Can Iowa Democrats help the national party appeal to working-class voters?

That line was spoken in one of my favorite movies of all time — 1989’s “Field of Dreams.”

As a journalist covering Iowa’s presidential caucuses I once drove through farmland to achieve a dream of my own — I wanted to stand on baseball’s legendary “Field of Dreams .”

Today, Democrats have another kind of dream coming to life in Iowa. They can see effective political appeals by Democrats to working-class, white men. These are voters who in the last decade turned away from Democrats and became star players in the political base that launched national victories for President Trump.

Now Iowa is offering a preview of a possibly big change. In the Iowa races for the U.S. Senate and for governor, Democrats have nominated candidates gaining traction with working class white men: Josh Turek, the candidate for U.S. Senate and state Auditor Rob Sand, the party’s gubernatorial nominee.

Turek has produced the best political advertisement of this midterm political cycle. The spot features Turek playing a driveway basketball game, a game of “HORSE,” changing the letters to “IOWA.” His opponent is the last Democratic presidential nominee to win Iowa, President Barack Obama.

“I know a little something about winning Iowa,” Obama says, a reference to his 2008 caucus victory that propelled the little-known U.S. senator from Illinois to the Democratic presidential nomination . Obama also carried Iowa in both the 2008 and 2012 general elections.

“Of all the things I’ve done in politics, Iowa was my favorite thing,” Obama tells Turek in the ad . “There was just a magic about regular folks showing up.”

It is an eye-grabbing advertisement. Turek, the winner of two gold medals in wheelchair basketball as a Paralympian , shows his basketball shooting skill in defeating Obama.

The ad shows his skill as a competitor and one of the guys in a gym as he runs against right-wing Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson.

Beyond the ad, Turek is effectively pressing Hinson on her votes for Trump’s Medicare cuts which devastated rural health care in the Hawkeye State.

The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation estimates the Trump cuts will limit healthcare for as many as 100,000 Iowans. Eight rural hospitals are at risk of closure.

In the governor’s race, Sand is running on his record since 2019 as the state’s auditor.

He is presenting himself as more intent on delivering waste-free government than the GOP officials now dominating the state’s politics.

At campaign rallies, Sand, the lone Democrat in statewide office in Iowa, makes a point of starting off with a chorus of “God Bless America ” — a powerful symbol to separate himself from Trump’s constant attacks on Democrats as lacking patriotism because they disagree with his war in Iran.

Sand is also getting an assist from the drip, drip, drip of negative stories about his Republican opponent, who appears to live in Kansas and was a major investor in a company that made award-winning sex toys .

Iowa has not had a Democratic governor in 15 years. Turek’s campaign for the U.S. Senate is also facing a Democratic drought. Iowa has not had a Democrat in the U.S. Senate in more than a decade, and it hasn’t elected a Democrat in nearly two decades.

That senator, Tom Harkin, served for 30 years. Now 86, Harkin has endorsed Turek .

Both of the insurgent Democrats must fight the polarized media of the Trump era, which puts blinders on voters trying to look across party lines.

In the cookie-cutter stereotypes offered nationwide, the Democratic Party is often labeled as the party of “weak and woke,” to quote Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.). Paul Begala, the former Clinton White House aide, once remarked that the Democratic Party began to lose ground when it became “the party of the faculty lounge instead of the factory floor.”

Turek and Sand also have to confront conservative media portrayals of Democrats as uniformly supporting the far left of the party, the democratic socialists. The challenge in Iowa and other states is to defy these caricatures.

Iowa is fertile ground for Democrats on that front because engaged voters can expect to see candidates in person, if not talk with them.

For that reason, the Iowa State Fair, one of the most popular in the nation, is regularly attended by candidates of both parties, including presidential aspirants. Sen. Mark Kelly (D- Ariz.) was there last week .

Paid advertising is also less expensive in Iowa than massive media markets in states like Florida and Texas. Again, Iowa gives Democrats a better chance to remind rural and small-town voters, including a large share of Christian Evangelicals, about the negatives of the Trump record.

Specifically, Trump’s tariffs, most recently imposed against nearby Canada, could hurt Iowa farmers .

For decades, Republican lawmakers have allowed large equipment manufacturers like John Deere to monopolize the market on repairing farm equipment, only very recently allowing the people using the equipment to make some routine repairs on their own.

Democrats like Sand and Turek are reminding farmers they support “right to repair” legislation that would save them time and money.

Turek and Sand are creating political messages with potential to become the prescriptive model for effective Democratic appeals to the voters who previously lined up with Trump.

It is a pattern with potential to go nationwide: If you build it, they will come.

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “ New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement . “