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      Ron DeSantis makes his pitch before Iowa caucuses amid faltering campaign

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      Amid a campaign that has, from its very first minutes, not gone quite as planned, Ron DeSantis took the stage on Saturday before a crowd of supporters in an Iowa office complex to inform them that the latest obstacle – a historically frigid winter storm – would not stop him from winning the first state to vote in the Republican presidential nomination process.“Are you ready to make some history on Monday night?” the Florida governor asked during a visit to the West Des Moines offices of Never Back Down, the Super Pac supporting his bid for president.“They can throw a blizzard at us, and we are gonna fight. They can throw wind chill at us, and we are gonna fight. They can throw media narratives at us, and we are gonna fight. They can throw fake polls at us, and we are gonna fight. We are gonna fight because we are going to turn this country around.”It was as good of a summation as any of the challenge he faces in Iowa’s Republican caucuses on Monday, where all signs point to Donald Trump clinching victory and throwing the viability of DeSantis’s campaign into jeopardy. Launched last May with a glitchy Twitter live event, the governor’s pitch to voters that he would replicate his conservative remaking of Florida on the national stage have not caught on the way he hoped.With an unapologetically rightwing pitch, DeSantis tried to turn Republicans away from the former president’s Maga agenda by recounting how he rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19, and deploying his own draconian turns of phrase, such as his vow to have drug traffickers shot “stone-cold dead” at the border with Mexico.But in the days before the Iowa caucus, that message did not seem to resonate.“He’s perceived as trying to be a Trump wannabe, of bringing in bombastic rhetoric, copying some of Trump’s policies,” said Patrick McDonald, 19, a student at Hillsdale College, a private conservative Christian school in Michigan, who traveled to observe Iowa’s caucuses and says he is undecided on who to support when his state’s primaries occur.Other Republicans worry DeSantis does not have what it takes to beat Joe Biden in November’s general election.After hearing both DeSantis and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley speak at recent rallies, Nancy Wildanger, 70, came away with the impression that the latter would represent the best shot at getting a Republican back in the White House.“She said nothing wrong. DeSantis said nothing wrong. But, statistically, I think she has a better chance, and we need someone with a better chance,” Wildanger said at a rally for Haley in Iowa City on Saturday.Rather than a campaign for victory, DeSantis’s best-case scenario on Monday is a second-place finish that would improve his standing as the best Republican alternative to Trump.“It’s good to be an underdog,” DeSantis said in a Sunday morning interview with ABC News, where he cast doubt on the accuracy of polling in the race. “We’re going to do well, but I’d rather have people count us out. I’d rather have people lower expectations for us. I tend to perform better like that.”The governor may have been referring to an authoritative NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa survey released Saturday that showed DeSantis was the first choice of only 16% of voters, compared to 20% for Haley and 48% for Trump.It served as a testament to how effective Trump had been at consolidating support over the past year even as state and federal prosecutors issued a wave of criminal indictments against him. Beyond Iowa, polls show Trump in the lead among Republicans in other early voting states, and nationally.It also underscored how Trump’s rivals have failed to wrest the power of incumbency away from him, despite his re-election defeat to Biden in 2020, said Dave Peterson, a political science professor at Iowa State University, which has conducted its own polling of the state that shows an overwhelming Trump lead and a tie between Haley and DeSantis.“This race is a referendum in the Republican party on Donald Trump,” Peterson said. “And it is because nobody else has made the argument for why it should be a choice. Haley and DeSantis did not do an effective job, so far, of saying: ‘No, no, no, think about it this way, think about it as a choice between Donald Trump or me.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShould DeSantis finish lower than second place, it could prove fatal to his ability to continue competing in New Hampshire, the next state to vote, and later in the primaries.“If he doesn’t get second, I think it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point, that the narrative out of the election, which is what tends to matter more than the actual outcome, is going to be, what the heck happened? Why did he fail? And that’s not the story that’s going to generate new momentum,” Peterson said.For all the hoopla they generate, the winner of the Iowa caucuses does not always go on to win the party’s nomination – Hawkeye state voters did not nominate Biden in 2020, or Trump in 2016.Meanwhile, turnout for this year’s vote could be upended by the aftermath of a colossal winter storm that dropped up to two feet of snow on parts of the state Friday and left behind bitter winds and temperatures that are expected to be in the negatives on Monday evening.“It’s not going to be pleasant,” DeSantis told the room cramped with supporters and press at the Super Pac’s offices. “But if you’re willing to go out there, and you’re willing to fight for me, if you’re willing to bring people to the caucus, if you’re willing to brave the elements and be there for the couple hours that you have to be there, if you’re willing to do that, and you’re willing to fight for me on Monday night, then as president, I’ll be fighting for you for the next eight years.”That would be four more years than Trump, who already served one term, could stay if voters send him back to the White House, and his potential longevity is a key plank of DeSantis’s appeal.Besides that, Trump’s long list of enemies and scandals is one reason why Connie Lendt, 69, has no plans to vote for Trump a third time, and will instead serve as a precinct captain for DeSantis in the town of Woodward on Monday.“Democrats have tried to … impeach him while he was in office. Out of the office, they’re taking him to court for hundreds of different things. If he gets in office again, are they not going to try to impeach him the entire time? So, that’s where all of his energy goes instead of running the country,” Lendt said. “Legally, he’s a mess right now.”Sam Levine contributed to reporting More

