President Trump’s push to secure Iowa, a state he won handily in 2016, is at full throttle, with efforts turning out massive crowds taking even seasoned operatives aback.
The response is intense and unconventional, said one 2016 Trump campaign alum, who was not authorized to discuss the efforts to secure the state.
“You’ve seen the boat parades. Well, I’ve been to six. And I’ve been to three tractor parades. And I’ve been to a golf cart parade. And now, there’s communities all over the state, all over rural Iowa, every single night,” this source said. “And I can’t even keep up with them. I mean, every single night. It is absolutely unreal.”
This source said: “We’ve never seen this kind of real organic, grassroots energy. We haven’t seen it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The campaign is sending Donald Trump Jr. to the state on Thursday and has Iowa native Eric Branstad barnstorming the state alongside his father Terry, the former longtime governor and until last month, Trump’s ambassador to China.
Matt Whitaker, who briefly tenured as Trump’s acting attorney general, is another surrogate stumping for the president in the Hawkeye State.
Democratic enthusiasm is also high, however, visible in the fundraising hauls for other candidates running on the November ticket.
Iowa Tea Party founder Ryan Rhodes pointed to races down ballot, including the U.S. Senate race for the seat held by Republican Joni Ernst, with “massive amounts of money” pouring in from outside the state to try to unseat her.
October’s polls show anywhere from Trump up 2 percentage points to Joe Biden up by 3, with the former vice president leading Trump by an average of 0.8 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics.
And though Trump won the state by 9.5 points in 2016, 51.2% to Hillary Clinton’s 41.7%, at this point in the race, 13 days out from Election Day, the president was ahead by a mere 1.7 percentage points, 41.7% to 40.3%.
Operatives pointed to Thursday’s debate as possibly influencing how the state will turn.
“A big piece of the puzzle will be answered tomorrow with the debate. He needs to have a strong showing,” one Iowa Republican operative said. “There’s a lot of support for him in the state, but there’s folks that are still in the middle and are undecided and maybe just a little unsure. And I think a good debate performance will be able to cement that support going into Election Day.”
This source said Thursday’s faceoff is an opportunity for Trump to “rise to the occasion” by delivering “a clear vision of what the next four years will look like.” Voters want “less bickering and more vision for the future,” he added.
“It can’t be all about the past,” he said. “It has to be, ‘How can we get the nation back on track?’ And if he does that, then I think he might not win by the same margin as four years ago, but he should have a pretty comfortable winning here in Iowa.”
“Republican voters are coming back home,” said another Iowa Republican operative. “The first debate was a true gut punch to [Trump]. I believe the president and Ernst should be able to get small wins here.”
In Iowa as elsewhere, “the same geographic and demographic changes are at work,” this source said, responding to a comparison to Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’s 2018 win. “You might even see Ernst/Trump do even worse than Reynolds in the cities and suburbs and do better with some rural voters.”
Former Polk County Republican Party Chairman Will Rogers said he sees more public and organizational support for Trump this year than for any candidate prior to this election year, including in 2016.
A Trump campaign event last week “was a sea of people,” he said.
He also pointed to a massive voter targeting effort up and down the ticket as a key tactic. “Democrats aren’t doing that organizationally,” he said. “We just picked the Democrats playbook and amped it up.”
David Drucker contributed to this article.
