Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown tweeted that he was off to the Midwest on a listening tour of Iowa, where he will visit the state fair on Sunday, hoping to discern what voters there might be thinking and where he might stand in advance of the 2016 presidential race.
“I'm going to be coming out more often to try to determine whether there's an interest in my brand of leadership and Republicanism,” Brown, said in an interview with
The Des Moines Register published Saturday.
Brown Tweeted a photo of himself casually dressed in shorts on Saturday in front of Iowa's famed Mitchell Corn Palace. He is using his trip to visit family in the region as well as "to understand the challenges and the opportunities and the aspirations of the people in the Midwest and how they view us and vice versa," he told the Register.
“I want to see if there’s interest in my brand of politics, being a strong national security hawk and a fiscal conservative," he added.
"The way I see it, hey, there’s plenty of room for people in the party like me and Sarah Palin and Rand Paul and Chris Christie, yet we’re always attacking each other for not fitting some ideologically pure mold.”
Brown, 53, and a native of Maine, is also keeping open another race — a bid against Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the
Huffington Post reported.
"I'm not going to rule out anything right now," Brown told the Associated Press in April, noting that the state "is almost like a second home."
After serving one term, Brown lost his U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts to Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren.