In the downtown museum, disaster is looming for Donald Trump.
This is Polk County precinct #55, where the votes have been counted in jig-time and where, in this room anyway, the weeklong declarations that Iowa is the deep red of Trump Country have been utterly defied. After they recheck the votes, it is official: Trump is tied with Nikki Haley.
Fortunately for the Trump campaign, they’re on five votes apiece. Patrick, the caucus organiser, is valiantly conducting three separate caucus events taking place concurrently through the State Historical Building on East Locust.
This is in the heart of the Des Moines city, a few minutes from the candidates’ hotels. But the number of voters is tiny. Outside, the Des Moines streets are ice-sculpted and there’s a vengefulness to the sub-zero night: it is –21 and falling and the coldness hurts anyone who is outdoors for more than five minutes.
Thirteen voters are gathered in this room. One of those, Spencer Burton, drove 1,300km to make sure he was home for caucus night and ended up serving as precinct secretary for the evening. He is official vote counter and signs his name to the returns as the other 12 voters stand around. Afterwards, he smiles at the notion that what happened here might be reflected when the votes are tallied throughout the state.
“They say that Nikki Haley voters don’t feel strongly about her. Well, I’m committed. She is the best alternative here in Iowa. But she is gonna do well in urban areas. That is why she did well here. You go up state in some rural county she is not going to be splitting it with Trump,” he says.
“But then ... it is easier to get to the polls in a big city. And maybe that will count more because some people in the rural counties have to go 25, 30 miles and drive on gravel roads to get there. And it is brutal out there. The roads are not even good here in Des Moines and people don’t have to go that far.”
In other voting years, Burton has been persuaded by argument and policy more so than party affiliation: he has voted Democrat and independent in the past and confesses that as he’s become older, he has become more conservative.
“A moderate conservative. I just want this country to be reasonable. To be united. I think we need some new policies. And I voted for Nikki because she is the best option of what is left. To me Donald Trump is dangerous to our democracy here and abroad. And I have to do my part. Whatever I have to do. It is just one vote, but I had to at least register my vote in a Republican primary to say he is not what I want for our country again.”
Burton is perplexed as to why other Republicans believe just as fervently that Trump is the solution to all problems.
Trump’s supporters applaud when, in advance of the vote, Blake Marnell gives a short speech to explain why he feels so passionately about Trump that he made a 2,700km drive from his native California over the weekend.
He wasn’t entitled to take part in the caucuses. But he wanted to witness the official start of the election year and to speak with Iowans, so he arrived at Trump’s Sunday morning rally at Indianola and waited in the bone-numbing cold for the doors of Simpson College to open. “And I talked to people from Iowa,” he explains.
“The number one takeaway I saw is that we have to get our border back under control. Under Joe Biden the number of illegal entries to our country has been astronomical and unsustainable. And even though you don’t share a border with Mexico, it affects every single state in America. We are all border states now.”
There is a ripple of applause for this from the Trump contingent.
Mary-Rose Frederick is so busy chatting with a neighbour that she almost forgets to submit her ballot paper, apologising as she ducks through a heavy presence of television cameras – which outnumber voters – to hand her paper to Spencer Burton.
She, too, saw Trump speak for some 90 minutes at Simpson College. The ad-libbing style is something she likes. “He’s unscripted. And I know a lot of people don’t like that but ... he is not being handled, and I feel he is more authentic. And I voted for him the first time because I didn’t like the other options.”
She grew up in Des Moines and is easy-going and pleasant to talk to. She was taken aback by the small number of people in her precinct. In other years, she voted at Franklin high school and reckoned there were about 100 people there then.
She believes one of the reasons why Trump has made such a strong impression in Iowa is the general sense that something has been lost. “And sometimes I think we won’t ever go back,” she concedes.
“Time keeps rolling forward. That’s all there is to it. And some things are just never going to go back. We are never going to see low prices because people are demanding higher wages ... the last four years we had were ridiculous. So, if we can even go back to the time before Biden, that would be something.”
It takes the caucus organiser all of three minutes to seal the envelope for the votes. It’s a peculiar thing to hear him announce the tally one last time – “so, one for Vivek, one for RonDeSantis”.
A stranger wandering in might assume they’d stumbled on a vote for president of the local history society rather than the Republican candidate for the White House. But what makes Iowa so unusual and exotic is that for all the epic scale of the election and seismic consequences of the outcome, it starts like this, with strangers in a room watching as an envelope containing their clashing views and ideologies and visions is ferried away to join the vast chorus of Iowan voters.
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