EXCLUSIVE: Independent candidate for Congress alleges his Democratic opponent offered him a job in Congress and believes she wanted him to withdraw from the race

A left-leaning independent congressional candidate told the Washington Reporter in an interview that his Democratic opponent offered him a job and he believes the offer was in exchange for withdrawing from the race.

Dave Bushaw is an Iowa farmer running in Iowa’s open 2nd District against Democrat Lindsay James, Republican Joe Mitchell, and Libertarian Rick Stewart. Bushaw told the Reporter that, following a candidate’s forum in May, 2026, James approached him.

“After the forum, I was talking to some of my friends, and Lindsay James came up to me and she pulled me aside, and she said ‘Dave I hear you’re a farmer, I’d love to come and see your farm sometime,’” Bushaw told the Reporter. “She said ‘when I get into Congress, one of the first things I’m going to do is I’m going to work on getting appointed to the House Committee on Agriculture,’ and she puts up her hand to me and she says ‘I’m gonna need folks like you working in my office with me that know the stuff on the ground,’ and it just sounded all gross and I just got my family left. That was the end of it. I closed up the conversation after that, and I just sat on it.”

For months, Bushaw said he “sat on this” because his “goal is policy, rather than tit for tat.” But Bushaw said that the way James has run her campaign made him conclude that she was offering him a job in exchange for him withdrawing.

“The only reason why I interpreted it like that was because of a prior instance where she was talking,” he explained. “I’ve been in the political world for a while. We’ve been in the political world. There are people that we know, and there are some folks that I know that she knows that she was talking to, and she said ‘I just don’t get it. I don’t get why Dave is doing this.’ And she asked one of those mutual acquaintances ‘what can you do to get Dave to quote unquote stop all of this?’”

“That was the first interaction,” Bushaw said of the December incident. “I blew that off. That was way back in December of 2025, but the precedent of that, coupled with her saying ‘when when I win, I’m going to need this.’ In my mind, I interpreted that as a you know, ‘hey, step out of the way, and I’ve got a job offer for you.’ I don’t give a shit.”

“She’s got no problem calling out the efforts to kick the libertarians off the ballot, and RFK Jr. calling my opponent Rick Stewart and trying to get him to drop out,” he said. “The whole time I see her sit up on her high horse, I’m like, you did the same damn thing to me, Lindsay!”

Bushaw made a case to voters in Iowa’s 2nd District who are interested in voting for James that she has not earned their support.

“Folks have got to be done with the rhetoric,” Bushaw said. “The buck’s got to stop somewhere. I’m sick and tired of sending folks to Congress who are going to preach about this or that and deliver no effective deliverable gains for the working class. I’m done with the pandering and the promise-breaking, and that’s what I think we can expect from Lindsay James.”

In the race, Bushaw said, “we’ve got four candidates on the ballot. Three of us agree that we should be on the debate stage. The only one who doesn’t acknowledge my existence is Lindsay, who doesn’t even want a democratic marketplace of ideas to even be presented to the voters in the 2nd District.”

“I’m the only candidate who’s a lifelong resident of Northeast Iowa, that’s just a fact,” he added. “I was born here, raised here, I’m working class, and I’m fighting for the community that raised me. It’s a shame that someone like Lindsay James thinks that she can come into our state in 2015, thinks she knows what’s best for us, and can run for state office in a safe Democratic district three years later, hold a spot in the legislature for eight years, effectively accomplishing nothing, and then thinks that she’s qualified to run and represent me when she won’t even talk to me. It’s disappointing.”

James’s campaign, for its part, told the Reporter that Bushaw is lying. “This is a complete lie and did not happen,” a James spokesperson said.

Following James’s campaign rejecting Bushaw’s claims, he reiterated their accuracy to the Reporter, saying that he is “operating in good faith as an Iowan, I don’t know what else to say.” He added that he remembered what James told him “almost verbatim.”