By SARAH STORTZ
s.stortz@carrollspaper.com
In a crowd of Republican voters during the Greene County GOP Spring Fundraiser last week, Nicole Hasso said she wants the party to “choose differently” for the upcoming election season.
Greene County will be located in the new Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, represented by Democrat U.S. Rep. Cindy Axne. Hasso is one of three Republican candidates running for the seat, along with Zach Nunn and Gary Leffler, who were also present at the event.
Hasso said her story begins in the South Side of Chicago, growing up with a mother who struggled with drug addiction and a father who wasn’t around much.
Hasso said she has two sisters and one brother, with both sisters becoming teenage mothers and her brother deciding to sell drugs.
“God had a different plan for my life,” Hasso said. “I started focusing on going to the library and getting an education, and because of that, I was able to earn an academic scholarship to Drake University.”
Hasso said she was the first in her family to graduate high school, and she was the first to attend college. While attending college, Hasso met her husband, Mitch Hasso, who was a student at Iowa State University.
She is a mother to her 25-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son, and worked at Principal Financial Group, where she helped advisors come up with different retirement solutions for their clients.
“I am living my American dream, but if the Democrats have their way, all that is gonna change,” Hasso said. “There is no American dream for our children if we don’t change the course of this country. They are pushing a radical socialist agenda that is crazy, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
According to her website, one of Hasso’s plans for Iowa is to improve Iowa’s economy by helping create well-paying jobs, lowering taxes, reducing government regulations, and rejecting barriers against small businesses.
Hasso also hopes to protect agriculture by defending agricultural producers in Iowa, opposing President Biden’s 30x30 Executive Order, promoting competitive markets, and building an energy future.
“I am an outsider, I’m not your typical political candidate, but I will not sit on the sidelines and watch this country that I love go to hell in a handbasket,” Hasso said. “I will not sit on the sidelines and allow their agenda to be pushed, and to tell us that we can’t sit down and have conversations, that we can’t have kitchen table talk.”
In her speech, Hasso rejected the notion of the Iowa Republican Party being racist, going on to say she always felt accepted wherever she went.
Her website states Hasso has spoken against the 1619 Project, a longform journalism project by Nikole Hannah-Jones that aims to reframe history by including the consequences of slavery and contributions of Black Americans.
“There is not one county, not one small town, have I ever gone to that I have ever felt in my life was in danger, and this is even prior to when I decided to run,” Hasso said. “We have to stop their agenda, they are not uniting us, but they are looking to divide us. They’re looking to divide and conquer, but we have to take a stand.”