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      Democrats Fret That Biden’s Power Players Are Not at His Campaign Base

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      President Biden has a re-election campaign with two distinct centers of gravity — the White House and his Delaware headquarters — and advisers who are juggling two jobs at once.With less than 10 months to go until the 2024 election, the nerve center of President Biden’s bid for a second term is stationed not at his campaign’s headquarters in Delaware but within feet of the Oval Office.The president and his chief strategist, Mike Donilon, have repeatedly discussed when to move him over to the campaign — perhaps after the 2022 midterm elections, then after the 2023 off-year elections and again at the end of 2023. Each time, no move happened after the president told aides he wanted to keep Mr. Donilon within walking distance.Anita Dunn, the longtime Democratic operative who stepped in to help revive Mr. Biden’s fledging operation four years ago, is devising the re-election message again, even as she oversees communications at the White House. Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s deputy White House chief of staff and former campaign manager, is also splitting her day job with her role as one of the most powerful voices in the campaign.So far, almost none of the people in the president’s inner circle have left for campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., prompting some donors and strategists to worry that too much of Mr. Biden’s team remains cloistered inside the White House. Less than a year before Election Day, the president has a campaign with two distinct centers of gravity, advisers juggling two jobs at once, and months of internal debate about when to consolidate everyone in one place.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Trump Has Made Claims About Caucus Fraud. What if He Underperforms?

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      The last time Donald J. Trump participated in competitive Iowa caucuses, he lost narrowly, accused Senator Ted Cruz of Texas of stealing the contest, claimed fraud, demanded that Iowa Republicans nullify the results, and called for a rerun.While Iowa has a history of troubles with its caucus results, there’s been no evidence of fraud. The 2016 Republican contest was, in fact, the only one since 2008 that had gone off without a hitch.And yet if Monday night ends with Mr. Trump underperforming expectations, both his history and his rhetoric during this year’s campaign suggest he won’t hesitate to cry foul and refuse to accept the result.Mr. Trump has already accused Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida of “trying to rig” the caucuses. Laura Loomer, a far-right and anti-Muslim activist whom Mr. Trump last year considered hiring for a campaign post, suggested on social media that “the deep state” was engaging in “weather manipulation” to instigate Iowa’s Friday snowstorm and subzero temperatures to depress Trump turnout on Monday. And Donald Trump Jr. suggested in a Telegram video that “we can’t take anything for granted, or assume that everything is going to be on the up and up. We’ve seen this rodeo before.”Those claims are not likely to be met with much support from Iowa Republicans and the party volunteers who will operate the 1,657 caucus sites across the state.“If Trump says it’s fraud, he’s full of crap,” said A.J. Spiker, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa who is backing Mr. DeSantis.Still, Iowa Republicans aim to protect themselves from campaigns claiming foul play at the caucuses.At each site, caucusgoers mark their presidential preferences on paper slips. Those slips are then counted in full view of whoever wants to watch. Typically a representative from each campaign watches the counting, and recording is allowed.“It’s the most transparent straw vote you could possibly do,” Mr. Spiker said.The Trump campaign’s headquarters in Urbandale, Iowa, on Saturday.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s pre-emptive Iowa fraud claims last month followed a flub by Mr. DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis. She called on supporters to “descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”“You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” she said.That earned Ms. DeSantis a rebuke from the state Republican Party.Only Iowans can participate in the caucuses. Republican volunteers are supposed to check for photo identification at the caucus sites. Still, Mr. Trump’s campaign suggested then that the DeSantis campaign had professed a “plot to rig the caucus through fraud.”Another candidate who has trafficked in conspiracies and has been sowing doubt about Iowa’s caucuses is Vivek Ramaswamy, who failed to qualify for recent debates.“The mainstream media is trying to rig the Iowa G.O.P. caucus in favor of the corporate candidates who they can control,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in a campaign video this week. “Don’t fall for their trick. They don’t want you to hear from me about the truth.”Voting rights groups and disinformation experts say the pre-emptive cries about fraud and rigged elections have become something of a new normal.“This follows the general playbook, the election denier playbook of just pre-emptively laying the groundwork for claims of fraud in the event of a loss,” said Emma Steiner, the Information Accountability Project Manager at Common Cause, a left-leaning voting rights organization. “It’s sort of future-proofing.”Indeed, Mr. Trump has long trumpeted baseless claims of fraud or rigging before an election. In 2016, weeks before Election Day, Mr. Trump started questioning the veracity of mail ballots in Colorado, citing little evidence. After he won the 2016 election, Mr. Trump claimed that widespread fraud cost him the popular vote (it did not), and he launched a commission to investigate voter fraud in the country (it folded without any significant findings).The Trump team has called elections rigged even when he is not participating in them. When the 2020 Democratic caucuses melted down because of a faulty app and a disorganized state party, Mr. Trump’s campaign questioned whether the results were “being rigged against Bernie Sanders.” His sons went further.“Mark my words, they are rigging this thing,” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter the night of the 2020 caucuses. “What a mess.” More

