The Power of Political Disinformation in Iowa

Republicans demonized Democratic candidates in 2020. It worked, and their narrative remains largely intact, posing challenges for the Biden Administration.
David Balk, a farmer who lives in Fayette County, Iowa, said, “There’s no way that Biden got that many votes.”Photographs by Kathryn Gamble for The New Yorker

The Biden Administration is accomplishing much, and quickly, with the passage of a nearly two-trillion-dollar relief package, and the President’s announcement that he will order states to offer universal vaccine access by May 1st. He is resuming efforts to combat climate change, expand access to health insurance, and energize American diplomacy. Holding power in Congress by the thinnest of margins, Democrats face pressure to deliver clear proof of success before the 2022 campaign season begins. They are counting on policy successes, a sturdy economy, and a return to some measure of normalcy to lift their prospects in the midterms, when the party in power often loses seats.

Whatever their emerging record, Democrats must also overcome a fearsome wall of mistrust, and a broad willingness among Republicans to believe the worst about them. Nowhere is this clearer than in Iowa, where Republicans rolled to one victory after another last November, powered by support for Trump and disdain for the Democrats. Trump beat Biden there by eight points, a dozen years after the Obama-Biden ticket carried the state by nine. Senator Joni Ernst, once considered vulnerable, was outpolled by Trump, but still collected fifty-two per cent of the vote to defeat her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield. Democrats lost six state House seats and two congressional seats, including one by an excruciating six votes out of nearly three hundred and ninety-four thousand cast. (The Democrat, Rita Hart, is continuing to contest the results.) The other seat belonged to Abby Finkenauer, an energetic first-term Democrat, who was blindsided by her defeat.

Republicans drove turnout to unexpected levels by crafting a blunt-force narrative anchored in puffery and lies when it came to Trump and caricature when it came to Democrats. The message was repetitive, it was relentless, it was thin on facts and policy detail, and it worked, especially in rural counties, where Trump and the G.O.P. won by significant margins. The fundamental attack was straightforward: Democrats were socialists at heart, and would raise taxes, expand government, and extinguish individual freedom. Biden, meanwhile, was portrayed as corrupt and, at age seventy-seven, as barely able to complete a coherent sentence. The twin attacks coalesced during the summer of 2020. As David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican strategist, explained, they went something like this: “Well, he’s obviously older, he’s getting more frail, which means he’s not strong enough to fight inside his own coalition against the more extreme voices.” Republican leaders and pundits amplified the message, and it powered candidates up and down the ticket. “No memos,” Kochel said. “You just picked it up every day from what the President and his people were saying.”

Chad Ingels is a Republican farmer from Fayette County, in Eastern Iowa, where he raises corn, soybeans, and hogs, on a farm that has been in his family for nearly a hundred years. He ran for the state legislature last year, travelling the district and knocking on doors, as he campaigned for a House seat that no member of the G.O.P. had won in more than a decade. It took him a while to get over the initial nervousness of trying “to sell yourself to someone who doesn’t want you on their doorstep.” When he did, he quickly discovered that voters cared most about one detail in his biography, and it was not his position on school funding or water quality, two of his fields of expertise. Rather, they wanted to know his party affiliation. He told them he was a Republican. “Almost universally, they said, ‘Good, you have my vote,’ ” he recalled.

Rick Hofmeyer saw the G.O.P. messaging take hold. He is the chairman of the Fayette County Republicans, and his roots in the Party run deep. “I have voted for Democrats, but not too many,” he told me, when we met at his home, in the town of Fayette, where he lives with his dog, Duchess. He came late to his support of Trump, in 2016, after his preferred candidate, Ted Cruz, lost the Republican nomination. Since then, Trump has grown on him, and the Democrats have continually turned him off. He watched as Republican strength grew throughout the fall. “A good share of it was concern over how things were going in the cities,” he said. “When we sit out here in our nice, quiet homes and we see rioters breaking glass and setting up their own independent countries, that is just not us.” He heard frustration, in his conversations with other voters, that Democratic candidates “were not complaining about it, or doing anything about it; that they were starting to be run by the far left.” Biden did criticize violent demonstrators, repeatedly. But the message vanished beneath an avalanche of eye-catching news coverage, conservative commentary, negative advertising, and Trumpian smears. Among a critical mass of Iowa voters, the conviction grew that Biden and the Democrats could not be trusted.

