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      The Iowa State Fair Continues Friday, as Republican Candidates Seek a Moment

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      The butter cow is carved. The pork chops are prepped. And the candidates who weren’t at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday are on their way.Six candidates for the Republican presidential nomination will be circulating through the fairgrounds on Friday, as they try to woo voters months ahead of this crucial first nominating contest.A day at the fair — one of the largest in the nation — has long been one of Iowa’s quirkiest political traditions. Presidential aspirants make their campaign pitch but also flip pork chops at a grill sponsored by the state’s pork industry, pay homage to a sculpture of a cow made of 600 pounds of butter and eat their share of fried foods — all while navigating hecklers and a media throng.It doesn’t always go as planned: In 2007, Mitt Romney flipped his chop into the gravel. (He lost the caucuses that year but won the party’s nomination four years later.) And in 2015, Donald J. Trump, walking through the fair in a navy blazer and buffed white dress shoes, offered rides at random to handfuls of Iowa children in his helicopter parked nearby. (He, too, lost the caucus but won the nomination.)Five months before the 2024 caucuses, Iowa has already emerged as a make-or-break contest in this race. With Mr. Trump leading by a double-digit margin, the state represents the best opportunity for his rivals to stop his march to the nomination. If one of them can take him down — or even come close to beating him — it would show cracks in his support and potentially undercut the narrative that he still has a stranglehold on the Republican base. If Mr. Trump wins in Iowa, party strategists say, it will be difficult to slow his momentum, particularly as the race broadens out to states across the country.Friday’s lineup at the fair is a list of Republican candidates who have been struggling to break into the top tier of the nomination race, including former Vice President Mike Pence, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami and Larry Elder, the conservative commentator.Several candidates are scheduled to deliver speeches at the political soapbox, a small podium open to the public and sponsored by the Des Moines Register. Others will participate in public Q. and A. sessions with Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, opting for a more scripted encounter with a fellow Republican.While Saturday will bring Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to the event, the Friday attendees are likely to enjoy a day basking in the Iowa attention without the former president stealing the show. More

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      How Are Iowa Democrats? ‘I Can’t Even Describe to You How Bad It Is.’

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      Not long ago, Iowa was the center of the Democratic political universe.In 2019, two dozen presidential candidates roamed the Iowa State Fair to grill pork chops and admire the famed butter cow as they vied for the state’s caucusgoers. Some Democrats still saw the state’s rightward jolt in 2016 as temporary, believing that their flipping of two congressional seats in 2018 had reaffirmed Iowa’s purple status. Days before the 2020 general election, Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigned in Des Moines.Now, as Republican presidential candidates flock to the fair, Iowa Democrats are at their lowest point in decades.“It is so bad,” said Claire Celsi, a Democratic state senator from West Des Moines. “I can’t even describe to you how bad it is.”Ms. Celsi and others described themselves as exhausted by repeated defeats at the ballot box, an inability to slow Republicans at the State Capitol and the loss to South Carolina of the first-in-the-nation status in Democratic presidential contests. Deep in the minority, Democrats in the State Legislature have squabbled among themselves, ousting their party’s State Senate leader in June after a dispute over personnel.In interviews this week, Iowa Democrats said the state now stood as a warning sign for what happens when their party falls out of touch with voters who once made up key parts of its electoral coalition.“There’s no question that Democrats are at a low point in Iowa,” said former Representative Dave Loebsack, whose eastern Iowa seat, which he had held for 14 years, flipped to a Republican when he chose not to seek re-election in 2020. “It’s difficult even to recruit people to run when we’re so far down.”Iowa’s transition to a deep-red state has taken place with remarkable speed. Democrats controlled the State Senate as recently as 2016. In 2018, Democrats won three of the state’s four congressional seats and three of the six statewide offices. But after the party’s bungling of its 2020 presidential caucuses, President Donald J. Trump cruised to victory in Iowa that November.Claire Celsi, a Democratic state senator from West Des Moines, said simply of the situation for Iowa Democrats, “It is so bad.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe midterm elections last year were a Democratic blood bath in Iowa, even though the party had over-performed in much of the rest of the country.The underfunded, little-known Democratic nominee for governor lost by 19 percentage points to Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, and carried only four of the state’s 99 counties. Republicans took all four congressional seats for the first time in 50 years, enacted a gun rights amendment in the State Constitution, ousted two of the three Democrats in statewide office and took supermajority control of both chambers of the Legislature.The three congressional seats Democrats held as recently as 2020 are still winnable, Democrats say, but the party doesn’t have 2024 candidates for any of them so far.“We should have candidates out there thinking, ‘If I get a few breaks, I can win,’” said Pete D’Alessandro, a senior aide to Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in Iowa. “That we don’t is a direct reflection of having an incompetent party for the last couple of years.”Democrats, including Mr. D’Alessandro, express optimism about the party’s new chairwoman, Rita Hart, who has sought to empower county-level leaders. Ms. Hart, who in 2020 lost the congressional race for Mr. Loebsack’s seat by six votes, said Iowa Democrats would have to fight for a focus on local issues.Ms. Hart took over the party in January, after a period in which Iowa Democrats had four leaders in less than two years. She has sought to instill some continuity while reorienting the party’s priorities away from the presidential cycle and toward local needs.