Can 2,000 people in a hangar in Sioux City influence the US midterms? Trump is banking on it

If you are to come to Sioux City on a Thursday evening in late October, then there can be few more spectacular ways to arrive than this: that iconographic plane swooping low over the golden fields where, at an airport hangar below, waiting supporters are pointing their phones skywards, while Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth blasts out of the speakers and a harvest moon’s already visible even though its warm enough to wear T-shirts long after dusk. And the excited shout: “Here he comes!”Here he comes.“This feels like God’s country,” Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator who was among the list of warm-up acts here to entertain the crowd over the hot afternoon, had thundered earlier in the day. “This feels like Trump country.”READ MOREThe crowd cheered. And it was true. If these midterm elections are to mark the first tolling of the bells on Donald Trump’s fierce grip on US politics, then nobody told them in this western pocket of Iowa. It’s an unpretentious city, tucked between the prairie grasslands of South Dakota and Nebraska, and although Lewis and Clarke passed through here on their immortal expedition in the early 19th century, in 2026 most visitors have a specific reason to come here. President Trump’s reason was that few states have shown him as much love as Iowa. “I love our farmers – I know you’re not all farmers, but I love Iowa,” Trump told them after taking the stage to rapturous applause sometime after 7pm. The most loyal had turned up in the morning to wait in line.“I shouldn’t brag but ... I won [in Iowa] all three times by more than any candidate in political history.”[ What are the US midterms? A visual guideOpens in new window ]A furious midterm election cycle, defined by reckless and bitter exchanges by the candidates in the key states, has reached the phase of inevitable repetition. Everyone has said everything a thousand times, the president included. If anything, Trump is doubling down on his promise to hold daily rallies to bolster the chances of Republican candidates – whereas the commentariat and strategists argue those chances would be improved if he spent the month holed up in the movie room of the White House, watching Citizen Kane and other favourites. But Trump works to his own instinct and has made this election cycle a personal popularity contest.So, what is to be extrapolated from this vivid scene of Trump devotion in a regional airport hangar? Everything and nothing. On the surface, these events are a reminder that once he cedes the stage, Trump-rally theatre will be remembered, in his strongholds, as a kind of folkloric mirage. Americans won’t see anything like this again. Any Trump rally is a strange confection of pageantry and patriotism, speeches filled with nostalgia and dark premonition, of many hours of waiting. The mood at these events is one of wilful escapism from the mundanity of ordinary life. To be up close and personal with Trump is, for his supporters, to commune with the fantastical.[ Trump is about to discover the political cost of inflationOpens in new window ]The Iowa GOP had their homework done, selecting this small airport hangar and festooning it with the familiar backdrop so that the place was packed by midafternoon. Does the attendance of a couple of thousand people in a corrugated box on the edge of Sioux City have any real significance on the overall senate vote in a state of 3.2 million people? Trump, in defiance of the polling numbers, is banking that it does. All day, a small, voluble group of protesters stood at the entrance to the parking fields. Joining them was Helen Doidge, who pulled a “Putin Is Not Our Friend” placard from the boot of her car. “The numbers are very close. Which is unbelievable. After everything that has happened. And now this,” she says pointing to her placard. We talk for a while about being an Independent voter in a deeply Republican patch of the land.“After a while, you can’t change anyone’s mind. We lost friends because of it. Relatives, we had our words and made up. But we don’t discuss politics any more.” Nearby, Chris Klein was headed to the rally with his friends. The 19-year-old grew up in Sioux City but has just joined the US marines and leaves for San Diego, for boot camp, on Sunday. I ask him what it was like growing up here, and whether he will miss it.“I love it,” he nods.“I love Sioux City. But I definitely saw with the open borders a lot happening. I went to Sioux City North. My freshman year we were a white-majority school. By the time I transferred the majority became Hispanic and Latinas and other migrants. I saw that in my small town in the middle of Iowa. I can’t imagine everything else that is going on in other places.” Chris Klein has just joined the US Marine Corps. Photograph: by Keith Duggan Klein is courteous and quick-speaking, and says he was fascinated by politics from an early age. He agrees his decision to join the marines has concerned his mother.“For sure. Being worried about her young son going into the military – especially with the job I want to do. I’m going to be in the infantry. It’s definitely a risk and a risky job but I know I have a great God who is going to be protect me through all of that. How could I not serve such an amazing country that has provided so much for me?”In the hangar, the series of speeches reinforce the overall threat represented by the insurgent Democratic candidates. Josh Turek, the Iowa state representative who is narrowly leading Ashley Hinson in the polls, is linked and aligned with Texas’s James Talarico and Michigan’s Abdul El Sayed by repeated anecdote.[ Branded ‘lazy’ by Trump, Democrat Josh Turek is mounting an unexpected challenge in a Republican strongholdOpens in new window ]“The 42 per cent of the time he actually showed up for work, he was voting like Bernie Sanders,” Hinson tells them.