This past winter, I made two trips to Eastern Iowa and called around the state, speaking with strategists, candidates, party activists, and regular voters. I wanted to understand why things had gone so smoothly for the Republicans and so badly for the Democrats—and what it might tell us about the midterm elections and, perhaps, the prospects of the Biden Administration. A central lesson is that facts matter little when the opposition chooses demonization over debate and pivotal groups of voters stick to what they think they know. Hofmeyer, for example, still doubts that Biden won the election fairly. Looking to 2022, he plans on urging Fayette Republicans to move past Trump, which he expects will “cause a problem with a few people.” But he isn’t worried about the Party’s future. “I think we’re going to be O.K.,” he said. “This remains a contest between the rank and file and the Washington insiders.”

Democrats were hopeful, even buoyant, about their election prospects at times last year. But, apart from the marquee victories in Arizona, Georgia, and the race for the Presidency, they didn’t achieve the results they had expected, in Congress or at the state level. The results in Fayette County, where nearly eighty per cent of voters cast ballots, revealed Republican energy in rural America that many outsiders failed to see coming. Biden collected more votes than Hillary Clinton did four years ago, but Trump’s gains over his 2016 total were even bigger. The evidence is clearest in the House results. Finkenauer, the Democratic incumbent, increased her total from two years earlier by about four hundred votes. But Ashley Hinson, a Republican state legislator and former television reporter, collected roughly eighteen hundred votes more than the 2018 Republican candidate, and won the seat by more than ten thousand votes.

Drawing on the 2020 G.O.P. playbook, Hinson’s pitches were thin on policy and thick with innuendo. In one video advertisement, unflattering black-and-white photographs of Finkenauer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on the screen, side by side, as Hinson declared in a voice-over, “Washington politicians are making things worse.” (Finkenauer, then thirty-one, had been in office less than two years.) In another advertisement, Hinson said that Washington was home to “socialists trying to abolish the police” and “radicals trying to tear down our country.” A Republican National Committee video claimed that “Finkenauer votes with the radicals,” and a National Rifle Association mailer targeted what it called her support for “fanatical gun control.”

For the record, Finkenauer is anything but radical. She does not favor abolishing the police, tearing down the country, or repealing the Second Amendment. She did support Pelosi for Speaker, after avoiding the question during the 2018 campaign, and she voted for Trump’s first impeachment. She also sponsored bills designed to support her rural constituents while broadly backing a centrist Democratic agenda. “Anyone who knew anything about Abby Finkenauer would find the notion that she’s a socialist ridiculous, but the margin in this race was likely not the people who knew anything about Abby Finkenauer,” Jason Noble, her former communications director, said. “If you wanted someone to have a government agenda to help rural places, she was doing it. People didn’t hear that, didn’t listen to it, or wanted to go the grievance route. If they refuse to listen, what do you do?”

One line of argument, as Democrats across the country sorted through their poor results in Senate and House races, was that the party failed to choose candidates who align with their states and districts, allowing Republicans to paint them as outside the mainstream. Yet Finkenauer, who grew up in a working-class family in the district, appeared to be a solid match. So, too, did Greenfield, Ernst’s Democratic opponent, a real-estate executive who grew up on a farm and talked often about the agricultural economy, pitching herself as a “proud, scrappy farm kid” determined to act accordingly in Washington. In a viral debate moment, Greenfield knew the price of corn, to the penny, and gave a polished answer about the price needed for farmers to break even. Asked the same question, about soybeans, Ernst fumbled, and guessed “about five dollars and fifty cents.” The correct answer was ten dollars and five cents.

During the campaign, however, Ernst successfully tied herself to Trump, joining him onstage in Iowa to declare, “I love you. God bless you. Four more years!” Running behind in many polls, she also badly misrepresented Greenfield’s positions. After Greenfield said that the United States should address “systemic racism throughout all of our systems,” including health care, housing, education, and policing, Ernst falsely told supporters, according to the Iowa Starting Line, “that every single sheriff’s deputy, sheriff, every police officer, every trooper out there, she’s calling them racist.” In one Ernst advertisement, a law officer wearing a bulletproof vest says to the camera, “Being a cop these days is hard enough, so it doesn’t help when liberals like Theresa Greenfield call us ‘racist.’ ” Ernst tweeted, “This is the type of talk you’d expect to hear from Portland or San Francisco, not someone who wants to represent Iowa.” Defending against such inflammatory attacks proved to be the Democrats’ biggest struggle. Kochel said Democrats often left themselves vulnerable to attack. In his view, some candidates, wary of alienating their base, fudged their positions on the Green New Deal and police funding, giving Republicans an opening. “It’s just getting harder and harder to frame yourself outside of these labels,” he said, “and Republicans did a better job of doing that.”

