Trump dominated rural America. Iowa is testing whether Democrats can win them back

NEW HAMPTON, Iowa (AP) — Standing in the doorway of his home near the corn and soybean fields that blanket this stretch of northeast Iowa, Dave Roethler doesn’t know what happened to the Donald Trump he supported during his first presidency. Trump did a “heck of a good job” back then, the 70-year-old school custodian said. But now Roethler laments an economy in which “it’s the middle-class families that are taking the big hit” while Trump is “going to come out way ahead.” He scoffs at the Republican president’s effort to win accolades such as the Nobel Peace Prize or a spot on Mount Rushmore.

“I think he has delusions of grandeur,” said Roethler, who plans to support Democrats next month in a state that has become a midterm battleground after Trump carried it by 13 percentage points two years ago. The president will return to Iowa twice before the election to rally supporters. Democrats face a steep challenge in winning rural communities like this one in Chickasaw County, a onetime party stronghold that swung sharply to the right in the Trump era as a broader realignment swept through much of the agricultural Midwest.

But by simply narrowing their losses with appeals to voters such as Roethler, Democrats hope to become newly competitive from Iowa and Kansas to Nebraska and Ohio. Josh Turek, the Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat in Iowa, said his party has “looked at this math problem incorrectly.” “You’ve got to go out there in these rural counties and trim the margins,” he said in an interview.

Competitive races in states that usually aren’t Republicans know they are on defense in these states. Trump recently held a rally in Nebraska to boost U.S. Pete Ricketts and will do the same for U.S.

Roger Marshall in Kansas on Monday. Republicans are pumping money into both states before the Nov. Few places represent the party’s challenge like Iowa, where Democrats are mounting spirited campaigns for governor, U.S.

House seats, including the 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses much of the state’s northeast and was considered reliably Republican until recently. With tariffs disrupting the agricultural economy and the war in Iran driving up gas prices — diesel surpasses $6 a gallon in Iowa — U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., swung through the district to ask voters to keep his fragile majority in pla…