Republicans abound at the Iowa State Fair

Des Moines, Iowa

This isn’t your grandfather’s Iowa State Fair. 

Iowa, once a reliably blue state, hosts an internationally renowned fair every summer that explodes in popularity during presidential cycles. This year was different. Republicans ran the show, building off their almost complete political domination of the state. 

“Iowa has been trending red,” the state’s lieutenant governor, Adam Gregg, told me, laying out the stakes. “The future of our state and the future of our country is impacted by what Iowa does.” And the state fair is where it’s at. Gregg, who’s been coming here for “decades,” called the fair “ground zero” for presidential campaigns. While Joe Biden skipped out on the fair, some of his intra-party rivals did stump around, but failed to garner the traction of Republicans.

The state fair is so critical to the DNA of Iowans that the new congressman who represents the fairground, Zach Nunn, told me that he’s only missed three in his life: one that was canceled due to Covid-19, the other two while he was deployed overseas in the Air Force. 

While Iowa helped propel Obama into the White House, Democrats have since yanked the first-in-the-nation caucus from the state in part because Biden lost it in 2020 in an event so mismanaged that there is still no formal winner. 

Another previous tradition, the Des Moines Register’s soapbox where presidential candidates took their messages, hasn’t disappeared, but it was supplanted by a panoply of ways that Republicans addressed their voters directly. 

The state’s governor, Kim Reynolds lent a variety of Republican presidential candidates her star power in a series of “Fair Side Chats,” where Republican candidates (excluding Donald Trump, but including whoever Ryan Binkley is) made their case, with Reynolds acting as interrogator

Her chats gave candidates large and small an opportunity to connect with voters. Larry Elder, a nationally renowned talk show host, kicked off and was mobbed by voters who said they’ve spent decades listening to him. While Elder is currently nowhere near qualifying for any presidential debates, there’s an obvious benefit to being first, which lesser-known candidates like Perry Johnson, who spoke on the last day, missed out on. 

Two other lesser-known candidates seized the spotlight afforded to them before the Trump-DeSantis feud dominated the scene: North Dakota governor Doug Burgum and Miami mayor Francis X. Suarez, both of whom attempted to qualify for the GOP debate stage by giving out free money and tickets to see Lionel Messi, respectively. Burgum’s team flooded the zone early on, and he was one of the first to compete in the “Olympics of grilling” with Reynolds at the famed Pork Tent.

Burgum the billionaire, who’s been leaning heavily into “small-town values,” told me his background is what’s been helping him resonate with voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and beyond. “In a small town, you’re accountable for your actions. You’ve got to live your life with integrity.” Unsurprisingly, he’s a fan of Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” — and has actually been selling merch with the slogan. Aldean himself closed the fair down on its final day.

As for Mayor Suarez, he made the case that Iowa and Miami aren’t actually that different: both formerly blue enclaves that are rapidly trending red. But he also had to reckon with how to qualify for the debates. He told Reynolds that Iowa has a special place in his heart because the state gave him his first poll towards qualifying, but his aligned PAC has been sounding way rosier than he was about whether he can make the stage. While it’s unclear if he’ll take the stage in Milwaukee (he needs 1 percent in two national polls), his PAC blasted out a missive that “Suarez hits RNC Debate Thresholds,” causing confusion among some voters at the fair who pay close attention to this nitty-gritty.

“We gave a poll to the RNC yesterday that was a national poll, we hope that qualifies,” he told me. Hope, however, is not a strategy. He told reporters later that he would consider dropping out if he doesn’t make it on the debate stage. 

After hours, the state fair shenanigans really commenced, headlined first by the Ruthless Podcast’s cattle call, which featured free-flowing booze, candidates and virtually every elected Republican in Iowa. 

“People want politics that are not only fun, but that are also functional,” Representative Nunn told me at the Ruthless show. And the podcasters delivered at an event filled with presidential candidates like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, and games — including one where DeSantis perfectly guessed whether it was a Democrat or a journalist who was attacking him.

The Ruthless show, while rowdy, wasn’t violent. That happened the next night, when the Trump versus DeSantis feud escalated into an all-out bar-room brawl, seemingly sparked by Trump hats. This chippiness was reflected at the fair itself, where airplanes flying banners telling DeSantis to “be likable,” along with voters on the ground heckling DeSantis, dogged the Florida governor. Trump also rolled up with a squad of Florida Republican congressmen who have endorsed him over DeSantis. 

On the flip side, DeSantis took the tried and true path to winning the state fair, flipping burgers at the pork tent, sitting down with Reynolds for a chat and retail politicking. Trump lost the state’s caucus in 2016, and the DeSantis team (along with Tim Scott’s crew, among others) sees a path to dethroning him here in January. 

At the fair, you’d see a Republican presidential candidate making a spectacle by rapping Eminem (like Vivek Ramaswamy) or eating rattlesnake (like Doug Burgum) almost anywhere you looked. Meanwhile, Iowa Democrats openly bashed the fair and almost entirely skipped out. Longtime Democratic congressman Dave Loebsack told the New York Times that the fair’s country music doesn’t appeal to him —jd sc and J.D. Scholten, a highly-touted Democratic candidate in the past, skipped the fair to play baseball in the Netherlands. 

None of this is to say that Democrats were totally absent, however. They shipped in Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who has managed to maintain the lockdown in his state just to the north, and a fellow with an apron boasting of 100 percent Glatt Kosher Swag and a book called Make America Kosher Again was frequently at several of the Republican stops. 

In the spirit of an evolving Iowa State Fair, I asked attendees what they would sculpt out of butter and place it next to the iconic butter cow sculpture, and got some great results: Abraham Lincoln (Elder), a lobster (Suarez), a Tiger Hawk (Gregg) and a bison (Burgum). While none lifted a sculpting knife this year, one thing that’s for sure is that the Iowa State Fair will be open for their entries next year…