Dem in key swing race missed nearly half her state House votes while taking taxpayer salary: 'No show'

Missing nearly half your floor votes while still cashing a state paycheck isn't a rounding error. That's basically working a part-time job and billing full-time hours, except the client is the taxpayers of Iowa and they didn't get a say in the arrangement. Bohannan wasn't out sick or dealing with some family emergency that forced her away from the chamber. She was out campaigning for a promotion, on the clock the whole time.

The excuse-making around this always follows the same script: everybody does it, it's just how modern campaigns work, voters don't really care about attendance records. Except voters absolutely notice when the person asking for a bigger job can't be bothered to finish the one they already have. If you can't show up for votes on property taxes or school funding or whatever else came before the Iowa House that year, why should anyone trust you to show up for the harder, less glamorous work of representing a swing district in Congress?

There's also something a little insulting about the timing. Missing votes isn't a one-off slip, it's 45% of them, which means it was a pattern, a choice made over and over across the whole session. That's not a scheduling conflict. That's a candidate who decided her constituents' business was less urgent than her own ambitions, and then kept collecting the salary anyway. Voters tend to remember who bothered to show up and who didn't..