“The way the media has changed, the way people have gotten their information, we have not shifted to understanding that we’ve got to talk to our fellow Iowans,” she said. “I’m very convinced that we’ve got to empower our county parties to do just that.”The struggles of Iowa Democrats reflect the broader migration of white, rural voters to Republicans, a long-term trend that has accelerated during Mr. Trump’s political career. Iowa has just two big cities, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and two college towns that state Democrats can still count on winning.Interviews with two dozen Democrats in the state suggest that the party has suffered from a confluence of problems, including diminished campaigning during the coronavirus pandemic; Mr. Trump’s appeal to the white, rural voters who dominate state politics; and weak messaging in the 2022 elections.Democrats have faced numerous setbacks this year, including Republicans’ passage of a six-week abortion ban — which has been temporarily halted by a court order — and a new program that allocates state money toward private school vouchers.“It’s just been so exhausting and frustrating to continue to take losses,” said Sarah Trone Garriott, a Democratic state senator who was the party’s rare bright spot last year when she flipped a suburban Des Moines district to beat the Republican president of the chamber.She added, “If I had known everything that I was getting into, I don’t think I would have run in the first place, because it’s just been really hard, but I see so much opportunity in Iowa.”Losing the first presidential contest after the state party had suffered international ridicule for the 2020 caucuses fiasco forced what several Democrats described as a long-overdue reckoning. No longer can the party rely on a periodic influx of fund-raising and attention. Internal discussions now center on how to act more like successful red-state Democrats elsewhere, nominating moderate candidates who can attract independent voters who have been tilting more conservative with each election.“I’m hopeful that now our attention is on getting people elected and getting Democrats to turn out the vote rather than a national entity that overtakes everything,” said J.D. Scholten, a state representative from Sioux City who in 2018 nearly defeated Representative Steve King, a hard-right Republican with a history of racist remarks.Mr. Scholten, who spent years playing professional baseball in several countries, will not attend the State Fair because he’s pitching for a team in the Netherlands this summer. Ms. Celsi said she wouldn’t go because it is “Kim Reynolds’s show.” And Mr. Loebsack said he was staying home because the country music acts at the fair’s amphitheater did not appeal to him and his wife.Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, a Republican, holding an interview at the State Fair. She easily won re-election last year.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIt’s clear that Iowa Democrats have a long way to go.Republicans, with a hammerlock on the state’s politics, dominate fund-raising and media attention — and that was before the G.O.P. presidential candidates made themselves regulars at local fund-raisers and other political events.That has left Democrats doing a lot of finger-pointing and soul-searching about what has gone wrong, whether they have hit rock bottom yet and how to maneuver their way back to political relevance.“The Iowa Democratic Party didn’t prepare for the transition to understanding and using social media,” said Jack Hatch, a longtime state legislator who was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2014. “Some individual campaigns understood, but not the party. As a result, we had one message for all campaigns, which weakened all our campaigns. One message doesn’t work in Iowa.” More

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      What Is the Iowa State Fair and Why Does It Matter?

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      The Iowa State Fair is one of the most famous stops in a presidential campaign, known for delivering the kind of memorable moments that can define a candidacy.The fair, which attracts about a million people over ten days, amounts to a political obstacle course for candidates, who must woo voters in unscripted interactions, flip a pork chop for the cameras, deliver their stump speeches in a public forum and — most treacherously of all — eat fair food while avoiding unflattering photographs. It all happens before the hundreds of thousands of Iowa voters visiting the fair, throngs of reporters and banks of televisions cameras.And it can easily go very wrong.In 1987, Joe Biden lifted passages of a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock without attribution, adding to questions of plagiarism that ultimately lead to his early withdrawal from the race.In 2004, John Kerry, one of the country’s richest lawmakers who had been struggling to show he connected with regular voters, ordered a strawberry smoothie — a choice that had his aides scrambling to find a corn dog.And in 2012, Mitt Romney responded to a heckler with the line, “Corporations are people, my friend.” The comment came to be a shorthand for Democratic attacks that he sided with business over American workers.These kinds of moments can create narratives that become cemented in the public perceptions of the candidates — even when the facts may be slightly off. In 2007, Senator Fred Thompson, who ran for the Republican nomination, traveled the fair in a golf cart and, allegedly, $500 Gucci loafers. Years later, Mr. Thompson insisted that he did not own the shoes.This year, all the major Republican presidential candidates, except former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, are expected to attend. The biggest showdown is expected to be on Saturday, when both former President Donald Trump and his major rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, will be circulating through the fairgrounds.Mr. DeSantis will participate in a conversation with Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa. Mr. Trump is skipping the organized events to attend with an entourage of endorsers not from Iowa but Florida — a dig at Mr. DeSantis. It’s the kind of unconventional approach Mr. Trump has taken to the event in the past. In 2015, he caused a media frenzy when he landed his helicopter near the fairgrounds and offered rides to children. More

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      Racing to Stop Trump, Republicans Descend on the Iowa State Fair

