NEW HAMPTON, Iowa — 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. Sen. Pete Ricketts and will do the same for U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas on Monday. Republicans are pumping money into both states before the Nov. 3 election.
Few places represent the party's challenge like Iowa, where Democrats are mounting spirited campaigns for governor, U.S. Senate and several 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 place.
“This state is so important to us,” Johnson said in Cedar Falls.
The Republican erosion was evident about 45 miles north in New Hampton. A few houses away from Roethler, 69-year-old Bill Stonecypher voted for Trump in 2016, expecting him to apply his business acumen to governing. Now Stonecypher plans to vote for every Democrat on the ballot for the first time in his life.
“I just know it’s a mess and it’s going to take years to fix," he said.
Another neighbor, 70-year-old Deb Thorne backed Trump in 2024 but said he hasn't followed through on his pledge to lower costs.
“He lied to us,” she said. “I’m looking more at Democrats for everything.”
How a candidate for governor is reaching beyond the party base
Democrats in Iowa are buoyed by Rob Sand, the state auditor whose campaign for governor is built on explicit overtures to independents and disaffected Republicans.
A few dozen people gathered recently in an American Legion hall in St. Ansgar, a square-mile town near the Minnesota border. Sand opened by describing a “pretty standard upbringing” centered on hunting, fishing and church.
He distanced himself from the fighting over cultural issues that has bogged down the national party. A few heads in the room nodded as he spoke of opposition to transgender girls playing on female sports teams.
"All that stuff was stuff that nobody was talking about back when we were in high school," said Sand, whose opponent is Republican Zach Lahn, a political newcomer.
The only reason he was a Democrat at all, Sand said, was that he had to pick a party to participate in primaries and he thought Democrats were stronger on issues like clean water and protecting public land.
Jim Wherry, a Republican member of the Mitchell County Board of Supervisors, attended the event and said Sand “has a pretty good chance.”
“My big thing is sometimes things get focused on urban areas,” he said. “So I like that he's actually incorporating rural Iowa.”
Sand, who has won two statewide elections as state auditor, said he's received support from voters who also backed Trump.
“One of the things that people who vote for both of us find in common is that we say what we think and we're dissatisfied with the political system,” he said.
Democrats are boosting rural investments
Democrats are stepping up their rural investments. The Democratic Governors Association has directed $10 million each to campaigns in Iowa, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin and could spend elsewhere ahead of the election.
“What I see is a map that has grown and grown and grown and that is good for Democrats,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who leads the DGA, said in an interview.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is focused on retaking the House, launched a rural engagement program for the first time this election cycle, including polling, paid media and staff. The group has made a six-figure investment in television advertising in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District alone.
Democratic candidate Lindsay James, a chaplain who often speaks of her faith to connect with voters, could see a boost because the district includes Sand's hometown of Decorah. She's competing against Republican Joe Mitchell, a former state representative who worked in the Trump administration.
In an interview, James said she was “committed to showing up everywhere.” When asked why Democrats lost rural voters in previous elections, she was blunt in her assessment.
“Democrats in Washington have left the Midwest behind," she said.
Economic concerns could give Democrats an opening
The economic headwinds in Iowa could give James and other Democrats an opening.
A poll conducted in August by The Associated Press, in partnership with KFF, found that rural voters in the United States are economically frustrated with Trump. About half of rural voters believe the national economy is "worse off" than when Trump returned to office in January 2025. The survey found about 6 in 10 rural voters disapprove of Trump's handling of the war with Iran.
Still, the survey found that rural voters were unlikely to support Democrats on a large scale in November.
Mark DeVries, a 64-year-old farmer in Franklin County, Iowa, said he does not agree with everything Trump does and acknowledged the president's tariffs have hurt his business. But he said he was sticking with Trump and Republicans.
“He's doing stuff that needs to get done,” DeVries said of Trump.
Campaigning with Mitchell, Johnson drew on that loyalty to Trump to warn of the consequences of Democrats regaining control of Congress. A Trump impeachment, he said, “is the first thing that would happen.”
But the Democrats hoping to go to Congress avoided being drawn into that fight.
Turek said he had “no interest” in impeachment and that Democrats “need to look forward, not back."
James, who has made fighting corruption a campaign theme, said she's “not interested in political theater.”
“I'm certainly interested in accountability,” she said. “But I'm singularly focused on policies that are going to provide, immediately, relief for families.”