Alex Wagner

To us, that sounds very different from Make America Great Again, but to a lot of the voters that our party has lost, they sound very similar, right?

People who are willing to challenge a broken status quo.

And especially for a lot of folks in small town and rural America, they have been failed by leaders in both parties.

And I would say in Iowa, going back to the farm crisis in the 80s,

Our state has had a reflexive skepticism of the establishment because of how much damage that did to our state and what the kind of consequences of that have been over the last 40, 50 years.

And so you've seen Iowa support people like Bill Clinton in the 90s, Barack Obama in the 2000s, and now Donald Trump on that anti-establishment message.

I also will tell you, so I live in Coralville, which is in Johnson County, a Democratic county.

But my district, when I was first running in 2018, included...

Cedar County to the east and Muscatine County south and east.

And I spent a lot of time knocking on doors in Cedar and Muscatine counties.

And I talked to a lot of Obama, Trump, Walls voters.

And whenever I would talk with somebody like this, of course, you want to know what are the issues facing your community.

And if they tell you that you're voting for you, like what's going on here?

And what I would often hear from voters was something to the effect of, look, I don't agree with Donald Trump on every single issue, but I feel like he's fighting for me and for my family.

And you're here.

You're listening.

You understand what's happening here.

So you got my support, too.

And I think that is something that I learned, actually, after that 2011 speech.

I spent a lot of time traveling around the state, traveling around the country.