AMES, Iowa — As most attendees crowded the stage in anticipation of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ entrance, 20-year-old Layne Sagetz, an Iowa native and student at Iowa State University, was almost hiding in the back corner.
This isn’t Sagetz’s first presidential campaign rodeo — growing up in Iowa means that politics has always been part of his life. But this is the first time Sagetz can vote in a presidential election, and participate in the famed Iowa caucuses. Young voters were plentiful in the crowd Thursday at the Never Back Down event here at Jethro’s BBQ, a restaurant-meets-dive bar with “Vote for Jethro” posters depicting outlandish meaty sandwiches and platters lining the walls.
About 75 committed DeSantis supporters, curious college students of all political parties, and, notably, three climate action protestors gathered in the back room of Jethro’s to hear from DeSantis. Sagetz, an independent, said he came to the event with an open mind — he had planned to caucus for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who had ended his campaign the day before.
With a conservative father and a liberal mother, Sagetz has been to a wide variety of campaign events for many candidates. In 2020, his parents brought him to an event for then-Democratic candidate Pete Buttigeg, now the Secretary of Transportation.
“He seemed really down to earth,” Sagetz said of the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. “I was surprised he didn’t get more votes.”
While Buttigeg won the Iowa Democratic Caucuses in 2020, Sagetz speculated that his sexuality was a barrier to his success. Buttigeg was the first openly gay man to run a competitive campaign for president, but Sagetz thinks some people just weren’t ready for him.
Sagetz’s parents also took him to a rally for former President Donald Trump, who lost Iowa to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in 2016, but went on to win Iowa in a landslide in 2020 as the incumbent and in 2024 hoping to get back to the White House.
“It was basically a concert, they played a hype video and a diss video,” Sagetz said about the Trump rally.
Of the current candidates, Sagetz said that ads for DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley have turned him off — he said he finds their use of words like “weak” and “lame” to attack each other annoying. Sagetz said that while Vivek Ramaswamy was well-spoken, Sagetz suspected him to be “an industry plant,” referring to the candidate’s government-outsider status and ties to the pharmaceutical industry. With the end of Christie’s campaign, Sagetz said he is now still open to all candidates, including Trump.
Despite his indecision, Sagetz is much like other Iowans who value their integral role in the election process. He says that while Iowa’s faced a slow decline from having their “finger on the pulse” of presidential candidates, the state should still keep its status as first in the nation.
“They should give it to us!” Sagetz said. “We don’t have anything else going for us.”
It’s political tradition in Iowa to get the chance to hear from presidential candidates, even those with whom attendees disagree or for whom they don’t plan to vote. In fact, many young people at the event who self-identified as Democrats came to check it out because they had the unique, Iowan opportunity to do so.
During DeSantis’ speech, he was interrupted three times by climate activists from the Sunrise Movement, a group dedicated to bringing together young people to advocate for climate action. These protestors attended multiple events the weekend prior to the caucuses, including Trump’s event at Simpson College, Ramaswamy’s town hall at Grimaldi’s Pizzeria and Haley’s stump speech in Adel, Iowa, all on Sunday, among others.
On Friday in Ames, the first protestor rushed up to the stage and unfurled a banner reading “DeSantis: Climate Criminal” before being tackled just a moment later. From the ground, he yelled, “How much money are you taking from oil companies?” as he was dragged out of the event.
As audience members told the protester to “get out” and “shut up,” DeSantis took the tense moment to resume one of his standard campaign lines.
“This is [what’s] wrong with the college system right there,” he said, a reference to the age of the protestors and the event’s proximity to Iowa State University, although it was unclear if they were college students.
However, because of that proximity to ISU, volunteers were handing out “Cyclones for DeSantis” stickers to people walking in.
The second protester interrupted DeSantis’ speech to ask “How much money are you getting from oil executives?” DeSantis responded by calling him rude and repeating his talking points on low gas prices and energy independence amid cheers from the audience.
A later question from the audience — regarding DeSantis’ position on providing small business loans to young people — prompted further censure of the “brick and ivy” college system which DeSantis said allows students to major in “Zombie studies” and indoctrinates them with liberal ideologies.
After the event, a group of college students sporting the “Cyclones for DeSantis” stickers headed out of Jethro’s, peeling the stickers off on the way. These students said that they were just wearing the stickers because someone handed them out, and that they were not DeSantis supporters. The group attended the event simply because, in the Iowan fashion, they were able to.
Nineteen-year-old David Hauber, a student at the University of Iowa, said he found the governor’s remarks to be alienating for young people and college students in particular.
“I don’t understand why [DeSantis] is so obsessed with thinking that colleges and indoctrinate people,” Hauber said. “There’s no indoctrination and it’s not like colleges are overtly Democrat.”
Hauber said he felt these tactics may help draw older voters in, but distance DeSantis from a whole base of potential voters who seem to be ignored.
“I feel like a lot of the younger generation is Democrat. And that’s where they’re getting that from,” Hauber said. “And they just say, ‘Oh, it’s indoctrination.’ I feel like it’s an easy hit point for them.”
However, he also criticized the protesters for their behavior at the rally: “I just wonder, what are you here to gain? It’s disrespectful,” Hauber said.
Hauber is a registered Democrat and came to the event with friends hoping to ask questions and hear from the opposing side. His friend John Higgins, an 18-year-old student at the University of Minnesota and a fellow Democrat, was disappointed that he wasn’t able to ask his questions of DeSantis.
Hauber wanted to question DeSantis’ view on super-PACs, considering the candidate’s own criticism of Haley’s donations. Eighteen-year-old Allie Enyart, a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and also a Democrat, suggested that DeSantis’ attacks on Haley were hypocritical.
“I thought it was interesting how he kept talking about Nikki Haley and being for the lobbyists when [DeSantis] accepts more lobbying money than any other Republican candidate currently in the race,” Enyart said.
Enyart said she was similarly frustrated by DeSantis’ criticism of college students, and mentioned that a woman in the crowd next to her aggressively yelled at her after one protester was escorted out, asking if she was “one of them too” because of her age.
“He was pushing so hard for his anti-woke agenda. It came off the wrong way to me — it sounds extremely homophobic and xenophobic, especially,” Higgins said. “Multiple times he mentioned that he wanted to remove the ‘woke’ from the military.”
Sagetz also felt that DeSantis’ comments about higher education were out of touch with reality.
“I completely disagree with him on this,” Sagetz said. “I think that the majority of my professors are conservative and lowkey are pretty aggressive about their political opinions.”