DES MOINES (AP) – Former United States (US) President Donald Trump headed to southeast Iowa yesterday in the middle of a fall campaign push aimed at locking in supporters with large organising events.
As he has with his other recent travels to the leadoff caucus state, Trump will campaign in an area that formerly supported Democrats but has embraced him.
Trump was planning to headline an afternoon event in Ottumwa, where his campaign was expecting more than 1,000 potential supporters. The small city is a hub in eastern Iowa and the seat of Wapello County, one of 31 counties Trump carried in 2016 that Democrat Barack Obama had won four years earlier.
Trump, the first Republican to capture the county since the Eisenhower administration, campaigned the week before in northeast Iowa.
There, he drew about 1,400 to rural Jackson County along the Mississippi River and almost 2,000 to Dubuque County to the north. Like Wapello, Dubuque County had been a Democratic stronghold for decades before 2016.
Though aides said they were not specifically targeting counties that Trump flipped in 2016, they noted that he has had success in the eastern part of Iowa where manufacturing has declined sharply in the past two decades.
His administration’s renegotiation of the US trade pact with Canada and Mexico remains popular.
