This Woman Just Trying to Get Some Ranch at a Presidential Campaign Stop Is All of Us

As the race for the 2020 presidential election heats up, it's become increasingly clear that we're all in for another doozy of a campaign season...

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As the race for the 2020 presidential election heats up, it's become increasingly clear that we're all in for another doozy of a campaign season. And with a full year and eight months to go until Election Day, it's easy to understand why some of us aren't ready to fully embrace the madness of it all. Take, for example, this very relatable woman in Iowa, who briefly interrupted a campaign event hosted by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand not to engage with the candidate, but just to find some ranch dressing. 

Gillibrand, who is among the 10 Democratic candidates who've thrown their hats into the ring so far, was addressing a crowd at the Airliner Bar in Iowa City, Iowa on Monday night, when a woman pushed her way into the center of the scrum, presumably to see and hear the senator better. However, as she needled her way through, she made it clear that was not at all her intent, and that she was simply "just trying to get some ranch" from the bar. The crowd erupted with laughter, because if there's anything that unites us all as Americans, it's our love for ranch dressing (and perhaps our aversion to politics this early in the election cycle). 

The moment was captured on video by a CNN producer nearby, and the clip (shown above) has been retweeted over 2,200 times and amassed nearly 9,000 likes as of this writing. The folks at New York Magazine identified the ranch-seeker as a student at the University of Iowa named Hanna Kinney, and caught up with her.

She explained she was at the bar to meet with her weekly bible study group that night, and was simply trying to fetch some of The Airliner's famously delicious homemade ranch for the pizza they were all eating. 

"It was all the way in the back of the restaurant. I finally got through and when I came back holding a squirt ranch bottle I said something like, 'I got my ranch.' People were literally yelling 'yes, queen' and 'she got her ranch!' I was just like, 'Thank you, I’m going to go back upstairs now,'" she said. 

She also wants to dispel any rumors that she was trying to to disrupt the event or snub Gillibrand. 

"The funny thing is I was just trying to get to the back quietly and a lot of articles have said 'person snubs political candidate' and I honestly wasn’t trying to snub her. I was pushing through people in the nicest way possible. ’Cause you know, 'Iowa nice,'" she said. 

Rock on, ranch Hanna. Rock on.


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Joe McGauley is a senior writer for Thrillist. Follow him @jwmcgauley.