she starred in a $1 million ad calling an iowa democrat "just plain dangerous" for kids. her own statement says "i drank and drove with my children in the car." read the room, babe.

The Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines, for illustration. Photo: Thesavagenorwegian, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Washington Post and Shellie Flockhart's own statement

The ad is the kind of thing you have seen a hundred times this fall. Several women. A warning about a Democrat and children. A bathroom vote. The super PAC behind it, the Congressional Leadership Fund, spent at least $1 million on it, according to The Washington Post, which cited AdImpact. One of the women is Shellie Flockhart, a city council member in Dallas Center, Iowa, who says of Democratic House candidate Sarah Trone Garriott that "when it comes to our kids," she is "just plain dangerous."

Then the Post pulled the court file.

what the court records say

In 2017, an officer found Flockhart parked in the grass on the side of a highway with two of her children, then 8 and 11, in the car, according to an affidavit in Dallas County court records the Post reviewed. A preliminary breath test read 0.254, about three times the legal limit. She later pleaded guilty to one count of child endangerment and one count of operating a vehicle while intoxicated, both misdemeanors, and got a fine and probation, the Post reported.

She does not dispute it. In a two-page statement she posted on X after the story ran, titled "My Past. God's Grace. My Testimony.", Flockhart wrote: "I drank and drove with my children in the car." She called it "inexcusable, a profound failure in judgment that endangered those I love most," and wrote that she has committed to sobriety since.

Recovery is real and nobody here is mocking it. The problem is the script, not the sobriety. The ad's whole argument is that one vote makes a person a danger to children, forever, no context, no grace. Flockhart's statement asks for exactly the grace her ad refuses to extend.

how she answered

She did not answer by stepping back. She told Trone Garriott that "a pastor's job is grace and healing," not "weaponizing a 10-year-old OWI against someone with a decade of sobriety," and called that "spiritual abuse." The next day she wrote that "Iowans aren't dumb," that she "appeared in that commercial unpaid and willingly," and that she only speaks "to what is documented and on the record." Which, yes. So did the Post.

On Tuesday she was back on X after a radio appearance: "Candidate Sarah Trone Garriott can't silence me."

Trone Garriott is challenging Rep. Zach Nunn, a Republican, in one of Iowa's most competitive House races, and the votes the ad attacks are on transgender issues, including her vote against a bill on which school bathrooms students can use, per the Post. A spokesperson for her campaign called the ad "desperate lies." It is not the only Iowa race this cycle where Republicans have run on trans panic. It is the one where the messenger came with her own court record.