Even as the Iowa Democratic Party worked to resolve reporting glitches following Monday’s first-in-the-nation 2020 primary, President Donald Trump easily beat back a pair of GOP outlier candidates with a record vote turnout.
The president earned 97 percent of the caucus vote, with 100 percent of the counties according to the Republican state party reporting page.
Challenger Joe Walsh, a former one-term U.S. representative from Illinois, got only 337 votes, while former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld got 388 votes. Trump, meanwhile, received 29,615 votes.
Though the challengers were never a serious threat to the president, his reelection campaign nevertheless sent some 80 surrogates to Iowa, including members of his family and other leading Republicans,
Brad Parscale, the president’s reelection campaign manager, said it was still important to make an appearance in Iowa in order to build up Trump’s base of support.
“A lot of people ask us why we’re out here today,” Parscale at a caucus press conference on Monday. “The truth is, this is our first test of a grassroots army we built.”
He was joined by daughter-in-law Lara Trump, sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle.
“Unlike Hunter Biden, we were international business people before we got into politics; that’s what we actually did,” Donald Trump Jr. said, adding, “That’s the difference between us and them.”
“We’re here in Iowa to show the people that we take this election seriously. We don’t take a single vote for granted,” Lara Trump added.
Parscale was upbeat and positive about the 2020 election.
“This is going to be the largest grassroots army the Republican Party’s ever seen, or hopefully, this country’s ever seen,” he said.