President Donald Trump is returning to the campaign trail, this time in hopes of buoying a crop of Republicans running for a spate of battleground and GOP-leaning races in Iowa.
Iowa has open Senate and governor’s races, while another two House seats are considered to be toss-up contests, according to the Cook Political Report.
With the House, in particular, poised to be decided by a couple of races, every district will be critical as Trump and Republicans try to defy history and retain control of Congress after this November’s midterm elections.
The White House previewed that Trump’s trip on Tuesday to Clive, Iowa, which is in Rep. Zach Nunn’s (R-IA) 3rd Congressional District, will underscore the president’s economic and energy policies and that he will make similar appearances each week until the end of this electoral cycle.
“We’re going to be doing a lot of campaign traveling, I hate to tell you guys, but it’s going to keep you employed,” Trump himself told reporters this week. “We’re going to work hard.”
For Trump, the Iowa trip will be an opportunity to convince farmers struggling due to his trade war with China and other countries that his policies will, at the end of the day, help American agriculture. In December, the administration announced $12 billion in bailout money for the industry, while Trump has also touted the resumption of soybean crop purchases by China — something the country paused in retaliation for his tariffs.
“The farmers have been great. I helped them out when we were going through the difficulty with China,” the president told reporters. “China’s buying a lot of product right now, as you know. But while we had that negotiation, I gave them, you know, billions of dollars, and they were very happy.”
The bailout only represents a Band-Aid for farmers, and the industry has other priorities that the president has backed. Nunn, for example, pointed the Washington Examiner to his support of Republicans seeking to approve the year-round sale of higher-ethanol gasoline blends that would increase the demand for corn.
The push for the higher gasoline blend became a sticking point in government funding talks this past week, but agriculture lawmakers in the House backed off their demand in exchange for a commitment to vote on the policy shift in February.
“I want him to help, which he has committed to, to getting E-15 across the finish line for America’s farmers,” said Nunn, a second-term congressman seeking reelection in one of the two Republican-leaning toss-up races.
There is a risk to bringing Trump out on the campaign trail, as his average approval rating is 12 percentage points underwater, according to RealClearPolitics. But Republicans are, by and large, still comfortable with his presence in their states.
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), who is running in the other toss-up race, pointed to Trump’s agenda in telling the Washington Examiner he would “absolutely” be a help in her district, Iowa’s 1st.
“He’s the president of our party,” Miller-Meeks said. “We have had a remarkable first year in 2025 doing things for the American people that we were elected to do, which is securing our border, passing the largest tax cut in American history, which every Democrat voted to raise the average [American’s], average families’, single mothers’ taxes. Provisions that help small businesses, family farms, and are beneficial to senior citizens. You know, [the] child care tax credit doubling. So very good provisions.”
The third-term incumbent added: “We have a lot to run on, in addition to the first bills to make healthcare more affordable. So I think we’ve got a lot to both work on, to talk about, and I think focusing on those domestic issues and what we’ve accomplished in the first year, and that what we hope to accomplish in this year is important.”
Trump’s trip to Iowa comes after White House chief of staff Susie Wiles promised last November, following Republicans’ underperformance in the off-year elections, that the president would “campaign like it’s 2024 again,” a response to GOP concerns that the voters they depend on to turn out will not do so when he is not on the ballot.
Trump first traveled to Rep. Rob Bresnahan’s (R-PA) 8th Congressional District in Pennsylvania last December with the aim of rebutting Democratic claims that he was to blame for the rising cost of living.
“They always have a hoax,” the president told a crowd in Mount Pocono. “The new word is affordability. Democrats talking about affordability is like Bonnie and Clyde preaching about public safety, and they are really the, truly, the enemy of the working class when they do it.”
This year, Trump has already traveled to Detroit with his economic message, but his remarks were overshadowed by the middle finger he gave to a since-suspended Ford worker who called the president a “pedophile protector” during his factory tour, an apparent reference to Jeffrey Epstein.
Republican strategist and former Rep. Philip English (R-PA) emphasized that “campaigning on improving household incomes requires governing with a focused message of creating jobs and improving paychecks.”
Beyond message discipline, English said Trump needed to hammer home the benefits of his signature tax law, which extended the lower rates that were slated to expire last December.
“Their challenge is that nobody ever gets credit for staving off a tax increase that the public was unaware of,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Unless Trump claims the high ground on tax policy, the next Congress will be focused on raising tax revenues regardless of economic competitiveness.”
Trump’s campaign trail blitz comes as Democrats average a 5-point advantage over Republicans in generic congressional ballot polling, leading Trump to downplay his party’s prospects this November.
“Whatever reason, it’s a deep-down, psychological reason, sitting presidents that won, even that won big, we won big, all seven swing states, the popular vote, sitting presidents don’t seem to do well in the midterms,” he told reporters this week. “I guess over a 50-year period, they won twice.”
During a rare appearance in the White House press briefing room to mark one year since he returned to power, Trump also told reporters that “maybe I have bad public relations people, but we’re not getting [our accomplishments] across.”
That historical trend has led some of the most vulnerable Republicans to create some daylight with their party’s standard-bearer. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who represents Pennsylvania’s 1st District, preferred to be more independent, contending he has “never really had anybody with me on the campaign trail at any level of government.”
“We run our own race. I always have,” Fitzpatrick told the Washington Examiner. “He’s welcome to travel anywhere he wants. We have our own race with our own issues. We know our people well, and that’s how we’re approaching it.”
But others, including Bresnahan, have not distanced themselves.
“Anytime the president of the United States wants to come and visit northeastern Pennsylvania, we will welcome him with open arms,” he said.
With respect to Iowa, University of Iowa professor Timothy Hagle said that “it’s probably true” there are people who supported Trump because he was “willing to take even the Republican Party to task.”
“It’s really a matter of getting the voters that maybe supported Trump, but then are less inclined to vote in a midterm election,” Haggle told the Washington Examiner.
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And surrogates like Vice President JD Vance insist there is a “strategy behind the messaging” and that voters will come around to supporting the party as that message is shared.
“Because when people are aware of some of the things that we’ve done, and they connect them to administration policies, they’re much more likely to vote Republican,” Vance told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
“The flip side of it is acknowledging, yes, there are a lot of people who are still struggling, but again, connecting that to some of the policy decisions made during the last administration,” he said.
Christian Datoc contributed to this report.