A study from Echelon Insights sought to find “typical counties” in the United States and two counties from Iowa rank in the top 20. The Midwest plus Pennsylvania ranked pretty high overall. The link has a map to play with.
Under the metrics in this project, Scott County is the third-most-representative county in the country, and Linn County is 20th. Then there’s Polk at 44th, one spot ahead of California’s highest rank on the list (San Luis Obispo). Tama is the 999th “most representative”, and Van Buren is the county in Iowa that least resembles the nation as a whole, ranked 2724th.
Given the way Iowa swung between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections and then between the 2016 and 2018 congressional elections, the state remains a place for testing political messaging.
(But please, someone do a name-recognition poll between the commissioner of the Big Ten Conference and that guy from Maryland.)