“But please don’t be nice,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of well over 1,000 people who filled every available seat and packed a hall at the Bridge View Center. “Don’t be nice, because if we don’t win this election, we’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Sunday’s “commit to caucus” event was part of the Trump campaign’s push that began last month to ensure that the former president’s foothold on the Republican Party translates to a strong showing at the Iowa caucuses in January. Such a victory could more definitively shut out his rivals and clear a path to the nomination.
This pocket of southeastern Iowa, Wapello County, is of particular significance to his campaign. Democrats had won it in 10 straight presidential elections until Mr. Trump flipped the county in 2016 and held onto his advantage four years later.
Even after his loss in 2020 — or maybe because of it — Mr. Trump has retained his appeal here. In remarks from the stage, Jeff Kaufmann, chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa, celebrated Ottumwa as “a place that used to be blue, and now you’re dark red, like the rest of Iowa.”
Robert LaPoint, 61, said that he was among those swayed to reconsider past support for the Democratic Party. Though he had long identified as a Democrat, he said, he began to feel that the party had drifted too far left on issues like abortion. As of four years ago, he said, he had no party affiliation at all.