The master label-maker was Trump. His followers knew that his opponents were “Sleepy Joe” Biden and “Phony” Kamala Harris, whom he called a “monster” and a “communist.” Two days before the election, he brought his show to Dubuque. To the cheers of the crowd, many wearing winter gloves and red MAGA hats, he reinforced the themes that his campaign team had been pounding for months. “Joe Biden is a corrupt politician, and we know that,” he claimed, and said, of Biden’s mental faculties, “He’s shot.” Yet, he implied that Biden was also a powerful menace. Biden’s approach to COVID-19, Trump said, “will turn America into a prison state, locking you down, while letting the far-left rioters roam free to loot and burn.” He said falsely that Biden, whose Catholicism is central to his political and personal identity, wants to “abolish religious liberty and they want to ban God from the public square.” He misrepresented Biden’s approach to taxes and ethanol, two topics dear to Iowa voters, and said falsely that Biden wants to give “free health care” to undocumented immigrants. Biden’s victory would lead to “a socialist country,” Trump said. “And America will never be a socialist country.”

For years, Trump’s aides described his rallies as little more than performance art that entertained his fans and satisfied his ego. But, even if one takes their declarations at face value, millions of his supporters didn’t have the same impression. In my conversations with dozens of Trump voters last year, most recently in Iowa and Wisconsin, their explanations echoed the rhetoric of Trump and his campaign messengers. I met Kimberly Pont, the vice-chair of the Fayette County G.O.P., at a Mexican restaurant in the small city of Oelwein, and asked her what drove local residents to vote Republican. She said, “People could see the news. They could watch for themselves what was going on, when you have a party that’s not going to denounce rioting.” Pont believes COVID-19 death figures are inflated, mail-in voting is dangerous, Biden is a “figurehead,” and Harris is unqualified. “I’m terrified,” she told me. “She is the most left-leaning of all the senators.” When I caught up with Pont this month, she told me that the failure by the courts to identify widespread election fraud left her “disappointed and disillusioned.”

Pont suggested that I visit David and Maxine Balk, who raise hay on two hundred and forty acres in far northwest Fayette County. The Balks live on a gravel road just outside Waucoma, in the clapboard farmhouse where David was born. A faded, hand-drawn sign on their front porch reads “Stop Abortion, Vote Pro-Life.” A sign in the window says “Keep America Great.” Of Trump, Maxine said, “He was always about us, the people. He will never forget the people.” As for Finkenauer, the daughter of a small-town Iowa pipe fitter, well, that was another story. “She was tied to Nancy Pelosi too much. She was just a puppet,” David said. Maxine remembered the night in 2019 when Democratic women in Congress dressed in white to honor the fight for gender equality. “I’m sorry,” Maxine said, “but you dressed in white at the State of the Union address, and you sat over there with all the so-called woke women, a bunch of snowflakes.”

The Balks, who raised seven children, have had COVID-19. David collapsed in late November and went by ambulance to the hospital, where he received a plasma infusion. They are baffled by the suggestion that Trump bears any responsibility for the country’s suffering during a pandemic that has left more than half a million people dead, including thirty-seven in Fayette County, and many more in economic ruin. “I thought he did excellent,” Maxine said. “He got out there and got the manufacturers to make things that they never dreamed they could. He’ll never forget the people. That’s who he is.” They also said other things. David: “Biden was such a liar.” Maxine: Harris “doesn’t have a conscience.” David: “There’s no way that Biden got that many votes.” Maxine: “All the good that has been done will be undone.” David: “How long do you think Biden’s going to last? One year. They’re going to push old Joe aside.” To this day, Maxine has not warmed to the Democrats. In March, she told me, “There’s so much hate coming from them.”

Andy McKean was the longest-serving Republican in the Iowa legislature, representing the farm communities just east of Cedar Rapids, when he quit the Party in 2019 and became a Democrat. He felt unable to support Trump, or the party that Trump led. McKean’s district was composed of so-called pivot counties, which voted twice for Obama before switching to Trump in 2016. He calculated that he could win reëlection while running as a Democrat who doesn’t like taxes, supports the Second Amendment, opposes abortion (“but not in a doctrinaire way”), and cares about constituent service. “I’m still the same Andy McKean that they knew yesterday,” McKean, a soft-spoken man with silver hair, said. But once he announced his decision, he learned that many Republican voters did not think he was the same person at all. “I never knew you would side with the communists,” one told him. He recalled a campaign visit to a business owner whom he had helped with a problem: “I said, ‘I hope I can count on your support on November 3rd. I hope you remember what I’ve done for our area.’ She said, ‘I’m sorry, if you were a Republican, I could vote for you.’ ” There was virtually no policy discussion during the campaign, he said, and no nuance. One of the mailers sent to voters by the Iowa Republican Party asked, “Whose team are you on?” This was an obscure state house contest, but the Democratic “team” pictured on the mailer was McKean, Nancy Pelosi, and Bernie Sanders. He lost the race.

