The Iowa caucuses hold an exalted place in the American electoral tradition and although it reaches its apogee in the folksy cafes and echoing across the state on Monday evening, it’s a gruelling, year-long carnival for the candidates eager to make an impression on the Midwest. Beneath the national weeklong cause celebre of an electoral tradition lies untold hours of serious political wooing.
“It’s 11 months’ worth of work, of going over all over this state multiple times to really get to answer all of your questions and take pictures,” Nikki Haley told a noonday crowd on Thursday at Ankeny, a suburb on the edge of Des Moines, of her experience of the past year. Since announcing her bid for the Republican nomination in February, Haley has beaten a path through the small towns of Iowa and New Hampshire, and just five days out from the caucuses, her last lap of the circuit brought with it an intensified media presence. In a week’s time, she acknowledged, Iowans will be left in peace to get through its harsh winter and the crucial weeks of the college basketball season.
“I know why I’m excited,” she told a crowd of about 200 in a suburban function room crowded with television crews and voters alike.
“But I also know why you’re excited. Just think. All the TV commercials will go away. All of the mail, the text messages, all the media. I know you are all ready to see everybody go. But you get it. You get the fact that it all starts here. You set the tone for the country. It is a pretty cool thing when you think about the fact that you get to set the tone for where you want our country to go. And if you look at where our country is: it’s unsettling, right?”
The slight Carolinian inflection in her voice marks Haley out as something different. That distinguishing factor has been her calling card as a public figure. She was governor of South Carolina, her home state, until 2017, after which she served as US ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration.
Trump is at once her former mentor and the shape-shifting force she must ultimately bring down if she is to make history as the first woman and the first Asian-American – her parents are Indian immigrants – to attain the Republican nomination.
[ Who is Nikki Haley, the Republican presidential candidate rising in the polls?Opens in new window ]
Haley has run a deft campaign. Her conspicuous avoidance of identifying slavery when asked, at an event in late December, about the cause of the US civil war stands as her most conspicuous mistake. She has trodden a cautious line between avoiding overt criticism of Trump while offering coded warnings of what a second presidency would look like.
‘I agreed with a lot of [Trump’s] policies. But rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him. Y’all know it. Chaos follows him. And we can’t be a country in disarray and have a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos, because we won’t survive it’
— Nikki Haley
“I have always spoken in hard truths,” she told her listeners on Thursday.
“I think president Trump was the right president at the right time to bring the things we needed. I agreed with a lot of his policies. But rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him. Y’all know it. Chaos follows him. And we can’t be a country in disarray and have a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos, because we won’t survive it. And the other thing we need to think about: we can never afford a president Kamala Harris. And we can’t afford another nail-biter of an election.”
Haley speaks swiftly and moves with energy and this message formed the heart of a delivery in which she ran through her manifesto – reducing the national debt, securing the borders and deporting illegal immigrants, restoring permanent tax cuts to small businesses and making federal expenditure accountable. She presented herself as someone with credible experience in foreign diplomacy and, as the wife of a military man – Michael Haley is in the South Carolina National Guard and is posted in Afghanistan – is someone who knows what it is to have a family member serve overseas.
Haley’s spoken conviction is that if she can navigate a pathway through the next few months and convince Republicans, then national polls suggest she can become that most elusive of things: the unifying national political figure.
“Ron [DeSantis] doesn’t defeat Biden,” she said, alluding to the national polling narrative.
“Trump is within the margin of error. In every one of those polls, I defeat Biden by as much as 17 points. Do you know what that means? That is bigger than the presidency. You go into DC with a double digit win, that’s a mandate.”
And there exists among some Iowans a sense of puzzlement at the Republican polls which have consistently returned Donald Trump as commanding a staggering 50 per cent of Republican votes in the 99 counties.
‘I really cannot understand why evangelical Christians are going for Trump. I consider myself an evangelical Christian and I would be so embarrassed to think that he was representing me’
— Anne Darby, Iowa evangelical
“I don’t know who is voting for Trump,” says Anne Darby, who travelled with her daughter and granddaughter from her home an hour away to see Haley in person.
“I don’t know them. I guess I do know two individuals but I do a lot of networking. And two individuals? So, I don’t believe the polls. And I really cannot understand why evangelical Christians are going for Trump. I consider myself an evangelical Christian and I would be so embarrassed to think that he was representing me. He doesn’t exactly live by what Jesus taught.”
This was the first time Vince Newendorb had been in the same room as Haley as well. Like many Iowans, he can see the merits of both Ron DeSantis and Haley and he is also sceptical of the national assumption that Iowa is now unadulterated Trump country.
“When I get to the caucus: that’s where I make a decision. Not on some poll. I could tell you I am going to vote for Trump. But I think there are a lot of folks in Iowa who want to see a change.”
But a change from what? Newendorb pauses for a moment when asked when he believed the United States was at its best.
“In my lifetime? Under Ronald Reagan. He was charismatic. He didn’t do everything right. But he was in front of the people – and he was believable. We all make mistakes. Premiers make mistakes. But it’s how they respond and take ownership and responsibility for that. And our former president hasn’t done that. Our current president doesn’t do that. We are looking for somebody to do that. I think Nikki could do that. I think Ron could do that. But, yeah, she is an impressive lady.”
Iowa Caucuses: The first state out of the blocks
It’s a folksy tradition and like many things, the Iowa caucuses began in accidental fashion.
After the bedlam of the 1968 convention, when sentiment against the Vietnam War led to widespread demonstrations and unrest, Democrats moved to give their voters a more prominent voice. Before that, the party held popular state votes sporadically.
In 1972, Iowa Democrats happened to organise an early vote and four years later Jimmy Carter became the first nomination hopeful to canvas Iowa so thoroughly that he moved from relative obscurity to front-runner. Iowa Republicans followed suit and the Iowa state legislature went on to pass legislation so that both parties are the first in the nation to caucus.
Primaries and caucuses are similar in that both are methods of voting. But the caucus system requires that voters physically attend their designated caucus site, where the merits and otherwise of the candidates are discussed. Next Monday is expected to be the coldest caucus night ever (-27C), which is likely to reduce the turnout.
For years, the Democratic system was much more convoluted, with the public indicating their preference by standing in physical clusters
After arriving and listening to the debates, caucus attendees vote. The results are reported to the Iowa Republican state party, tallied and released within hours.
For years, the Democratic system was much more convoluted, with the public indicating their preference by standing in physical clusters, with those candidates with the lowest numbers eliminated and the voters moving to their next preference. That theatre has vanished for now: this year’s Democratic caucus is notional and will be held by mail.
The Republican caucuses begin in all 99 Iowa caucuses at 7pm on January 15th, with the precinct captains conducting eleventh-hour networking campaigns to deliver a healthy turnout for their candidates.
The accidental fact that it has been the first state out of the blocks for 50 years is what gives Iowa such prominence in the election drama.
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