Iowa historian makes independent bid for US Senate

An Iowa historian who crisscrosses the state on a bus converted into a museum is pursuing an independent bid for U.S. Senate, arguing his nonpartisan approach offers a needed alternative to longtime Sen. Chuck Grassley.

More attention has been focused on four Democrats seeking the nomination to face Grassley, who was elected to the U.S. House in 1974 and to the Senate in 1980. But Michael Luick-Thrams, a 53-year-old Mason City resident, said he’s the right person to bring new ideas to Washington that will help Iowa.

Although Grassley has repeatedly won re-election by overwhelming margins, Luick-Thrams said his 36 years in the Senate is long enough, making his point by invoking images of the 1970s.

“We’re at times the laughing stock of the country because we have a senator who was elected when I was a junior in high school,” he said. “ABBA is gone, the platform shoes are gone, so why are we still being ruled by people with ideas from the 1980s?”

Luick-Thrams grew up on his family’s farm between Mason City and Clear Lake and received his Ph.D. in modern European history in Berlin. Since then he has written or edited 15 books about Midwest cultural history and launched the TRACES Center for History and Culture, a nonprofit that documents Iowa’s connections to Nazi Germany, including the stories of war refugees who fled to Iowa. ...