the worst, but 12 years later these same communities have faced an even more devastating disaster-- the recent derecho storm.
If you don't live in Iowa, you may not have heard much about it at first. While reporters here in the state were in the trenches covering the equivalent of a category 2 hurricane, most of the national media looked the other way. To them, Iowa is still just fly over country. Houses, farms were destroyed. About one third of our crops here were damaged. In some cases, these storms wiped out a lifetime of work. And yet, Iowa farmers didn't hesitate to grab their chainsaws and check on their neighbors. Our farmers live every day with that sense of service-- the stewards of the land, the ones who feed and fuel the world.