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      Over decades of presidential campaigns, the Iowa way has been to hop from town to town, taking questions from all comers and genuflecting to the local culinary traditions. Going everywhere and meeting everyone has been the gospel of how to win over voters in the low-turnout midwinter caucuses that kick off the American presidential cycle.Now former President Donald J. Trump is delivering what could be a death blow to the old way.Five months from the 2024 caucuses, Mr. Trump holds a comfortable polling lead in a state he has rarely set foot in. If any of his dozen challengers hope to stop his march to a third straight nomination, they will almost certainly have to halt, or at least slow, him in Iowa after spending the better part of a year making their case. A commanding victory by Mr. Trump could create a sense of inevitability around his candidacy that would be difficult to overcome.As Mr. Trump and nearly all of his Republican rivals converge in the coming days at the Iowa State Fair, the annual celebration of agriculture and stick-borne fried food will serve as the latest stage for a nationalized campaign in which the former president and his three indictments have left the rest of the field starved for attention.“You’ve got to do it in Iowa, otherwise it’s gone, it’s all national media,” said Doug Gross, a Republican strategist who was the party’s nominee for governor of the state in 2002. “The chance to show that he’s vulnerable is gone. You’ve got to do it here, and you’ve got to do it now.”At the Iowa State Fair on Wednesday, Dana Wanken, known as Spanky, cleaned the grill outside the pork tent, one of the destinations where Republican presidential candidates will converge in the coming days to compete for the attention of voters.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMost of the Republican candidates are trying to do Iowa the old way, and all of them are less popular and receiving far less visibility than Mr. Trump, who has visited the state just six times since announcing his campaign in November.The same polling that shows Mr. Trump with a wide lead nationally and in Iowa also indicates that his competitors have a plausible path to carve into his support in the crucial first state. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that while Mr. Trump held 44 percent of the support among Iowa Republicans — more than double that of his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — 47 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would consider backing another candidate.Mr. DeSantis, for all his bad headlines about staff shake-ups, campaign resets and financial troubles, holds significant structural advantages in Iowa.He has endorsements from a flotilla of Iowa state legislators; a campaign team flush with veterans from the 2016 presidential bid of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who beat Mr. Trump in the state; and a super PAC with $100 million to spend. Mr. DeSantis has also said he will visit all 99 counties, a quest that has long revealed a candidate’s willingness to do the grunt work of traveling to Iowa’s sparsely populated rural corners to scrounge for every last vote.Convincing Iowans that they should be searching for a Trump alternative may be Mr. DeSantis’s toughest task.“Trump’s supporters are very vocal, so sometimes being very vocal sounds like there’s a lot of them,” said Tom Shipley, a state senator from southwest Iowa who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the case.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and his family at the Clayton County Fair in Iowa last weekend. While Mr. DeSantis has drawn receptive crowds and has been cheered at the state’s big political events, there is no flood of Iowans rushing to support him.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesYet while Mr. DeSantis has drawn receptive crowds and has been cheered at the state’s big political events, there is no flood of Iowans rushing to support him. Through the end of June, just 17 Iowans had given his campaign $200 or more, according to a report filed to the Federal Election Commission. Nikki Haley, who lags far behind him in polls, had 25 such Iowa donors, while Mr. Trump had 117. Former Vice President Mike Pence had just seven.(The number of small donors Mr. DeSantis had in Iowa is not publicly known because his campaign has an arrangement with WinRed, the Republican donor platform, that effectively prevented the disclosure of information about small donors.)Mr. DeSantis’s supporters are quick to point out that the three most recent winners of competitive Iowa caucuses — Mr. Cruz, Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008 — each came from behind with support from the same demographic: social conservatives. None of the three won the presidential nomination, but all of them used Iowa to propel themselves into what became a one-on-one matchup with the party’s eventual nominee.Operatives and supporters of the non-Trump candidates warn that Iowa caucusgoers are notoriously fickle. Around this point in 2015, Mr. Cruz had just 8 percent support in a poll by The Des Moines Register. Mr. Trump was first at 23 percent and Ben Carson was second, with 18 percent.“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” said Chris Cournoyer, a Republican state senator from Le Claire who is backing Nikki Haley, who was at 4 percent in the recent Times/Siena poll.What’s different about Iowa this time, according to interviews with more than a dozen state legislators, political operatives and veterans of past caucuses, is that before Republicans consider a broad field of candidates, they are asking themselves a more basic, binary question: Trump or not Trump?Jeanne Dietrich of Omaha, Neb., displayed an autograph from former President Donal J. Trump after attending the opening of his Iowa campaign headquarters in July. Five months from the 2024 caucuses, Mr. Trump holds a comfortable polling lead in the state.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesWhere in the past Iowans might have told those running for president that they were on a list of three or four top contenders, Mr. Trump’s dominance over Republican politics has left candidates fighting for a far smaller slice of voters. The longer a large field exists, the harder it will be for Mr. DeSantis or anyone else to consolidate enough support to present a challenge to Mr. Trump.“These people are absolutely going to vote for the former president, and those people are absolutely not going to vote for the former president,” said Eric Woolson, who has been in Iowa politics so long he was part of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 1988 presidential campaign before working for a series of Republican presidential hopefuls: George W. Bush, Mr. Huckabee, Michele Bachmann and Scott Walker.Now Mr. Woolson, who owns an organic catnip farm in southern Iowa, serves as the state director for Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, who is polling at 1 percent in Iowa. Mr. Woolson said the first hurdle for 2024 campaigns was sorting out which voters would even consider candidates other than Mr. Trump.