On Thursday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced that President Trump’s rally scheduled for Sunday in Dubuque was canceled, and so was a rally he was supposed to hold in Kansas on Saturday. Less than 24 hours later, the White House canceled those cancellations.
“Rallies are BACK ON! President Trump loves his supporters, and in addition to nearly 20 tele-rallies, he will hold back-to-back rallies in Kansas and Iowa on Sunday,” according to a statement from the White House on Friday morning.
The statement did not offer any explanation for the sudden about-face. The RNC statement on Thursday did offer a reason for canceling the Iowa and Kansas rallies.
“With Election Day approaching, the Republican Party is maximizing opportunities for President Donald J. Trump to speak to voters across the country,” it said. “With Republicans in a strong position in Kansas and Iowa, previously planned in-person rallies in those states will no longer take place as scheduled.”
As part of “maximizing opportunities,” the president would be holding “tele-rallies in nearly 20 states,” instead of in-person rallies ahead of Election Day. Tele-rallies involve people calling into a central phone number, and listening to the president speak. When Trump has done tele-rallies in the past, he has typically spoken for 10-15 minutes, instead of putting on a performance of 90 minutes or more, as he has been doing during his pre-election tour.
Trump’s tour has had staging rallies in states that typically vote Republican, and that he won in the 2024 presidential election, because Republican campaigns in those states are faltering and Trump’s party is likely to lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate as well. There’s a certain irony in Trump going to those states to try to boost candidates, since polls show disapproval of Trump’s performance in office is an important factor dragging down those candidates and energizing Democrats.
Trump won Kansas and Iowa all three times he’s been the Republican candidate for president. In both states, his biggest margin of victory came in 2024, when he beat Kamala Harris by 16 percentage points in Kansas and 13 points in Iowa. In both states, registered Republicans substantially outnumber registered Democrats among active voters, with Republicans making up 44 percet of active voters in Kansas and 39 percent in Iowa, as of Oct. 1. Registered Democrats accounted for 26 percent of active voters in Kansas and 29 percent in Iowa. In both states, people registered as “no party preference” outnumber Democrats.
Iowa hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2008. Kansas hasn’t since 1932. That may change this year, which is a big reason why Trump has been campaigning in both states.
Trump announced he was coming to Iowa for two rallies in a Truth Social post on Oct. 15, “to get truly fantastic Warriors elected.” He listed Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn, as well as 1st District Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and 3rd District Rep. Zach Nunn, as well as Joe Mitchell, who is running for the open seat in IA-02, among his “warriors.” Miller-Meeks and Nunn skipped Trump’s Oct. 22 rally in Sioux City, and the president never mentioned their names.
Joe Mitchell used his two minutes on stage with Trump to obsequiously praise the president, and even gave Trump a framed certificate declaring him “The Man of the Century.” (A clearly unimpressed Trump handed the certificate to an aide without looking at it.) Hinson also had two minutes on the stage with Trump, but didn’t engage in the sort of hyperbolic praise of the president she started her campaign with.
After Joni Ernst announced in September last year that she wasn’t running reelection, Hinson immediately put out a statement.
“As we look forward, President Trump needs a fighter in the Senate,” she wrote. “I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with the President to pass this America First agenda in the House and I would be his strongest ally in the Senate.”
Three days later, Hinson was on Fox News, praising Trump and telling an interviewer, “I think he’s going to go down as the best president in our history.”
None of that was a surprise. Hinson has always voted the way Trump has said members of Congress should, and has a long history of extravagantly praising the 80-year-old president, even denouncing efforts to hold him accountable for crimes committed when he wasn’t in office. In May 2024, she called his conviction on 34 felony fraud counts a “disgrace and total sham.”
Now that she’s in a toss-up race with state Rep. Josh Turek for the open Senate seat, Hinson no longer talks about being Trump’s “strongest ally in the Senate.” Instead, she is running ads that portray her as always being bipartisan. The ads are well produced, and may be convincing to voters unfamiliar with Hinson’s actual record.
The bipartisan presentation is helping her chances of winning, according to the Cook Political Report (CPR). In August, the well-respected election analysis site changed its rating of the Iowa Senate race from Leans Republican to Toss Up.
“Republicans acknowledge it’s tighter than they’d like, but their internal surveys still have Hinson leading within the margin of error. Republicans will privately admit that Turek — a former Gold Medal basketball paralympian who’s in a wheelchair due to spina bifida — is hard to demonize,” editor Jessica Taylor wrote in CPR’s August analysis.
Turek may be hard to demonize, but Hinson, the Republican Party’s Senate Leadership Fund and Elon Musk have spent millions on ads trying to do just that, while Hinson has also been pushing bipartisan rebrand.
In its final analysis of Senate races before Election Day, CPR notes that Hinson is in the best shape of any of seven Republicans in races rated as Toss Up.
“Both Democrats and Republicans privately believe that if only one GOP candidate in our Toss Up states hangs on, it will be Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson over Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek,” Taylor wrote on Friday. “The key here may be Democratic state Auditor Rob Sand’s margin of victory in the governor’s race and if it’s enough to pull Turek, a former paralympian, over the finish line.”
“Hinson has shown herself to be a talented communicator who deftly distanced herself from some of Trump’s most unpopular policies, but the president is still deeply underwater in the state. Private and public polls show the race is a dead heat, with each side believing their candidate is up, but within the margin of error.”
It’s unclear what, if any, impact Trump’s rescheduled rally on Sunday afternoon at the Five Flags Event Center in Dubuque may have on the Senate race. His rally in Sioux City was a standard rambling performance piece, with the president airing his grievances and regurgitating his standard set of racist, xenophobic and transphobic remarks. Trump spent very little time talking about Iowa, and politicians he seemed most focused on was Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
During the few minutes Hinson spent onstage with Trump at the Sioux City rally, she did not say if she still believes Trump is “going to go down as the best president in our history.”
