To test Iowans’ feelings for the president, Mr. Link asked people who voted for the president what aspect of a beloved local institution, the Iowa State Fair, they associated with him. The most common answer was Bobo the Clown, who heckled fairgoers and baited them into hurling softballs at his dunk tank. (He was dropped from the fair after being accused of using racial slurs in 2009.)
Voters will respond to someone who is “gritty and authentic,” Mr. Link said, regardless of party identification, which is why he believes Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an avowed democratic socialist who joined the Democratic Party only so he could compete as a presidential candidate, has been leading in recent polls of likely caucusgoers.
As proof that Democrats can still appeal in Trump Country, the party’s strategists point to Representative Abby Finkenauer, who in 2018 flipped a congressional district in northeast Iowa by emphasizing her blue-collar, union-family roots and declaring she was “my grandfather’s Democrat.”
There are some signs that the Republican Party’s brand is in trouble in Iowa. Last year, the state’s longest-serving Republican legislator left the party and became a Democrat. Andy McKean, a representative from an area in northeast Iowa that broke for Mr. Trump in 2016 after voting for Mr. Obama in 2012, explained his switch, saying, “If this is the new normal, I want no part of it.”
But examples like these remain the exception because most Republicans understand that the voters who make up their bedrock support in elections have an affinity for Mr. Trump that is far greater than their attachment to the Republican Party.
For Iowa Republicans running for almost any office, “There’s only a downside to opposing Trump. And he’s more willing to take the bat to the dissenters,” said A.J. Spiker, a former chairman of the Iowa Republican Party who was aligned with the faction that supported Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman, and his son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. In 2016, Mr. Spiker opposed Mr. Trump and called for him to step down after the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape. Today, he is out of professional politics and sells real estate.
The current party chairman, Jeff Kaufmann, acknowledged that many of the president’s biggest fans are, at best, ambivalent about the Republican Party. “Remember these folks that voted for Trump didn’t necessarily become Republican,” he said, describing how his long career in politics is often a liability when he talks to voters. “When they hear that I was in the Legislature, when they hear that I’m the head of the party,” he added, “I still have to prove myself.”