“In past elections, voters were keeping an open mind of, ‘Well, maybe I can still vote for this candidate, or maybe this one’s my second choice or whatever,’” he said. “Now there’s just such stark lines that have been drawn.”Those lines are compounded by a political and media environment centered not on Iowa’s local news outlets but on conservative cable and internet shows.Nikki Haley, who lags far behind Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump in polls, reported that just 25 Iowans had given her campaign $200 or more through the end of June, according to a report filed to the Federal Election Commission.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesFor decades, presidential candidates from both parties have flocked to The Des Moines Register’s state fair soapbox, a centrally located stage that has served as a gathering spot for the political news media and passers-by on their way to the Ferris wheel and the butter cow. It was at the soapbox in 2011 where Mitt Romney responded to a heckler with his infamous quip, “Corporations are people, my friend.”Mr. Trump skipped The Register’s soapbox in 2016 in favor of a far more dramatic appearance — landing at the fair in his helicopter and offering rides to children.This year, only lower-polling candidates — Ms. Haley, Mr. Pence and Vivek Ramaswamy, among others — are scheduled to speak at the soap box. All of the contenders except Mr. Trump will instead sit for interviews at the fairgrounds with Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, a Republican who has pledged to stay neutral but has clashed with Mr. Trump. The scripted nature of those appearances is likely to cut down on the kinds of viral moments that once drove politics at the fair.Mr. Trump does not need to participate in Iowa’s retail politics, his supporters say, because he is already universally known and has been omnipresent on the conservative media airwaves as he fights against his indictments.“Trump can rely on the network that’s out here already,” said Stan Gustafson, a Republican state representative from just south of Des Moines. “It’s already put together.”Yet at least a few Iowa Republicans supporting Mr. Trump say they are looking to the future — just a bit further out than next year’s caucuses. Mr. Gustafson, who has endorsed Mr. Trump, said he was eyeing which candidates he might support in 2028.Tim Kraayenbrink, a state senator who also backs Mr. Trump, said Iowa’s turn in the campaign cycle was a good opportunity to judge which candidates would make a good running mate — as long as it is not Mr. Pence, he clarified.“He’s going to have some quality people to choose from for vice president,” Mr. Kraayenbrink said of Mr. Trump.Andrew Fischer More

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      Ron DeSantis Faces Four Main Challenges Ahead of 2024

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      Ron DeSantis has cut back, reorganized, reset and refocused his presidential campaign. We talked to Republican strategists about what they think he ought to do next.The presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis is clearly in a downward spiral, whether measured by polling, internal upheaval, shifting strategies or money woes.Early this year, Mr. DeSantis seemed to have a clear path to the Republican nomination: He was a political fighter in the mold of Donald J. Trump, but without the chaos and with a solid record of conservative achievements in Florida.But those best-laid plans have met reality — a Trump rebound and a crowded Republican field — and now the Florida governor is desperately struggling to regain his footing after his campaign this week announced its third major shake-up in a month.In interviews, Republican strategists with experience in presidential races (but unaffiliated with Mr. DeSantis or his 2024 rivals) diagnosed some of the top problems of his campaign.What to do about Trump?There is no way around it. Solving the Trump problem is the master key to this election, and no one has found it. Mr. DeSantis, like almost every other Republican in the race, adopted a strategy of never criticizing Mr. Trump, for fear of alienating his ardent base. The theory was that at some point Mr. Trump would disqualify himself, and Mr. DeSantis would be positioned to inherit his supporters.But now, after three criminal indictments have failed to dent Mr. Trump’s popularity with Republican voters, pressure is mounting on Mr. DeSantis to stop pretending Mr. Trump isn’t in the race and take him on directly.“The people who want Trump don’t need a mini-me Trump,’’ said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican member of Congress from Virginia, who is not a fan of either the former president or Mr. DeSantis.This week, Mr. DeSantis took a small step in the direction of taking on Mr. Trump by stating plainly that “of course” he lost the 2020 election, a position that conflicts with what many Republican voters believe.“Trump is the de facto Republican incumbent, and in order to beat an incumbent you have to give voters a fire-able offense,” said Terry Sullivan, who managed Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016.A related problem: Mr. DeSantis has failed to captivate voters, either with a charismatic stump speech or with a new charm offensive in which he wades into crowds, poses for selfies and engages in chitchat. Sarah Longwell, who conducts focus groups of Republican voters, said that recently she had witnessed something novel: Not one G.O.P. voter brought up Mr. DeSantis’s name in the groups. “People are like, we gave you a look and we’re not that interested,’’ she said.A muddled message.“The No. 1 failing for any campaign, and it’s clearly DeSantis’s problem — what is his elevator pitch?” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based strategist who has advised multiple presidential campaigns.One day, Mr. DeSantis is reminding voters about taking on the Walt Disney Company over what he views as “woke” corporate meddling. Another day, he is picking a fight with Representative Byron Donalds, the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation, over the state’s new standards for teaching Black history.These headline-making fights may break into the Trump-dominated media coverage, but Mr. Carney said they hadn’t given voters a slogan they remember.