Trump won Iowa with new hats, voter education, and a video inspired by a truck ad
Plus: One of the biggest risks businesses face this year is politics
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
Trump won Iowa with new hats, voter education, and a video inspired by a truck ad
Trump was outspent in Iowa on traditional ads, but that didn’t seem to matter
One of the biggest risks businesses face this year is politics
Scroll to the end to see: how candidates staged their caucus night rallies.
Trump won Iowa with new hats, voter education, and a video inspired by a truck ad
Former President Donald Trump won 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties in the state’s caucus Monday with help from Trump Caucus Captains in brand new hats, a cartoon named Marlon, and a video inspired by a Dodge Ram Super Bowl commercial.
As the rest of the nation wondered ‘what the hell is a caucus?,’ the Trump campaign tried to make caucusing as easy as one, two, three.
Since Jan. 1, the campaign ran more than 400 ads on Meta platforms, including some that promoted Trump’s rallies in the state, but many of the ads linked to a landing page about how to caucus for Trump.
In an animated video shared by the campaign at events and online, a cartoon man named Marlon learns how to 1. check his voter registration status, 2. find his caucus location, and 3. register when arriving at the caucus location. The volunteers in the white hats would take it from there.
Unlike a primary, where you can vote at your leisure without anyone bothering you, the Iowa caucus requires voters to show up at their caucus location at a specific time where they hear short speeches in support of each candidate. Trump supporters tasked with the job got limited-edition white and gold “Trump Caucus Captain” hats.
Trump wore one himself to a campaign event this weekend in Indianola, and in a voter education video starring his daughter-in-law Lara, she assured viewers that these volunteers in hats would be on hand to answer any questions. “They are going to be very recognizable,” Lara Trump says. Only 2,000 hats were produced, according to Politico. Very exclusive and as of today, no one is selling theirs on eBay.
In her video, Lara Trump speaks about how results at the Iowa are counted in front of voters at each caucus location, “ensuring the process is secure and transparent,” before adding, “Not that we think that there was ever a time where voting was not secure and transparent, wink wink nod nod.” It’s a joke for the roughly two-thirds of Iowa Republican caucusgoers who falsely believe President Joe Biden was not elected legitimately, according to recent polling for the Associated Press, but I do wonder if Dominion and Smartmatic are laughing.
Trump was outspent in Iowa on traditional ads, but that didn’t seem to matter
Trump was outspent in Iowa on television and radio ads. His campaign reserved nearly $1 million in advertising on TV and radio advertising, which was more than any candidate or outside group except SFA Fund Inc, a super PAC supporting former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley, which spent $3.3 million, and Haley’s campaign, which spent $1.3 million, according to data from AdImpact.
Pro-Haley mailers also narrowly outnumbered those for every candidate except Trump for one voter. According to a tally from IAPoliticsMail, a registered Republican in Cedar Rapids who posted mailers he got during the cycle on X, Trump’s last mailer was educational on the front, listing information like the caucus date and time. The other side listed reasons to caucus for Trump, like “defend the border” and “lower energy costs.”
The most striking Trump campaign ad, though, wasn’t a traditional ad at all, but a video that claimed to speak for God. “God Made Trump” is a ripoff of a ripoff produced by the “Dilley Meme Team,” a group of volunteers some experts have said may fit the definition of a super PAC. Their video is based on the 2013 Dodge Ram Super Bowl commercial “God Made a Farmer” that used audio from a speech by Paul Harvey at the 1978 National Future Farmers of America Convention. In the ad, Harvey speaks whistfully and romantically about farmers and rural values. “And on the eighth day, God looked down and his planned paradise and said I need a caretaker, so I need a farmer,” he says.
The ad helped sell a lot of trucks at the time. The company said its sales were up year-over-year that February, and after promising it would donate $100,000 to the Future Farmers of America for every million YouTube views or shares the video got up to $1 million, it hit that threshold in less than a week, according to AdAge. Republicans this year hoped the concept would sell their candidate to rural Iowans.
