President Trump has secured the state of Iowa, adding six Electoral College votes to his tally.
The Associated Press called the state with 95% of the vote reported.
Trump won most of the state’s rural counties, while urban Des Moines and Cedar Rapids voted for Biden.
“Hard work always pays off,” Trump’s Iowa czar Eric Branstad told the Washington Examiner shortly after the state was called.
In his push to hold the state, President Trump called on veterans of his 2016 campaign — including Iowa native Branstad, who with his father, longtime former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, gave a rousing show of support.
A packed schedule saw the pair barnstorm the state in the closing weeks of the race, when Republican operatives pointed to massive enthusiasm for Trump’s reelection on the ground.
Many told the Examiner they had never seen anything like it.
“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,” said one source said. “And I can’t even keep up with them. I mean, every single night. It is absolutely unreal.”
Trump won the state by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016, 51.2% to Hillary Clinton’s 41.7%.
Six days from Election Day, Biden held a narrow 1.4-point advantage over Trump, according to a RealClearPolitics average of polls. Individual surveys had veered from as much as Trump +10 in March to Biden +6, also in March.
The polls narrowed as Tuesday neared, with at least two showing the candidates tied in the final month of the election.
While Trump held an advantage over Clinton in most Iowa polls in the last presidential race, he held the same slim 1.4-point lead over the former secretary of state six days before Election Day 2016.
By three days out, however, Trump had more than doubled his lead and would go on to win the race by 9.5 percentage points.
The president faced headwinds this year, among them an opponent that his campaign struggled to define.
Biden was at one time portrayed both as the architect of the 1994 crime bill, and therefore complicit in its ramifications, and a vessel of the “Defund the Police” movement, which erupted out of protests following the death of George Floyd.
A steady uptick in coronavirus cases across the Midwest also loomed large over the final weeks of the election, calling into question Trump’s response to the public health crisis.
Trump’s trade war with China also weighed on voters in Iowa, an agricultural powerhouse with close ties to Beijing.