“You have to have a message that’s relatable and simple and that you can communicate,’’ he said. “‘Morning in America,’ ‘Are you better off than four years ago?,’ Make America Great Again.’”Just what that should be, of course, is up for debate.Mr. Sullivan said he thought Mr. DeSantis was on point when he talks about electability. Mr. DeSantis has often suggested that Mr. Trump, now saddled with criminal charges stemming from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, can’t win a general election.“The messaging the other day was very smart — if the election is about January 2021, and not about Joe Biden’s record, we will lose,” Mr. Sullivan said.Gail Gitcho, a consultant who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Mr. DeSantis needed to talk about his achievements in Florida.“He’s got something no one else has — executive experience in a big state with countless examples of his effectiveness and conservatism,” she said. “Stop with the donor-induced shake-ups and run on his record.”Too much talk about donor-induced shake-ups?All summer, media reports have been filled with accounts of Mr. DeSantis’s struggles, fed by campaign insiders, his wealthy donors and other Republicans with a close view. It has led to steady headlines about campaign restarts and reboots and a revolving door of personnel. The coverage feeds a narrative of a campaign in trouble, which becomes self-fulfilling.Mr. Sullivan said Mr. DeSantis needed to just run the plays without discussing them.“You just have to keep your head down and execute. Win the day. Win the week. Then string them together,” he said.Putting all the chips on Iowa.In an earlier reboot, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign said it would zero in on Iowa, touring the state by bus, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private air travel, and visit all 99 counties. Such a hyperlocal strategy of retail engagement with voters is traditionally what underfunded long shots pursue. But it also raises the stakes for Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, a state where he was trailing Mr. Trump by 24 percentage points in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll.Although the Iowa caucuses are still several months away, Mr. DeSantis is playing a risky expectations game, one that could make it difficult for him to rebound if he doesn’t post a strong showing in Iowa.“Clearly, they said they’re going to win Iowa,” Mr. Carney said. “I just think a campaign that talks too much, that brags about what they’re going to do — they set themselves up for traps.”Ms. Longwell, on the other hand, said an all-in-on-Iowa strategy made sense.“Iowa is hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “You have to get a story in Iowa that Ron DeSantis is running close to Trump — because now it’s all a downward death spiral.” More

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      DeSantis Takes His Iowa Push To a New Venue: Weddings

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      The Florida governor, who has struggled at times to connect with voters, is looking for every opportunity to show he is all-in with Iowa Republicans.Two great traditions converged in Des Moines on Saturday night when wedding crashing came to Iowa politics.Iowa State Representative Taylor Collins welcomed an unexpected guest to his wedding reception: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, strode just behind the newlyweds into the event, held at a Beaux-Arts-style building in the state’s capital, to cheers and a standing ovation, according to videos posted on social media and confirmed by an attendee. They then spent an hour mingling with roughly 150 guests.The last-minute table-grabbers had been invited by the bride, Savannah Collins, to the surprise of her husband, who had previously endorsed Mr. DeSantis’s presidential bid, according to two people familiar with the event. Several other state legislators who have endorsed Mr. DeSantis were also in attendance.For the governor, who is struggling to gain ground on former President Donald J. Trump, according to recent polls, the appearance was a clear attempt to demonstrate that he possessed the interpersonal touch that has sometimes seemed lacking in his presidential campaign.Mr. DeSantis’s allies said he saw a path to victory in Iowa’s January caucus through an aggressive plan to visit each of the state’s 99 counties, meet voters in person and win endorsements from local officials. As of Saturday, Mr. DeSantis had visited nearly 30 counties.After making fewer visits to the state than some of his lower-polling rivals for the Republican nomination, Mr. DeSantis recently started to step up his appearances in Iowa, where polling shows he is performing better than he is nationally. His campaign recently has focused on the state as he has worked to position himself as the Trump alternative after losing ground earlier this year.Before dropping in on the wedding, Mr. DeSantis had spent Friday and Saturday on a bus tour of northeast and central Iowa, where he made frequent stops to address voters in small groups, answer questions and engage in the retail politics that Iowa voters expect, such as scooping ice cream for locals at a dairy store.“You’ve got to show up in people’s communities and you’ve got to be able to make the case about why you should be the nominee of the party and the 47th president of the United States,” Mr. DeSantis told a group of several dozen voters at a Pizza Ranch restaurant in Grinnell, Iowa, on Saturday afternoon.The comments were a thinly veiled attack on Mr. Trump, who has skipped events hosted by prominent evangelical Christian leaders and who recently picked a fight with Iowa’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds. “I think anybody who’s not willing to do that is basically telling you that they don’t think they have to earn your vote,” he continued. “And I think that’s a mistake.”Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, as well as the rest of the presidential field, are set to attend the Iowa State Fair, a major event on the political calendar that begins this week.Polling shows that Mr. DeSantis’s efforts are playing better in Iowa than in other parts of the country. Iowa Republicans are more likely than voters nationwide to see Mr. DeSantis as “moral,” “likable” and “able to beat Joe Biden,” although he still lags Mr. Trump in the state by 24 percentage points overall, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.While Mr. DeSantis has had success attracting endorsements from state lawmakers like Mr. Collins, Mr. Trump has much more backing from members of Congress, in part because of the former president’s attention to personal relationships, which has included reaching out to lawmakers when they or their family members fall ill and hosting them for dinners.Mr. Trump is also known to drop in at weddings held at Mar-a-Lago, the exclusive Palm Beach social club that serves as his home, as well as at his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey.This was not Mr. DeSantis’s first attempt at surprising Iowa voters.In May, after a busy day of campaigning around the state, he made an unscheduled evening stop at a barbecue restaurant in Des Moines, not far from where Mr. Trump had canceled an earlier rally (because of bad weather, according to Mr. Trump’s campaign).After Mr. DeSantis’s unexpected entrance to the wedding, Mr. Collins celebrated on social media, saying: “You never know who will crash your wedding reception during caucus season! An honor to be on #TeamDeSantis.”In response to an email seeking comment, he wrote: “It was great for our family and friends from across the country to experience firsthand what it’s like to be in Iowa during caucus season. I can’t think of a better way to end the night than seeing everyone spend time with the governor.”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York. More

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      ‘These people are diehard’: Iowa Trump supporters shrug off indictments

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      From his corner of rural Iowa, Neil Shaffer did more than his fair share to put Donald Trump in the White House and to try to keep him there.Shaffer oversaw the biggest swing of any county in the US from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, and increased the then president’s share of the vote four years later. But the chair of the Howard county Republican party is not enthusiastic at the prospect of yet another Trump presidential campaign, and he blames the Democrats for driving it.“Honestly, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with these prosecutions,” he said. “Why is Trump doing so well? Because people feel like they are piling on him. If this is the Democrats’ effort to make him look bad, it hasn’t. It’s probably going to make him the [Republican] nominee and, honestly, he may win the general election again. And then whose fault would it be?”After pleading not guilty on Thursday to federal charges over his attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, Trump denounced the indictment as “a persecution of a political opponent”.“If you can’t beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him,” he said.There are plenty who buy that line in Iowa and the rest of Trump-sympathetic America.With Trump likely to spend a good part of the next year in one courtroom or another, after being indicted in New York, Florida and Washington on an array of charges and with more expected in Georgia before long, his supporters are more than willing to believe it is a plot to keep their man out of the White House.One of them is Tom Schatz, a Howard county farmer on Iowa’s border with Minnesota.“They’re bringing the charges against Trump so he can’t run against Biden. Biden is so damn crooked. We’ve never had this kind of shit in this United States, ever,” he said. “Democrats are gonna keep riding [Trump’s] ass and bringing shit up against him. They don’t quit. They just don’t like him because he’s draining the swamp, and they don’t like that.”Schatz, like many Trump supporters, sees the prosecutions as part of a pattern of establishment attacks, from Congress twice impeaching the then president to the FBI’s investigation into alleged ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign. The same message is hammered home on rightwing talk radio stations that are often the background to the working day in rural America.On the day of Trump’s arraignment, Buck Sexton, a former CIA analyst on AM 600 WMT in Iowa, was energetically telling his listeners, without irony, that the prosecutions undermined confidence in the electoral system.“We are up against something we have never dealt with before,” he said. “They don’t care how reckless this is, the Democrats. It doesn’t bother them the disruption that they are doing to faith in the judicial system, faith in our elections, something that he’s talked about all the time. How can you have a fair election when one candidate has soon to be four criminal trials against him? Specifically timed to happen during the election.”Shaffer, who works for the state as a river conservationist as well as running a family farm, has watched Trump’s support rise, fall and then bounce back.Some support drained away to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, after several prominent candidates backed by the former president lost in the midterm elections last November. For a while, polls put DeSantis ahead of Trump in a primary matchup. Shaffer said his county party was split, although at the time he still thought Trump would win because his supporters had more energy and commitment.“Now I think it’s even more so. When I speak up for DeSantis at our Republican monthly meeting, these people wearing their Trump hats don’t want to hear it. It’s such a foregone conclusion. Trump is going to get the nomination easily, whether he’s in a jail cell or in the courtroom. These people are that diehard,” he said.Shaffer sensed the renewed vigor in Trump’s campaign when he met the former president days before the latest indictment, at the Iowa Republican party’s annual fundraising Lincoln Dinner. Trump was among 13 candidates there to argue their case before meeting party activists one on one. So was his former vice-president, Mike Pence.“I feel bad for Pence because there were 500 people in line to see Trump and there were literally five people in the room for Pence,” said Shaffer. “Trump has that connection. Most of our group was there just to meet him.”Shaffer said the line to see DeSantis was longer than for Pence but nothing like the one for Trump, which he took as further evidence that the rightwing Florida governor’s moment had passed and that the the prosecutions helped revive Trump’s candidacy.“I think DeSantis is awesome. I think he’ll make a great president someday. But as long as Trump is running, there’s no way he’s gonna get the nomination,” he said.The polls back Shaffer’s view. But among some Howard county voters, support for Trump is more ambivalent.Tom Schatz’s son, Aaron, was a reluctant Trump voter in 2016. He voted for Obama but didn’t like Hillary Clinton. He was much more enthusiastic about Trump four years later but has cooled on him since.For all that, Schatz believes the former president is the victim of a political conspiracy.The dairy and corn farmer said he was more concerned about inflation, rising interest rates and falling prices for his milk than the details of the 45-page indictment laying out Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. He preferred to see the charges as evidence of a double standard in which the Washington establishment failed to properly investigate Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden for alleged crimes.Asked about Trump’s part in the January 6 storming of the Capitol, Schatz brushed it off as a bad thing but not very different from what he said were Democratic politicians encouraging the protests and riots that followed the killing of George Floyd three years ago.