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MAGA's Midterm Defectors

Iowa is seemingly at the center of the pushback against President Trump as the state grapples with the impact of both tariffs and higher fuel costs.
Duration
30m
Broadcast on
16 Oct 2026
Audio Format
other

Perhaps no American feels the domestic effects of the war, tariffs and inflation more than the Iowa farmer. The political environment stirred up by those farmers’ strife could allow the Democrats to seize the moment and elect one of theirs to the Senate or the governor’s mansion for the first time in 20 years — making Iowa potentially one of the most important states on the map this midterm cycle.

Today, we follow Caleb Renner, a young farmer in north central Iowa, as he shows the effects of the past two years on his community and talks about why those effects may lead him to turn on the Republican Party for the first time, and whether that will translate into support for Democrats.

Guest: Caleb Renner, a farmer in Klemme, Iowa.

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Photo: KC McGinnis for The New York Times

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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bovaro. This is the Daily. Yesterday on the show, our colleagues from the politics desk explained just how much next month's midterm elections will come down to the decision-making of Republican voters in red states who are now deeply disillusioned with President Trump and whether that disillusionment will push them into the arms of Democrats. Today, Daily producer Anna Foley travels to Iowa. A state Trump and Republicans have dominated for the past decade to speak with one of those Republican voters about what he's choosing to do with his frustrations. It's Friday, October 16th.
OK, I think we have corn on the left side of the street, and I think we have soybeans on the right. There's an old saying in Iowa that, in order to have a good harvest, your corn should be knee-high by the 4th of July. Hi! Sorry, I might smell like gasoline. Oh, no, that's totally fine. By the time I flew out to Iowa, in late summer, the corn towered over me. This is my cornfield right here. I was there to meet Caleb Brenner, a corn and soybean farmer. You can see it's bright yellow on the tip, but as it gets closer to the base, it's more of like a cream-colored. That's what we call the milk layer. Caleb's only 25, but he's been farming for years. He's the fifth generation of his family to work these fields. And his folks had him start young. I loved to ride in the combine with my dad, and my earliest memory is sitting in the combine and thinking I was inside of a spaceship, especially at nighttime. It's big open windows. You can see all around you, and it's nothing but like a really dark cornfield, and then a bunch of glowing flashing buttons and monitors. It was awesome. Even today, I love sitting in a combine. Caleb told me another thing he remembered was that growing up, it felt like a given that he was a Republican. I grew up in a very traditional, bright red area. Caleb's county, Hancock County, it's always been a reliably conservative area. But when Trump came on the scene, it went from bright red to deep, MAGA red. In 2016, Hancock went almost 30 points more to the Republican side. Caleb was so in high school at the time, but he remembers how Trump resonated with the people around him. You got to understand what he captured at the time, too. It was almost like this outsider, I'm going to drain the swamp as he says. It was also around this time, Caleb says, that he started to hear a lot more that Democrats were the enemy, that the stakes of every election were existentially high. It was like overnight, it became the right is against the left, and this tribalism sort of just emerged from, I don't even know where. It's like we're fighting a culture war, we're fighting against the liberals, or we're fighting against them. So by the time 2020 came around, there was really no question who Caleb's first vote for President would be.

Transcription truncated.

Iowa is seemingly at the center of the pushback against President Trump as the state grapples with the impact of both tariffs and higher fuel costs.