Why these voters, and why now
Iowa's harvest is under way, and it's an expensive one. On September 23 the state's corn growers asked Iowa's congressional delegation for diesel relief, with diesel close to double what it cost a year earlier. Agriculture has ranked among the top five issues in Iowa's Senate race every week since mid-July, in PharosGraph's weekly ranking of the issues in every race we track.
The map above shows a PharosGraph audience called Agriculture and Rural Economy Community Impact. It includes every registered voter who lives in a community where farm livelihoods face cost, land and water pressure, whatever their job. That covers a little more than half of Iowa's neighborhoods and 1,166,071 voters. Outside the state's eight largest counties, three in four voters are in it.
More than half of the voters in this audience, 655,159, are persuadable in the Senate race, the governor's race or both. About a third are persuadable in both. These figures come from PharosGraph's race-by-race scoring of every voter on whether they're firmly behind a candidate or still open to persuasion. On the map, amber dots are persuadable in both races and teal dots in one. These voters also turn out: 87 percent of the persuadable ones voted in 2024 and 66 percent in the 2022 midterm, against 78 and 56 percent of all Iowa voters.
Healthcare ranks second among the issues in both statewide races, and rural hospital closures are part of that conversation. More than half of the voters on this map also belong to another PharosGraph audience, Rural Hospital and Healthcare Access Community Impact, which flags communities where rural hospitals and healthcare access are under strain. Campaigns can reach the same voters on either concern.
PharosGraph refreshes these audiences every month, so what a campaign buys in October reflects the race in October. The audience is available now through L2 in LiveRamp and L2 DataMapping. The Senate candidates debate on October 7, and absentee ballots go out on October 14. This is a measure of where voters live and how open they are, not a poll or a vote prediction.