“They burned down Minneapolis. Were they prosecuted for that?“ he asked. “Trump acted poorly when he lost, I’ll give them that. But they’re just out to get anything they can on him. Part of me thinks that all they’re going to do is unite the Trump followers. I think they’re doing more harm than good.”Shaffer, too, is not persuaded by the detail of the indictment.“I still don’t like a lot of what Trump was doing, a lot of what he was saying. People know he didn’t handle himself very well from election day through January 6. But does it rise to the level where he should go to jail because he said something in a phone call? I think we’re more adult than that,” he said.Suspicions about the barrage of indictments even extends to the chair of Howard county’s Democratic party, Laura Hubka, a US navy veteran and ultrasound technologist at the city’s hospital who has no like of Trump.“I think that they’re going after him because he’s running,” she said. “Did he break laws and is he a bad guy? Yeah. But I think if he just went into the sunset, and blathered on Truth Social, maybe they would just have left him alone. But once he ran again, people thought he’s popular enough to win again and we need to do something to stop him. They had to do something, I guess.”The impact of Trump’s coming trials, and the evidence they lay bare, remains to be seen. But it might be expected that while diehard supporters will remain loyal through it all, those who voted for him once but then swung to Biden four years later have little reason to switch back.Trump was defeated by 7m popular votes and 74 electoral college ballots in 2020, and some Democrats are calculating that he will struggle to overcome that deficit with the additional baggage of indictments, trials and possibly even prison time.Yet the polls show the US’s two most recent presidents tied, including in key swing states such as Michigan.“Every time they indict him, he goes up in the polls,” said Shaffer. “I think the Democrats are so arrogant. Some of the liberals believe that, just like they did in 2016, he’ll never be elected, he’ll never get in again. Don’t be too sure about that.”For her part, Hubka cannot believe that the polls are that close even if the election is more than a year away.“I feel like he could be running from prison and it’ll still be a tight race with Joe Biden. That’s what scares me,” she said.Which raises a question about why the Democrats are not doing better in a former stronghold like Howard county.Shaffer says Howard county is doing well in many ways, and thanks to Biden. He said the presidents’s Inflation Reduction Act has pumped money into the county, paying to renew infrastructure, including bridges and roads. Shaffer’s conservation work for the state is well funded thanks to the federal government, and that brings financial benefits to farmers. In addition, the push for green energy has resulted in a proliferation of very profitable windmills.“We’ve got a lot of windmills around here and it’s a huge benefit. Each one of those is valued at a million dollars and we’re able to tax them and it puts money in our budget so we can build bridges and roads and have money for the schools,” said Shaffer.“I’ve got one of my farmers has four windmills and all the roads and lines. He gets $185,000 a year from it. He built a new home. He’s got new tractors. The whole northwest part of the county used to be a more depressed area. The windmills pumped in a lot of money “Shaffer is surprised that, with so many Republicans denouncing renewable energy, the Democratic party isn’t making more of an effort to claim credit for the benefits in Howard county.Hubka blames the Democratic national leadership, which has been accused of overly focusing on parts of the country where a majority of the residents have a college education, unlike rural Iowa.“They need to get some balls, be more bold. I also feel like they just are writing off the rural counties,” she said.But Hubka is still there, campaigning and waiting to see what happens if Trump goes to prison. She bought a gun before the last election because of so many threats from Trump supporters.“I was really very scared that I was going to get shot or hurt. It’s calmed down a bit in that sense. But who knows what happens if he gets thrown in jail,” she said.Around the corner from her hospital, a flag hanging outside a house might be read as a warning: “Trump 2024. 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      On the Campaign Trail, an Impossible Task: Ignoring Trump’s Latest Charges

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      Voters pressed them to weigh in. Reporters asked about pardons. Mike Pence was heckled. Republicans found it’s not easy to escape the fallout from Donald J. Trump’s legal peril.Days after the front-runner was indicted on charges of trying to subvert an election, Republican candidates in their presidential primary returned to the campaign trail acting as if nothing had changed.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida scooped ice cream in Iowa as he pitched his economic plans. Senator Tim Scott met community leaders at the southern border with a promise to get tough on immigration. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, showed up in Ukraine, a dramatic attempt to focus on foreign policy. And former Vice President Mike Pence talked up the “Trump-Pence administration” record at a town hall in New Hampshire.But their dogged attempts to create a political safe space — an indictment-free zone, where they are not asked to defend or attack former President Donald J. Trump, the dominant leader in the race and the party’s most powerful figure — kept failing.Reporters asked questions about stolen-election lies and presidential pardons. Voters wanted to know what they thought of the new charges. Trump supporters greeted Mr. Pence with a sign calling him a “traitor.” Mr. Trump, too, had thoughts.