Can Dems beat Trump in Iowa?
President predicts he’ll win the state in November with historic landslide
DES MOINES, Iowa — For a full year, Democrats owned the Iowa spotlight as presidential candidates logged thousands of visits, spent tens of millions on TV and digital ads and boasted of rallies that drew, on some of their best days, 1,000 ardent supporters hoping to defeat President Donald Trump.
Then on Thursday, Trump dropped in for 21⁄2 hours and attracted more than 7,000 fans at a rally where he predicted that Iowa would deliver for him again in November — and warned what would happen if it did not.
“We’re going to win the great state of Iowa, and it’s going to be a historic landslide,” Trump declared. “And if we don’t win, your farms are going to hell.”
For the last three presidential elections, Iowa has been a barometer of the nation’s vacillating political sentiments. Twice it broke overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, who beat John McCain by nine points here in 2008. It swung back to give Trump a nine-point victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And as the 2020 campaign formally begins on Monday with the state’s caucuses, Republicans and Democrats are again looking to Iowa for answers.
Is Iowa — with its large rural, blue-collar and overwhelmingly white population — the kind of state where the Republican Party that Trump remade is going to
dominate as long as he is on the ticket?
Or does it offer a glimmer of hope for Democrats to regain voters they lost in 2016?
As Mike Halepis waited to enter the rally at a Des Moines college campus the other night, he predicted the same “landslide” as Trump.
“Look around you. You see anybody else getting this kind of crowd?” Halepis, a restaurant employee, said. “The numbers, the economy, everything’s headed in the right direction for the president, and we want to make sure we are, too.”
But the indicators have not all been positive for Trump. Democrats roared back to life in the 2018 midterm elections, picking off two of the state’s four congressional seats from Republicans. The antiTrump sentiment was most evident around cities like Des Moines and along the Mississippi River, which is home to the nation’s largest cluster of counties that voted twice for Obama and then for Trump. Those pivot counties have suffered from Trump’s trade war with China.
Democrats said they were making inroads with Republicans and independents.
“We are up for grabs,” said Sean Bagniewski, chairman of the Democratic Party of Polk County, which includes Des Moines.
He pointed to four Statehouse seats that Democrats flipped in 2018. In Polk County, 871 people newly registered as Democrats in January, which the party says included 273 former Republicans.
But Jon Seaton, a Republican strategist with long experience in Iowa, said the party’s loss of suburban women — a national phenomenon — was more than offset by white blue-collar voters who have broken a historic allegiance to Democrats to vote for Trump.
“I think the numbers that they are able to move are just not going to be nearly sufficient to overcome what is happening on the Republican
side,” he said.
And Republicans can point to winning the governor’s race, along with picking up three seats in the state Senate in 2018.
Before swooping into Des Moines, Trump tweeted a New York Times/Siena College poll showing him winning head-tohead matchups with four leading Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa.
But what the president called “a great poll” also showed him ahead of Pete Buttigieg, the former Indiana mayor, by just one point and besting former Vice President Joe Biden by two points. Those numbers show how his political standing has softened after three years in office.
As Democrats consider which parts of the country and what kinds of voters are most persuadable, they are divided over whether Iowa’s swing voters are worth pursuing, compared to others who are more liberal-leaning, but didn’t show up in 2016.
Jeff Link, a Democratic strategist here who has held focus groups of Obama-Trump voters, said his party was passing up a huge opportunity if it ignored the 150,000 Iowans who cast ballots for Obama and then supported Trump.
“They didn’t want to vote for Trump,” he said, but were resigned to him as a protest against Hillary Clinton and the Washington establishment.
There are some signs that the Republican Party’s brand is in trouble in Iowa. Last year, the state’s longest-serving Republican legislator left the party and became a Democrat. Andy McKean, a representative from an area in northeast Iowa that broke for Trump in 2016 after voting for Obama in 2012, explained his switch, saying, “If this is the new normal, I want no part of it.”
But examples like these remain the exception because most Republicans understand that the voters who make up their bedrock support have an affinity for Trump that is far greater than their attachment to the party.