“In 2016, there was no ground operation essentially,” said Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann. “Literally, he got second place because of the sheer force of his personality. We have several campaigns here that have excellent ground games and Trump is one of them. But it’s not even day and night. It’s different planets from 2016.”
But it wasn’t just grunt work that drove Trump’s approach to Iowa. The candidate himself had a desire for vengeance in the state. Part of that was an outgrowth of his loss there in 2016 to Sen. Ted Cruz. Though Trump went on to steamroll to the Republican nomination that year, he stewed over falling short in the first-in-the-nation caucuses. He has long blamed a lack of political operation in the state and privately recalled that his daughter, Ivanka, called him the night of the 2016 Iowa contest to tell him that she was at a caucus location and that he had no organizers present.
“In 2016, we had tremendous support but we didn’t really have a ground game, we had never done that before. We had a group of people, but they weren’t really a ground game,” Trump told reporters on Sunday.
Trump was also driven by a desire to poke a thumb in the eye of the Iowa party hierarchy that had spurned him. Unlike other states, where Trump has amassed a dominant share of endorsements from top Republicans, in Iowa he was largely empty-handed. The state’s governor, Kim Reynolds, endorsed DeSantis, as did prominent evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats, and more than a third of the state’s Republican state legislators.
The former president has taken the slights personally. He has been vocal in his attacks against Reynolds, and has reminded allies that he endorsed her in her successful 2022 reelection bid.
“She went from being the most popular governor in the United States in two weeks to the least popular governor in the country. But I just thought it was very disloyal,” Trump said on Sunday of Reynolds’ decision to endorse DeSantis.
Trump’s win on Monday foreshadows a general election rematch with Joe Biden that will be adjudicated, in large part, over Trump’s past record in office.
Biden’s reelection campaign has said that it will center much of its focus on portraying Trump as a threat to democracy itself. Trump, for his part, has spent a good swath of the primary campaign at trials related to his conduct before and on Jan. 6. And he has not hid his desire to return to power, in part, to go after the political opponents he believes are now targeting him.
“These caucuses are your personal chance to score the ultimate victory over all of the liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps and other quite nice people,” Trump told a packed room of supporters in Indianola, Iowa on Sunday.
Those comments may end up turning off voters in a general election. But for the primary campaign, they have only drawn voters to him. At a rally on Sunday, Larry, a farmer from Kansas who would only go by his first name and drove in for the event, seemed gleeful at the prospect of Trump going on a vengeance tour.
“Trump, get this shit cleaned up,” he said. “Start military tribunals. … You’ll probably see Biden, Obama, the Clinton’s.”
