MAGA's Midterm Defectors

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Caleb Renner (0:15)

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Michael Barbaro (0:46)

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Yesterday on the show, our colleagues from the politics desk explained just how much next month's midterm elections will come down to the decision making of Republican voters in red states who are now deeply disillusioned with President Trump and whether that disillusionment will push them into the arms of Democrats. Today, Daily producer Anna Foley travels to Iowa, a state Trump and Republicans have dominated for the past decade, to speak with one of those Republican voters about what he's choosing to do with his frustrations. It's Friday, October 16th.

Anna Foley (1:35)

Okay, I think we have corn on the left side of the street, and I think we have soybeans on the right. There's an old saying in Iowa that in order to have a good harvest, your corn should be knee high by the 4th of July.

SPEAKER_5 (1:51)

Hi.

Caleb Renner (1:53)

Sorry, I might smell like gasoline.

Anna Foley (1:54)

Oh, no, that's totally fine. By the time I flew out to Iowa in late summer, the corn towered over me.

Caleb Renner (2:00)

This is my corn field right here.

SPEAKER_5 (2:02)

Okay.

Anna Foley (2:02)

I was there to meet Caleb Renner, a corn and soybean farmer.

Caleb Renner (2:06)

You can see it's bright yellow on the tip, but as it gets closer to the base, it's more of like a cream-colored. That's what we call the milk layer.

Anna Foley (2:15)

Caleb's only 25, but he's been farming for years. He's the fifth generation of his family to work these fields, and his folks had him start young.

Caleb Renner (2:24)

I loved to ride in the combine with my dad, and my earliest memory is sitting in the combine and thinking I was inside of a spaceship, especially at nighttime.

It's big open windows you can see all around you, and it's nothing but like a really dark cornfield, and then a bunch of glowing flashing buttons and monitors. It was awesome. Even today, I love sitting in a combine.

Anna Foley (2:47)

Caleb told me another thing he remembered was that growing up, it felt like a given that he was a Republican.

Caleb Renner (2:54)

I grew up in a very traditional bright red area.

Anna Foley (2:59)

And Caleb's County, Hancock County, it's always been a reliably conservative area. But when Trump came on the scene, it went from bright red to deep MAGA red.

In 2016, Hancock went almost 30 points more to the Republican side. Caleb was still in high school at the time, but he remembers how Trump resonated with the people around him.

Caleb Renner (3:23)

You got to understand what he captured at the time, too. It was almost like this outsider, I'm going to drain the swamp, as he says.

Anna Foley (3:31)

It was also around this time, Caleb says, that he started to hear a lot more that Democrats were the enemy, that the stakes of every election were existentially high.

Caleb Renner (3:41)

It was like, overnight, it became the right is against the left, and this tribalism just emerged from, I don't know even know where. It's like we're fighting a culture war, we're fighting against the liberals, or we're fighting against-

Anna Foley (3:55)

And so by the time 2020 came around, there was really no question who Caleb's first vote for president would be.

Caleb Renner (4:01)

I was definitely on Team Trump in 2020 I think 2020, I really did not do any, like I was not very informed at all. I just was marking the red box, the Republican box.

I think I was attached to a team and there was not a lot of convincing to make me think in a more nuanced approach. I had a team and I'm not going to deviate from that team.