President Donald Trump plans to hold two campaign rallies in Iowa before Election Day, on October 22 and November 1, according to a Republican Party of Iowa news release. The visits come as a state Trump carried by 13 percentage points in 2024 has turned into an unexpected battleground, with Republicans scrambling to defend an open U.S. Senate seat and multiple competitive U.S. House districts.
The rally locations have not yet been released. As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports, Trump's last Iowa appearance was a January rally in the Des Moines suburb of Clive, where he focused on immigration and economic messaging. He has campaigned in the state during the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 election cycles, but the stakes surrounding this return trip are notably different.
Republican Ashley Hinson is running for the open Senate seat against Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek, and the race is tight. A Real Clear Politics rolling average cited by the paper has Turek leading Hinson by about one percentage point, while a separate October 15 Marist poll reported by Forbes showed Turek ahead 48% to 45%. The seat is open following Republican Sen. Joni Ernst's retirement, and Democrats need a net gain of four seats nationwide to flip the Senate.
A State Suddenly Back in Play
The shift is reflected in how outside analysts now view Iowa. The Cook Political Report rates Iowa's 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts as leaning Democratic and the 2nd District as a toss-up, the paper notes, and the nonpartisan group had previously moved the Senate race from lean Republican to toss-up while shifting the governor's race from toss-up to lean Democrat, according to the Washington Post. In the governor's race, polling favors Democrat Rob Sand over Republican Zach Lahn, the Star-Telegram reports.
Underlying the shift is a New York Times/Siena poll conducted between September 22 and October 1, which found just 40% of likely Iowa voters approved of Trump's job performance while 58% disapproved. On his policies specifically, 50% of likely voters said they had hurt the state, compared with 19% who said they helped and 27% who said they made little difference.
Republican Candidates Walk a Tightrope
Iowa's three House Republicans have had to navigate friction with Trump's own agenda. Representatives Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks both supported a resolution to curb Trump's war powers and end the war in Iran, while Hinson voted against it, according to the Star-Telegram. That vote has drawn outside spending: the Democratic PAC VoteVets committed $4.5 million in ad buys attacking Hinson over her position, part of a broader campaign Hoodline detailed in its earlier report on the group's tracker of broken Iran war deadlines.
Policy friction has extended to the Senate race as well. In their first televised debate on October 7, Turek attacked Hinson over her vote supporting $1 trillion in federal Medicaid spending reductions, while Hinson countered by criticizing Turek's voting record in the state legislature, according to the Washington Examiner.
Trump's Pending Visit Follows a Wave of Surrogates
Trump's planned rallies cap months of surrogate campaigning across the state. Vice President JD Vance appeared at a September 18 rally in Council Bluffs, and Cabinet secretaries Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Scott Bessent also campaigned in Iowa through August and September, according to The Gazette. Hinson, Miller-Meeks and Nunn did not attend the Council Bluffs rally, per the Star-Telegram's reporting.
Iowa Republican Party chair Jeff Kaufmann said Trump has a major role in motivating the GOP's base voters, while Republican gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn said in Jefferson that Republicans will win if they turn out to vote. The state currently has about 180,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, per October data from the Iowa Secretary of State cited in the Star-Telegram's reporting.
A $15 Billion Announcement and Its Political Backdrop
Trump's visit follows his September 28 announcement at the White House that India-owned Mesabi Metallics will build a $15 billion steel complex in Lee County, Iowa, a project the administration says will create 1,750 permanent manufacturing jobs and support up to 6,000 construction jobs, per a release from The White House. Trump said he and others would attend a rally with Hinson and work to elect her, and Hinson has promised Trump an Iowa pork chop, according to the Star-Telegram. The Iowa Legislature moved quickly, approving a $1.36 billion state tax incentive package for the project in a one-day special session, which Governor Kim Reynolds signed into law that night, as reported by CBS News.
National Republican leaders have also been making visible, if uneven, commitments to the state's most contested House race. House Speaker Mike Johnson joined Miller-Meeks at a rally in Davenport, shortly before reports surfaced that the GOP-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC was reducing ad spending in her district, according to the Quad-City Times. Miller-Meeks faces Democrat Christina Bohannan for a third consecutive cycle in Iowa's 1st District, a seat she won by six votes in 2020 and held again in 2024 by 799 votes, according to Punchbowl News.
With as many as three competitive U.S. House races on the ballot alongside the open Senate and governor's contests, Iowa's shift from a state Trump dominated in 2024 to a genuine toss-up has made his return trip this month a test of whether his personal presence can still move votes in a state growing more skeptical of his policies, per the polling cited by the Star-Telegram.
