T-R PHOTO BY NICK BAUR Presidential hopeful and Republican candidate Eric Jon Boerner spoke to the Marshall County Pachyderm Herd on Friday at Legends American Grill, making his case to voters in the lead up to the Iowa Caucus next February.

With a little under a year left until the 2024 Iowa Republican presidential caucuses, a wide field of candidates are already hitting the ground running in the Hawkeye state.

Frontrunning candidates like former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley have already made high profile visits to Iowa in the lead up to the caucuses.

But on Friday, lesser known presidential hopeful Eric Jon Boerner made a campaign stop to speak with the Marshall County Pachyderm Herd at the Legends American Grill in Marshalltown, where he made his case to Republican voters and tried to separate himself from the increasingly crowded field of candidates.

“I’m trying not to be a polarizing candidate,” Boerner said. “I want to be the candidate that actually fits for most of Americans.”

The candidate, who hails from the state of Washington, says he hopes to take the party back to its more grounded roots in his campaign.

“While I am a constitutional Republican, I feel like we are the party of total equality,” Boerner said. “We’ve always been that party, and I think we need to bring that back into our form again. So I’m trying not to be a polarizing person. I believe that a lot of the candidates that we have in the frontrunner position are very polarizing, and I don’t think they would be appealing to a large swath of the population.”

Boerner says he is campaigning with a focus on energy security, data privacy, and particularly, immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Border security is one of my main problems, and homelessness issue is another issue, the fentanyl crisis really dovetails into that,” he said. “Those three kind of fit into a policy that we have to try to fix it.”

Boerner called for increasing trade with Mexico, South America, and Africa in order to help reduce migration from those areas.

Boerner also called attention to cybersecurity threats recently plaguing parts of the United States.

“One of my other main problems that I see currently coming up is going to be cyber-warfare in cyberspace,” he said. “That warfare domain, we are a little bit fragile, our infrastructure, and it seems like our adversaries are getting more brazen, and being able to penetrate our systems quite a bit more. So, I definitely want to try to modernize our systems, and ensure that that doesn’t continue to happen.”

Boerner will be campaigning in Iowa until March 23, having already made stops in Dallas, Madison, Polk, and Scott counties.

For more information about Eric Jon Boerner, and updates on his presidential campaign, see his website: Ericboerner.com.

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Contact Nick Baur at 641-753-6611 or nbaur@timesrepublican.com.