Good morning, everyone. I'm Playwood co-author, Ryan Lizza. It's Friday, August 11th. What's driving the day and the weekend is the Iowa State Fair, which began last night. Almost every Republican running for president is headed to Iowa for the fair, where they can indulge in some fried twinkies and marvel at the statues of farm animals made out of butter. And if the past is any predictor,

get caught in extremely embarrassing photos, eating those unwieldy treats. There are two big events

hosted by two Iowa political institutions, a literal soapbox sponsored by the Des Moines Register,

and a conversation series hosted by the state's Republican governor, Kim Reynolds.

Joining me from The Road in Des Moines to chat about what has happened so far and what we can expect during the next few days is senior Washington correspondent and my playbook co-author and buddy Rachel Bade.

Hi, Rachel. How are you? How's Iowa?

It's great, Ryan. I've got a half-eaten turkey leg in my fridge, in my hotel room.

That's from the fair?

From the fair. Is it gross if I eat the rest for breakfast? No, I don't think so. You need protein as soon as you wake up.

So, all right, let's start with your day yesterday. I know you started with the Ron DeSantis bus tour. Give us the highlights of that. Yeah, so I started in a small town in eastern Iowa,

actually flew it to Grand Rapids, a place called Corvill. And Desantis basically gave,

you know, gave his traditional stump speech talking about, you know, the economy hurting

and Republicans needing to take back the White House from Joe Biden, leading into cultural issues

and, you know, critical race theory, et cetera. It was a modest crowd, certainly not a Trump-sized rally, but I would say

probably about 100 people showed up at this bar in this small town. DeSantis came in. He was

holding his daughter on his shoulders. You know, Casey was there holding their other two kids.

And it was clear that, like, he had a lot of followers in the crowd.

If people were not committed to him, they were certainly DeSantis curious.

The loudest applause actually came when he talked about suspending that local prosecutor just a few days ago, which Democrats had blasted and bore, well, the crowd there loved it.

But, yeah, I mean, DeSantis clearly has

some work to do in Iowa. He's got people who are interested, but there were also a lot of

Trump supporters there. So he's still got that challenge. All right. So after the outing with DeSantis,

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