Former President Donald Trump ran up his historic margin in the Iowa caucuses by maintaining his dominance with rural voters despite his challengers’ pledges to expand biofuel usage and roll back the Biden administration’s regulatory agenda.
Trump carried 98 of the state's 99 counties and won 51% of the vote, 30 points ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who finished with 21.2%. Nikki Haley, who came in third with 19.1%, won Johnson County, the state’s fourth-largest and home of the University of Iowa, by a single vote over Trump.
Trump owed his margin to his dominance in rural areas, which accounted for 41% of the turnout, according to the CNN entrance poll of caucusgoers. Some 30% of the voters were urban and 28% were suburban.
Trump’s popularity among rural voters showed in his performance in the state’s most productive agricultural areas. He beat the combined total of DeSantis and Haley by more than a two-to-one margin in four of Iowa’s seven top corn-producing counties.
In the top corn county — Kossuth County, located on the Minnesota border — Trump got 430 votes, compared to 152 for DeSantis and just 58 for Haley. In Crawford County in western Iowa, Trump got 202 votes to a combined 85 for DeSantis and Haley. In north central Iowa, Trump carried Webster County by 652 votes to 251 for DeSantis and Haley.
Similarly, in Clinton County in eastern Iowa, Trump won by 1,139 votes to 395 for DeSantis and Haley.
By comparison, Trump won the state’s largest counties, Polk and Linn, by much smaller margins. He carried Polk, which includes much of metropolitan Des Moines, with 6,629 votes, but DeSantis and Haley combined to get 9,337. DeSantis and Haley got 3,387 votes in Linn County, home to Cedar Rapids, to 2,992 for Trump.
Iowa’s smallest county by population, Adams, gave 108 votes to Trump and 60 to DeSantis and Haley.
Trump has become a champion of white working-class voters and rural and small towns, said Dennis Goldford, a political analyst at Drake University in Des Moines.
“He didn’t create but he uncovered, I think, a significant element of anger, grievance, fear in the country, and to some extent in the cities, but I think more of the rural and small-town areas of the country,” Goldford said.
Former Iowa Ag Secretary Bill NortheyBill Northey, a former Iowa agriculture secretary who served as USDA's undersecretary for farm production and conservation during the Trump administration, said Trump has a loyal following in Iowa among people who feel that the country did better under his administration.
“The ag and rural communities felt like there was somebody aggressively working to try to make things better,” Northey said.
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Northey said Iowa voters welcomed Trump's trade actions against China, even though it's a major export market for soybeans and other commodities.
DeSantis, who has shifted in his personal views on ethanol, and Haley addressed several ag and rural issues during the campaign, including at the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit just four days before the caucuses.
DeSantis came under attack during the campaign for positions he took while in Congress, including a proposal to repeal the Renewable Fuel Standard.
But DeSantis told the summit crowd that he had “checked all the boxes” when it came to biofuel policy, including pledging support for year-round use of E15. He pledged to “rein in the bureaucracy,” citing specifically the Biden administration’s “waters of the U.S.” rule redefining the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act, and climate-related regulations.
DeSantis also criticized California's Proposition 12, which imposed housing standards on sows used to produce pork that is sold in the state. “I don't think that that's healthy for this country to have parts of our … national economy governed by just one state,” he said.
Haley similarly pledged to turn the biofuels industry into an “economic powerhouse” and curb regulations. “Farmers are your ultimate survivors. They can’t control the weather, they can’t control pricing and the last thing they need is government pushing down on them more,” she said.
She also touched on trade policy by calling for the United States to build export markets in India and other countries to reduce the dependence of U.S. farmers on China when it comes to exports.
In the end, there is little evidence ag issues drove voter decisions.
Some 38% of the caucusgoers surveyed for the entrance poll said the overall economy was the biggest issue for them, while 34% chose border security. Voters who said those were the most important issues favored Trump by a larger margin. Voters most concerned about foreign policy favored Haley, while voters whose No. 1 concern was abortion leaned toward DeSantis.
While ag issues and trade policy came up during the campaign, the “things that really drove the conversation come back to handling of the economy, spending and border security,” Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig told Agri-Pulse.
He said he thought the turnout was “very strong” despite the brutally cold weather. Some 110,298 people voted in the caucuses, down from nearly 187,000 in 2016, when the GOP nomination was last contested.
Kevin Ross, a Minden, Iowa, farmer and former president of the National Corn Growers Association, said farmers continue to benefit from the attention that presidential candidates have to give to ag issues when they campaign in Iowa.
“On strictly ag issues, I think you could poke some holes in each of them in where they may or may not stand, or have historically stood,” he said. “But I think anytime you get across our state, and spend the amount of time that you did in our state, you're going to walk away from here understanding how important ag and biofuels are to not only Iowa, but the rest of the country.”
Noah Wicks and Spencer Chase contributed to this report.
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