President Trump’s Iowa advantage is slipping as Democrats are beating out Republicans in total active voters on their rolls, after adding more than twice as many as the GOP since January.
Democrats hold a 4,952 voter advantage despite beginning the year with a more than 26,000 voter deficit.
After adding 60,556 active voters since the start of the year, Democrats now have 674,455 voters registered, according to figures from the secretary of state’s office. Republicans added 29,323 over the same period, bringing their total to 669,503.
In Iowa, where Trump trounced Hillary Clinton in 93 of the state’s 99 counties and won by 9 points, a bigger margin than Texas, a 2024 win for Trump had not seemed in doubt. Iowa has the highest concentration of counties that first went for President Barack Obama in 2012 and then for Trump four years later.
But Democratic enthusiasm has heightened after a busy presidential primary season where Democrats attacked the president repeatedly in the state.
A May television ad targeting Trump paid for by the Lincoln Project, a high-profile group of anti-Trump Republicans, ran in Sioux City, blaming him for leaving Iowa “weaker, sicker and teetering on the verge of economic turmoil” by failing to respond quickly to the coronavirus.
Trump’s reelect effort is now spending big on television ads in a bid to claw back its 2016 advantage.
The campaign spent more than $400,000 on television ads in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and Sioux City in recent weeks, according to data from Advertising Analytics.
The campaign also spent nearly $1 million on television ads that began airing on June 2 in Ohio, another state Trump easily won in 2016.
In both Iowa and Ohio, Trump spent enough for his ads to be seen by almost everyone who watches television.
“They wouldn’t waste the money if they didn’t need to,” Doug Gross, a Republican operative and former chief of staff to Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, told Politico.
And despite finishing fourth in the Democratic Iowa caucus, Biden has the opportunity to play the “change” candidate amid the protests calling for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
According to the RealClearPolitics Iowa average, Trump is still up plus 4.5 percentage points against the presumptive Democratic nominee former Vice President Joe Biden. On June 10, 2016, Clinton led Trump by 4 points in Iowa, falling to Trump plus 3 points by Election Day.
But Democrats see a contest emerging in November.
“We were approaching ‘done’ status — stick a fork in us,” former Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky said of the party’s status after Trump’s success in the 2016 election.
Today, “the worm is turning,” she said.
