Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks to voters at a town hall campaign event, on Feb. 20 in Urbandale, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/The Associated Press
There are faint indications that the 2024 presidential campaign is beginning to stir in the frozen terrain where both corn and presidential candidacies sprout.
It may be coincidence or cause, but just as reports of Jimmy Carter’s imminent demise began to circulate, so did the signs that next year’s presidential campaign was starting to come alive in these fields of dreams.
It was the onetime Georgia governor – so little known the year before the 1976 election that pollsters regarded him as a mere asterisk in their surveys – who first used the Iowa caucuses as a springboard to the White House. An unlikely candidacy in an unlikely venue transformed the peculiar Hawkeye State political process – gatherings of voters who on a wintry Monday night indicate their preferences by moving into various corners of community halls, libraries and church basements – into a vital testing ground for the presidency.
This element of the legacy of the president who campaigned with the mien of a preacher has become a civic covenant here.
“The genius of the Iowa caucuses is that they are an ideal starting point for a presidential campaign,” said Danny Carroll, a former speaker pro tempore of the state House of Representatives and the state vice chair of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s campaign, which won the 2008 caucuses here. “You can’t buy victory here. You have to distinguish yourself by being able to speak to normal people. Iowa and its caucuses are big enough to have consequence but not so small as to lack significance, so that a Jimmy Carter – or a Mike Huckabee or a Barack Obama – can emerge.”
And so as Mr. Carter lay dying, there were subtle – and even a few barely perceptible – shards of evidence that the campaign is coming alive.
Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley this week held two public events, one on each side of the sprawling, 499-kilometre-wide state, but left political observers wondering how she filled the rest of her 48-hour trip (likely meeting with potential founders and organizers.) Senator Tim Scott – who like Ms. Haley is from South Carolina, another presidential proving ground – addressed the Polk County Republican dinner outside Des Moines (a speech there is traditionally regarded as a sure sign of presidential ambitions).
Also in the state in recent days: Former vice president Mike Pence (weighing in on a matter involving the Linn-Mar Community School District in eastern Iowa, almost certainly positioning himself on the education issues that have become a GOP calling card) and former governor Asa Hutchinson (who met with state legislators and GOP activists, perhaps hoping to become the third Arkansas governor, after Bill Clinton and Mr. Huckabee, to join the Iowa caucus fight).
There were still no signs of Governor Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump. But Mr. DeSantis’s name is on the lips of every Republican here (mostly asking why the Florida governor made Presidents’ Day trips to New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois on Monday rather than decamp here). And Mr. Trump this week selected Marshall Moreau (known as a giant-killer here for managing the 2022 upset campaign for the Republican attorney-general candidate) as his Iowa state campaign director.
The Democrats were reminded of the travails of Mr. Carter’s White House years even though his decline prompted affectionate reminiscences of his grit in a campaign in which he carried his own valise, bunked in with farmers and visited coffee shops in even the smallest rural crossroads. Concerned that Iowa isn’t nearly representative of the country as a whole, the Democrats have removed Iowa from its place at the front of the party’s road to its presidential nomination. Black people comprise only 3.72 per cent of Iowa’s population (national rate: 13.6 per cent) and those who are not Christian comprise only 1 per cent of the population (national rate: 30 per cent).
Even so, the Republicans are planning to hold their caucuses as the opening event of the nomination struggle, probably in mid-January.
“Voters here are fanatically loyal to Iowa’s caucuses,” said Sheahan Virgin, a political scientist at Grinnell College, located in the central part of the state. “They like being the centre of attention. They don’t want to give up the caucuses, for all its peculiarities.”
Indeed, the Iowa event shines a light on the state’s unusual character.
“Our communities operate on assumptions of openness and honesty,” said Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the family-run weekly newspaper The Storm Lake Times (circulation: 3,386). “These things bubble up during the caucus cycle. And here endorsements from major politicians don’t carry much weight, a big contrast with South Carolina, which has a completely different culture.”
Here media campaigns are usually ineffective; Senator John Glenn of Ohio, the former Project Mercury astronaut, emphasized advertising over organizing and was defeated easily in the 1984 Democratic caucuses by former vice president Walter Mondale, whose White House drive deployed a formidable ground campaign that got supporters to caucus sites with military-like efficiency.
And here the campaign styles of big-state politicians often fall flat. Former governor George Pataki of New York left the 2016 race a month before the caucuses, having discovered that the tactics that work in Brooklyn, N.Y. (population 2.6 million) do not work in Brooklyn, Iowa (population 1,491).
That should serve as a warning to Mr. DeSantis, whose experience campaigning in The Villages, the central Florida development for residents over 55 (population 81,444 in 88 square kilometres) will offer him no advantage while campaigning in villages like Ladora (population 228 distributed in about the same land area), where a telling symbol stands outside a converted bank building on Pacific Street, right beside the BRT Ag & Turf outlet dedicated to marketing Iowa seed and grain. The Caucus Bistro may have closed a few years ago, but its sign remains. It says “Savor an Iowa Tradition.”