Marshalltown, Iowa — Iowa senator Chuck Grassley has held his seat since 1980. Tom Harkin served alongside Grassley as the state’s junior senator for 30 years before retiring in 2015. Tom Latham spent 20 years representing Iowans in the House. Before him, Leonard Boswell represented them for 16 years. And their governor, Terry Branstad, is the longest serving governor in U.S. history.

Many Republican presidential contenders this cycle have called for members of Congress to be term-limited. It’s a politically logical and popular idea in a year when much of the Republican base is rioting against Washington, D.C., and even sitting Senators are casting themselves as outsiders. But here in Iowa, where voters have a tendency to reelect the same politicians over and over and over again, the argument can have a strange ring to it.

At Cecil’s Diner here on Wednesday afternoon, seven-term Representative Steve King, one of Ted Cruz’s top surrogates in the state, found himself making the case against Cruz’s stance on the issue.

“How do you and Mr. Cruz feel about term limits?” a man asked. “Because I think that’s part of the problem we have in Washington: People are just trying to get reelected.”

#share#“Ted Cruz is for term limits. He’s said he’ll fight for a term-limit constitutional amendment. We have never fought over that. But, you know, I’m in a different position on that,” King told the 20 people sitting in booths and on stools at the counter. Too much turnover, he said, made for a Congress inexperienced in dealing with the issues at hand.

“I wouldn’t say to Ben Carson, ‘you don’t get to operate on brains anymore, you’ve been doing that for ten years,’” King said.

“I don’t think that you get much by doing the term limits, ‘cause . . . I think you lose a lot of the experience you might otherwise have,” he added. “And I kind of cast the responsibility on the constituents to make that decision for their member of Congress.”

#related#To be sure, the issue is not at the forefront of this presidential campaign. Voters inclined to support Ted Cruz (or Carly Fiorina, or Ben Carson, or Jeb Bush, for that matter) are unlikely to be put off by their support for term limits for members of Congress. And the Iowans listening to King at Cecil’s openly lamented how long the likes of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel had held onto their seats. But they weren’t ready to toss out their own representatives.

“I don’t want to lose the Chuck Grassleys or the Tom Lathams of the world. . . . I’m not willing to give them up just to get rid of Reid and Pelosi,” a man in the back of the room chimed in after King made his case. “We’ve got the ballot box for that.”

— Alexis Levinson is the senior political reporter for National Review.