There's what Ashley Hinson says when she thinks Iowans are listening, and there's what she says when she thinks they aren't.

On May 28, 2026, at a campaign stop in Fort Dodge, Hinson was caught on audio talking about Trump's war with Iran. The recording was first reported by Politico and obtained by CBS News. Here is what the Republican candidate for Iowa's open U.S. Senate seat said in that conversation:

"I do hope we can get this done by the next couple of weeks. If it drags on beyond that, it's a political liability for us too. Because we've lost Iowa soldiers."

And then:

"I've been to four funerals since December. It's awful."

Read that first quote one more time. Iowa soldiers are coming home in caskets, and the framing she reached for — in the same breath — was that this is a liability for us too.

Then she went back to Washington and kept voting to keep the war going.

Six votes

Between March and July 2026, Hinson voted seven times against measures to limit or end U.S. military involvement in Iran and Lebanon — all seven of them war powers resolutions.

She was one of 207 House Republicans who voted in July to keep us in the war — a vote that side lost, 214-208.

Nothing about her private worry changed her public vote. Not one time.

In the same conversation, she gave the other half of the argument: that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and that the families of the fallen Iowa soldiers had "all said we need to finish the job." "Even in their grief," she added.

That's the trick. The grief of the families she visited gets used as an argument for continuing the thing that produced it — in the same conversation where she's counting the political cost.

Who paid for the votes

Here's the part that makes the pattern legible.

Federal Election Commission records show Hinson's campaign and her leadership PAC have taken $98,000 from oil and gas PACs since 2021 — Chevron, ExxonMobil, Valero, Phillips 66, Marathon Petroleum and the American Petroleum Institute.

And after the war began at the end of February 2026, oil and gas PACs — Chevron, Valero, Phillips 66, Marathon Petroleum, ConocoPhillips and the American Petroleum Institute — gave her Senate campaign another $21,000.

You should know what that money was buying, and what it bought them:

• U.S. crude oil averaged about $96 a barrel in the second quarter of 2026.
• ExxonMobil reported $14.53 billion in profit between April and June — more than double the same period in 2025.
• Chevron reported $12.1 billion in second-quarter profits, up from $2.49 billion a year earlier.

Chevron's profit went up nearly fivefold. In the middle of that quarter, its PAC wrote a $5,000 check to the member of Congress voting to keep the conditions in place.

This is not a one-off. We documented the identical arrangement in Ohio, where Chevron made $12.1 billion off the Iran war and put $200,000 into a super PAC for Jon Husted, who has voted 13 times to keep it going. Same war, same quarter, same company, same play — just a different Republican.

What it costs at the pump in Iowa

While Exxon and Chevron were posting those numbers, Iowans were paying for them.

The average price of a gallon of gas in Iowa went from roughly $3.00 a year earlier to about $3.77 in early August. Diesel climbed past $5.00 a gallon.

Diesel is the number that matters most in Iowa, and it's the one that gets the least attention. Diesel runs the combines, the grain trucks, the co-op deliveries, and the semis that move Iowa's corn and soybeans to market. When diesel goes over $5, every acre in the state costs more to farm and every bushel costs more to move — and none of that comes back.

So the ledger for Iowa looks like this:

She knew

The thing that separates this from an ordinary bad-votes story is the audio.

A member of Congress can vote wrong out of conviction. That's a disagreement. What the Fort Dodge recording establishes is that Hinson understood the war was going badly enough to be a political problem, understood Iowa families were burying their children over it, and voted seven times to keep it going anyway — while the companies profiting from it topped up her Senate campaign.

She has served in the U.S. House since 2021. She is running for the seat Joni Ernst is leaving, against Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek, in what polling suggests is a close race.

Iowans get to decide whether "political liability" was a warning about the war — or just about the election.

Source

"Rep. Hinson backed Iran War and took big oil cash as Iowa gas prices surged" by Richard Eberwein, Heartland Signal, August 7, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall. The Fort Dodge audio was first reported by Politico on June 2, 2026.