Andy McKean, a long-serving legislator who quit the Republican Party and became a Democrat in 2019, lost his bid for reëlection.

As McKean sees it, the Democrats have an image problem in Iowa that will be difficult to repair. “Somehow, the Republican Party has become the patriotic party, it has become the Christian party,” he said. “We’ve actually heard people say that you can’t be a Democrat and still be a Christian.” He blames the relentlessness of G.O.P. messaging and the persistence of media bubbles: “People can hear what they want to hear, and hear it over and over again.” Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter communities are one part of the bubble. But a technology more than a hundred years old is a powerful component. As I conducted interviews during the campaign and after, I began to notice how often a radio tuned to conservative talk shows was playing in the background. The radio in the Balks’s kitchen was tuned to Rush Limbaugh’s show, which, until his death in February, was syndicated by more than six hundred stations around the country and admired by Trump, who awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

What was Limbaugh saying on December 15th, when I visited the Balks? I listened later. He falsely accused the American Medical Association of lying about the dangers of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, and said the organization wanted to hurt Trump’s electoral chances. He mocked Biden, who had delivered a speech while suffering from a cold, by playing a spliced montage of Biden coughing and clearing his throat. “It was a train wreck, he couldn’t stop coughing,” Limbaugh said. Mixing insinuation and fantasy, Limbaugh claimed that “information on the Bidens is mounting” and that the new President would serve “at the pleasure” of Barack Obama, who could give “a green light to Democrats to take Biden out.” He went on, spinning an illusion that he presented as fact: “Obama’s been running the Democrats’ show since 2016. He ran the operation against Trump. He ran the Russia sting. He ran the Russian coup. He ran everything, and he’s running this.”

I spoke with Republican voters who admired Trump for pulling out of the Paris Climate agreement and various United Nations programs, and who credited him with leading a strong pre-pandemic economy. As Election Day drew nearer, Republicans also benefited from one factor that was particular to the 2020 race: the decision by the Trump campaign and many G.O.P. candidates to stage rallies, bus tours, and community gatherings, while Democrats avoided even socially distanced canvassing for most of the campaign. This made it especially difficult for Democrats to overturn false impressions. As Norm Sterzenbach, the former executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, told me, the way to do so is to talk with voters face to face and show that “I’m not Washington, I’m not a socialist, I’m not going to defund the police department, I’m not going to end farming.” When prominent Democrats convened on Zoom for a post-mortem, Tom Vilsack, the Democratic former Iowa governor and newly seated U.S. agriculture secretary, made the point succinctly: “People in the rural counties, unless they know us, don’t trust us, and you can’t beat something with nothing.” Cindy Axne, the only Democrat to hold on to her U.S. House seat in Iowa, won by limiting the damage in rural counties, a feat she attributed to showing up regularly and answering questions and complaints. That included weekly appearances on KMA radio, and monthly sessions with Raccoon Valley Radio. Vilsack, too, said that taking tough questions, even if constituents don’t agree with you, is “really, really, really important.” Axne, meanwhile, believes face-to-face campaigning would have saved Finkenauer’s job.

After eagerly claiming their Iowa victories, as surprised as everyone else that they did so well, the Iowa Republicans are marching into the midterm election cycle with their narrative intact, their media champions in place, and Trump barking from the sidelines. “Democrats are vicious,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference, in late February. After the November debacle, more than one Iowa Democrat told me that they no longer recognize their state as a place that voted twice for Obama and elected a Democrat, Tom Harkin, to the Senate five times. Douglas Burns, a longtime newsman and political independent who co-owns the Carroll Times Herald, is similarly pessimistic. As a reporter, he watched any number of Iowa Democrats run what he considered solid, mainstream campaigns, attentive to voters and their local concerns, only to lose. “Unless you live here, I don’t think you can appreciate the level of rural white grievance,” he told me. “We think that you can win people over with the issues. I’m not sure that you can.”