Trump is returning to Iowa to campaign Sunday in an area he flipped from Democrats in 2016

DES MOINES, Iowa – Former President Donald Trump heads to southeast Iowa Sunday in the middle of a fall campaign push aimed at locking in supporters with large organizing events.

As he has with his other recent travels to the leadoff caucus state, Trump will campaign in an area that formerly supported Democrats but has embraced him.

Trump was planning to headline an afternoon event in Ottumwa, where his campaign was expecting more than 1,000 potential supporters. The small city is a hub in eastern Iowa and the seat of Wapello County, one of 31 counties Trump carried in 2016 that Democrat Barack Obama had won four years earlier.

Trump, the first Republican to capture the county since the Eisenhower administration, campaigned the week before in northeast Iowa. There, he drew about 1,400 to rural Jackson County along the Mississippi River and almost 2,000 to Dubuque County to the north. Like Wapello, Dubuque County had been a Democratic stronghold for decades before 2016.

Though aides said they were not specifically targeting counties that Trump flipped in 2016, they noted that he has had success in the eastern part of Iowa where manufacturing has declined sharply in the past two decades. His administration’s renegotiation of the U.S. trade pact with Canada and Mexico remains popular.

As Trump maintains a strong lead in Iowa, his Republican rivals are scrambling for backing, hoping a strong showing can help them consolidate the non-Trump support.

Trump arrives in Iowa after a two-day trip to California, where he picked up 6 million of his 74 million votes in 2020 while losing the state by 30 percentage points to Democrat Joe Biden.

In a fiery speech that delighted Republicans dejected after decades of Democratic control, Trump escalated his long-standing tough-on-crime message with calls for violent retribution for against criminals. People caught robbing stores should be shot, Trump said to applause. He raised money during his trip to Orange County, once a bastion of conservatism in Southern California that has become increasingly competitive.

While Trump’s would-be Republican challengers sparred in the second primary debate earlier in the week, Trump was in another key blue-collar county in the general election battleground of Michigan. Trump spoke during Wednesday night’s debate in Macomb County, Michigan, north of Detroit at a nonunion manufacturing plant, where he blasted Biden’s push for electric cars amid an autoworkers’ strike. Trump carried Macomb County twice, after Obama did in 2008 and 2012.

Trump is ramping up his travel in Iowa, which kicks off the Republican nomination calendar with the Jan. 15 caucuses. He has scheduled several visits to the state this month.

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Associated Press writer Jonathan J. Cooper in Anaheim, California, contributed to this report.