“Josh Turek voted to allow illegal immigrants have welfare benefits here in Iowa. He also voted to make it harder for law enforcement to deport dangerous illegal criminals out of our communities. He voted to allow taxpayer dollars to go fund sex changes. Have their kids be able to change their gender pronouns and not tell their parents. He is too liberal for Iowa.”Republican senate candidate Ashley Hinson speaks to a supporter during a campaign stop in Davenport, Iowa, earlier this month. Photograph: Kamil Krzacysnki/AFP via Getty Images That’s the central contention of the Republican message. Although Trump’s speech follows a familiar litany of accomplishments, his overarching theme in recent weeks has been to warn his supporters of a resumption of rampant border crossings, and crime, should the Republicans lose control of Congress. Turek, he told them, “even wrote a memo giving illegal aliens instructions on how to evade capture – murderers, drug dealers ... how to evade capture. Why can’t I have somebody like that to run against? Actually, I did.”He launched a fresh attack on Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman whose Washington home was recently raided by the FBI, citing a fraud probe. He announced that a federal court filing had identified the Somalian native by a different name, Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, and called on her to resign as she had been sworn in under another name. He waited as the crowd broke into a chant of “Lock Her Up”, temporarily drowning out the background hum of the power generators. It was a return to the messaging of 2024: the threat of outsiders, of otherness, of danger threatening the pastoral – which he can ward off. “I think Trump and his whole administration have a lot of common sense compared to the other side,” Lonnie, who preferred not to give a surname, said as we waited in line to buy water.“I love that he closed the border immediately. I feel safer with him. The gas prices are higher, I know, right now. I think they will come down but they were also super high under Biden.”Trump’s arrival in Sioux City coincided with another turbulent week. The surface depiction of the Republican midterm prospects is of a campaign putting out fires everywhere. His Wednesday-night rally in South Carolina was subject to some 30 protesters interrupting his presidential riff. They were, as usual, quickly booed and removed by security to loud chants of “USA USA”. But the protests, becoming more numerous and brazen, would have been unimaginable two years ago. Then, in Ohio, came outrage over an advert broadcast on behalf of the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy. It features Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton, in which she urges people not to vote for her daughter, and calls her a “liar”. Acton had suffered physical and sexual abuse by her stepfather as a young child, and she and her brother were removed by social services following a court hearing. Arthur remained with the stepfather. Several Republicans have condemned the advert, including Mike DeWine, Ohio’s governor, who described is as “deeply, deeply troubling”.“It was wrong to run this ad. I would just urge the Ramaswamy campaign to take it down,” he said.A screengrab from the #deeply troubling' ad produced by Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign team that includes the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent Amy Acton Vice-president JD Vance – a native Ohioan – was among those who doubled down in a stumps speech that will almost certainly be quoted back at him, ad nauseam, if he runs for president, scolding party members because Ramaswamy’s campaign “had the audacity to run a TV commercial that calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar”. Trump himself castigated DeWine as a “Rino [Republican in name only] governor” who was “disloyal to the Republican Party” on Thursday afternoon.By Thursday, reports began to emerge of heightened Republican concerns – and an influx of money into the normally safe senate seats in Mississippi and South Carolina. As if all of this wasn’t enough to contend with, along came the farcical news that the staff of embattled war secretary Pete Hegseth had, in responding to the secretary’s impatience to add to his office furnishings the unique globe reputedly used by Dwight Eisenhower in the planning of the D-Day landings, dropped it while transporting it, and partially broke it. [ Is controversy-plagued Pete Hegseth eyeing up a 2028 presidential bid?Opens in new window ]None of these events were likely to enhance Trump’s mood on this latest leg of his relentless national tour of the republic. But in a field in Iowa, as evening fell, he felt the love. Both parties in Iowa agree this race is likely to come down to a narrow number of votes either way. Although Turek has mounted a compelling case against the Trump administration, persuading Iowa’s farmer class to abandon Trumpism will be key.“I think there’s a lot of tribalism,” Turek had told me on Tuesday evening when asked why, if Iowans are hurting as much as he claims, the race is so close.“And that’s hard to overcome. Ultimately, I don’t think about why it’s so close, I think about it in the reverse. This is a state that Trump ended up winning by nearly 13 points and in one calendar year we have taken this from solidly Red to toss-up to leading in the polls. I look at it as: what amazing work to go to all 99 counties in 400 days and, more and more, I think a lot of moderate Republicans are seeing a difference between myself and Ashley Hinson. I am hearing people say: ‘Look, I voted for Trump two times, three times, but you got my vote. Because this is about the person and not the party.’ And that’s something I’m excited about – I am genuinely bipartisan and I don’t think any party has a monopoly on good ideas.”Out at the airport hangar, parents with children began to file out of the rally after the first hour. It was dark and many had already been here for five hours. It may also be true that the Trump era has reached the stage where for some supporters, the thrill now is in seeing him, in their town, maybe for the final time, and to feel the energy of all that dark drama that surrounds him, and to have the photographs for posterity. There was something unforgettable about the scene for those of us trooping out to the rows of cars in darkened fields; the secret service and police leaning on metal railings, the Trump merch hawkers packing away their wares and that voice that has dominated the country for a decade drifting from the hangar into a dream of a Midwestern evening. Sooner rather than later, these events, this night, will form part of the mad tapestry of American history.Shortly before he headed into his last pre-military weekend in Sioux City, Klein had offered a final thought in the bright sunshine before going to wait for his president. He was talking about the book of revelations in the Bible, and a reference to the world being under one leadership.“So, I believe there will come a time when America will fall,” he said.“Whether that’s in the next 100 years, 150 years, I don’t know. But I’m not gonna just stand by and just wait for it to happen. I’m going to go fight for my country. It’s an amazing country. I can join the military because I want to do it. I’m not forced. There is so much freedom that people take for granted. I take pride in our country. I honestly think the last presidency was not pro our country. They want people to come out here with signs, and they want people to go against each other. We have an amazing country. The American way is great. People want to come to our country and live the American dream – but it’s not the same any more because people are so divided.”