Last November, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ wife Casey shared a “God Made a Fighter” video in support of her husband based on the Ram ad, then earlier this month, Trump shared the version about himself on Truth Social. The “Trump Made God” video, which was also shown at campaign events, opens with a male narrator who says, “and on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said I need a caretaker, so I need Trump.”
The religious message of the video appeals to a portion of Trump’s base (he won 53% white evangelicals, per NBC News’ entrance poll), but not all believers are comfortable with it. “It was very concerning,” Pastor Joseph Brown of the Marion Avenue Baptist Church told the New York Times. Brown said he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but will not this year. “The original sin of Satan or Lucifer is not that he wanted to take over God’s position but that he wanted to be like God. There is only one god, and it’s not Trump or any other man.”
While Trump’s Republican rivals had to introduce themselves to Iowa voters and spent more of their advertising attacking each other than Trump, Trump is already well known and could focus more of his advertising on voter mobilization. Content from groups like the Dilley Meme Team helped supplement his message.
One of the biggest risks businesses face this year is politics
Companies that operate nationwide in the U.S. will have an increasingly hard time satisfying competing political interests in red and blue states this year, according to a new report.
Eurasia Group, a political consultancy, wrote in its annual top risks report that growing polarization thanks to the presidential election will collide with political trends businesses have already been facing. The result is a majority of the Fortune 500 “will struggle to adopt cohesive nationwide strategies that satisfy Democrats and Republicans alike,” founder Ian Bremmer and co-author Cliff Kupchan wrote.
“America's growing political polarization is fragmenting the internal market along party lines,” they wrote. “Red and blue states increasingly diverge on issues as varied as LGBTQ rights, education policy, and even whether companies can require on-site employees to be vaccinated, making it costlier for companies to operate in all states.”
Citing examples like California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom canceling state business with Walgreens after the pharmacy chain company said it wouldn’t distribute the abortion pill mifepristone, and seven Republican attorneys general warning Target its Pride Month collection may violate state child protection laws, the report predicts pressure from both sides of the political spectrum could intensify.
“This year, as the November elections approach, Donald Trump's megaphone grows louder, and new fronts open in America's culture wars, conservatives will continue to jettison their free-market instincts in favor of retaliatory, ‘anti-woke’ political activism, doubling down on their use of state legislatures and the courts to assert states' rights over federal regulatory authority,” the authors wrote.
The group’s 2022 report predicted “consumers and employees, empowered by ‘cancel culture’ and enabled by social media, will put new demands on multinational corporations,” mostly from the left, and they expect that trend to continue.
Some companies could face difficult choices about whether to comply with local laws that are out of step with their corporate and customer values or exit a market entirely. It’s an “expensive decision,” the report notes, since the GDP of single-party states like California and Texas are bigger than some countries.
Have you seen this?
Biden and Democratic Party groups raised $97 million in final quarter of 2023. The haul builds on the $72 million and the $71 million that Biden for President, the Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees feeding state Democratic Party organizations raised in the second and third fundraising periods, respectively. [NBC News]
Iowa Republican caucus sets new record for state political ad buys: $120 million. The battle to win the Republican Iowa caucus is the most expensive on record, with over $120 million in ad spending by campaigns and their affiliated political action committees. [CNBC]
Turns out Hunter Biden did actually know who bought his art. The statements from his dealer contradict a widely reported ethics plan set up after the artist's father became president. [Artnet News]
Here’s the 2024 Iowa caucus night staging. Is the winner determined by the number of flags, asked Joanne on Instagram. Yes, I think so. Who do you think had the best set up? [yellopolitics/Instagram]
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History of political design
“I Have a Dream. Let Freedom Ring. A Great American. Rev. Martin Luther King.” pinback button (ca. 1968). The button is a gift from the Peggy Boyd Petrey to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
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