“Every time they file an indictment, we go way up in the polls,” he said at a Republican Party dinner in Montgomery, Ala., on Friday night. “We need one more indictment to close out this election.”The scenes demonstrated the nearly impossible challenge before the Republican field as the candidates soldier on in a primary like no other. As Mr. Trump rallies Republicans to his side against what he says is a political persecution, how can they move beyond a past election to talk about the future?For months, their strategy has been simple: Ignore, deflect and change the subject. But it’s an approach that became significantly harder this week, as the felony counts against Mr. Trump grew to number 78 across three criminal cases with the addition of a federal indictment in a Washington, D.C., federal court accusing him of conspiring to defraud the government and to obstruct an official proceeding, as well as other crimes.Addressing voters at a brewery in northeast Iowa on Friday morning, Mr. DeSantis focused on his usual themes: his record as Florida governor, his biography as a father and a military veteran, and his plans on immigration and economic policy. But he could not entirely escape the drumbeat of news from Washington.When a member of the audience asked whether he thought Mr. Trump’s latest indictment was a “witch hunt,” Mr. DeSantis responded that the case was “politically motivated, absolutely,” and pledged to end the “weaponization” of federal government.Mr. DeSantis tried to steer the conversation away from former President Donald J. Trump while at a brewery in Decorah, Iowa.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesLater, a reporter asked whether he would pardon Mr. Trump, should the former president be convicted in the election case. Mr. DeSantis suggested he would — before quickly trying to recast the race as about the future.“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the country to have a former president that’s almost 80 years old go to prison,” the governor, 44, told reporters at a tire shop in Waverly, Iowa. “And just like Ford pardoned Nixon, sometimes you’ve got to put this stuff behind you, and we need to start focusing on things having to do with the country’s future.”He added: “This election needs to be about Jan. 20, 2025, not Jan. 6, 2021.”Still, there were some signs that the newest charges had pushed Mr. DeSantis, whose campaign is under pressure to appeal to more moderate voters, to inch toward criticism of Mr. Trump. After his event, he acknowledged that claims about the 2020 election’s having been stolen were “unsubstantiated” — a more direct response than he typically gives when asked about Mr. Trump’s defeat.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” Mr. DeSantis said in response to a reporter’s question.Part of the challenge for Mr. Trump’s opponents is that even Republicans who want to move past the former president defend him. Sandy Lloyd, a 61-year-old fourth-grade teacher, said she did not plan to vote for Mr. Trump, having grown tired of the frequent controversies surrounding him. Yet she said that she thought the election had been stolen and that she didn’t want to see Mr. DeSantis attack Mr. Trump.“If I’m going for a new job, I don’t go into my interview and attack everybody else — I tell them why they want me,” Ms. Lloyd said. “That’s what I want to hear. Why do I want you as president?”Others took a different view, arguing that the criminal charges against Mr. Trump would weaken him in a general election.James Smith, a supporter of Mr. DeSantis who drove from Wisconsin to see the governor, said he wanted the Florida governor to be aggressive.“I would love for him to go harder against Trump,” Mr. Smith said. “You’re not going to win the Republican nomination by not going after the leader. The only way to shake up the race is by attacking.”Supporters of Mr. Trump outside a town hall event featuring former Vice President Mike Pence in Londonderry, N.H.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesBut no candidate has a harder time escaping the political realities of the Trump indictments than Mr. Pence, who told prosecutors that Mr. Trump had pressured him to reject electoral votes in an attempt to disrupt the transfer of power.About a dozen Trump supporters gathered outside the American Legion post where Mr. Pence spoke Friday evening. They heckled him as he entered.“What Pence did is, he committed treason — that’s the bottom line,” said Derek Arnold, a protester from Derry, N.H. “He had the choice to do the right thing. And that man knows right from wrong, and we’re here to let him know that he did us wrong.”When Mr. Pence told a standing crowd of around 100 people that he had “stood loyally by President Trump,” his comment prompted scoffing from some in the room. But he was applauded after he finished his thought: “And I never changed my commitment to him until the day came that my oath to the Constitution required me to do otherwise.”Mr. Pence answering questions during a campaign town hall event Friday night in Londonderry, N.H.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesAsked if he would pardon Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence was noncommittal.“I really don’t understand why some candidates in the Republican primary are assuming that the president is going to be found guilty in these various cases,” Mr. Pence said. “Let him make his case in court, and if I have the privilege of being president of the United States, whatever pardon request comes before me, I’ll always give a thoughtful, prayerful consideration.”Around a dozen people in the crowd said they were still making up their minds on whom to support. Some were looking for a Trump alternative, but not all considered the charges against him disqualifying.“I feel bad that the country has to go through that, never mind Trump himself,” Fran York said of the prosecutions of Mr. Trump. “I’m not sure that what he did was so bad that he should be indicted.”Mr. York, who is supporting Mr. Pence, said he would vote for Mr. Trump again if he won the nomination.Mr. Scott, who has said little about the election indictment, went to Yuma, Ariz., to promote his plan to spend $10 billion on the border wall started by Mr. Trump. There, too, he repeated his accusation that the Justice Department was “hunting Republicans.”“My perspective is that the D.O.J. continues to weaponize their power against political opponents,” he said, deflecting a question from an NBC reporter about whether Mr. Trump’s legal cases were dominating the campaign.Perhaps the only candidate other than Mr. Trump who was eager to talk about the indictment was Mr. Christie, who has focused his campaign on undercutting the former president. Mr. Christie has struggled to break 3 percent in recent polling of the contest.“It’s an aggressive indictment,” he said from a train headed to Kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday night. “But what I believe is a much more important question than the criminality, in the context of this campaign season, is the fact that he’s morally responsible for Jan. 6.”Charles Homans More