RED OAK, Iowa — Sarah Trone Garriott, candidate for Iowa’s Third Congressional District,
spent Sunday in Montgomery and Page counties, knocking doors with local volunteers, touring
a Page County family farm, and speaking at the Montgomery County Democrats summer picnic.

Sunday is part of a stretch of rural campaigning that has taken Trone Garriott across the
southern and western end of the district. She has already held an open town hall in every one of
the 21 counties in the Third District. Her opponent, Congressman Zach Nunn, has not held a
single public town hall during his tenure in Congress.

“I learned a long time ago that if you want to serve a community well, you have to show up,”
Trone Garriott said. “So that is what I am doing. I am going to the small towns and the farms and
the county picnics, and I am listening. You learn things on a gravel road that you will never learn
in Washington.”

Costs and the farm economy
Trone Garriott has made the cost of living the center of her campaign, and she points to the
tariffs as a place where a member of Congress could act tomorrow.

The average Iowa family paid about $1,300 more in 2025 because of the tariffs, according to an
analysis by the Joint Economic Committee minority. Iowa’s net farm income is down 53 percent
since 2022 and farm bankruptcies have doubled. Nunn has voted eight times to keep the tariffs
in place and has called them “winning.”

“A tariff is a tax, and Iowans are the ones paying it,” Trone Garriott said. “Farmers are paying
more for fertilizer and more for equipment, and then they watch their customers overseas go
somewhere else. Families are paying more at the grocery store and the hardware store. Our
congressman voted eight times to keep those tariffs going and called it winning. I will vote to end
them.”

Montgomery County Memorial Hospital
Trone Garriott also spoke about rural health care, which she says is the issue she hears about
most in the small towns of the district.

Montgomery County Memorial Hospital in Red Oak is operating in the red, one of a number of
Iowa rural hospitals under significant financial strain. Nunn voted for the 2025 budget bill that
made the largest cut to Medicaid in the program’s history. Asked afterward whether rural
hospitals would close, he told WHO13 News, “I think the myth here is that rural hospitals are
going to close down. That’s not the case.” Since then, three clinics serving rural Iowans in the

Third District have closed and cited those cuts, including MercyOne’s family and internal
medicine clinic in Ottumwa and the River Hills Community Health Center clinic in Centerville.

“Montgomery County Memorial Hospital is a vital piece of this community,” Trone Garriott said.
“Congressman Nunn voted to cut Medicaid and then told Iowans it was a myth that rural
hospitals would be in trouble. It is not a myth in Red Oak. I will work to restore that funding,
because when a small town loses its hospital, it loses the doctors, the nurses, the jobs and the
reason young families stay.”

About Sarah Trone Garriott
Trone Garriott is an ordained Lutheran minister who still preaches on weekends and is marking
her 18th year of ordination. She has served as a hospital chaplain and a parish pastor, and for
nine years she worked for the largest food pantry network in Iowa, where she brought together
churches, businesses, schools and community groups to feed 32,000 people a month. Her
father was an auto mechanic and her mother was a nurse. At 18 she worked 30 hours a week at
Walmart to put herself through school.

She was elected to the Iowa Senate in 2020 by defeating a sitting Republican Senate President,
and in 2024 she became the only Iowa Democrat to win a Senate seat carried by Donald
Trump. In the Legislature she has worked across the aisle to cut taxes and lower prescription
drug and child care costs, and she introduced bills to set term limits and to ban politicians from
trading stocks. She takes no corporate PAC money in this race. She lives in Dallas County with
her family.

###