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      Ron DeSantis’s Campaign Trail Quirk: The Word ‘Do’

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      All humans have oddities in the ways they speak. But those of presidential candidates are exposed more than most. All day, the candidates talk. And talk. And talk. Sometimes in scripted stump speeches, sometimes in off-the-cuff remarks to voters and the news media.And few talk more than Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who, in trying to make up his deficit in the polls, will on a typical day host five events for voters, sit for three interviews on television and hold a gaggle with reporters.Over the weeks and months on the campaign trail, one of Mr. DeSantis’s most curious verbal quirks has become clear: the way he sometimes uses the word “do.”During a CNN debate last week, Mr. DeSantis pledged to help seniors afford prescription drugs.“I want seniors to be able to do,” he said.Not “do” something. Just do. There is no word missing. That’s the full quote. In Mr. DeSantis’s parlance, the verb does not always require a direct object.Similarly, at a barbecue restaurant in Ames, Iowa, the next day, he said that as president he would defund the United Nations. “You’re going to see a lot of changes into how we do,” he vowed.Discussing the freezing weather with a crowd of Iowans, the Florida-born Mr. DeSantis remarked that once the temperature fell below zero, “with the windchill on just your exposed skin, it really, really starts to do.”And when a voter in Decorah asked if he would move the Department of Agriculture’s headquarters to Iowa, the governor said yes — in his typical fashion.“Iowa has first dibs on the Department of Agriculture,” a grinning Mr. DeSantis replied. “You guys want it, we’re going to do!”For Mr. DeSantis, who pitches himself as a take-charge, get-it-done leader, “do” is not just a verb. It can be an idea, a promise, a way to solve the problems that bedevil America. All of us can — and should — do.Of course, Mr. DeSantis also uses the word in the more traditional sense. But ask him if he thinks his rigorous campaigning schedule will help him win the Iowa caucuses on Monday?“I’ve done it right, I think Iowans appreciate that,” he said. “And we’re going to do.” More

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      Asa Hutchinson on staying in the race and the Republican party: ‘We’re in trouble’

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      Asa Hutchinson spent Friday night at a rodeo in Des Moines, watching cowboys ride broncos while holding on for dear life. “You have to only hold on to the horse with one hand and so you’ve always got to be keeping the other hand up, and you’ve got to do that for eight seconds with that bronco bucking like crazy,” Hutchinson explains. “One of them decided to preserve themselves and so grabbed hold with two hands. They’re disqualified.”America in the Donald Trump years can feel like a wild horse trying to throw off its rider but Hutchinson is still clinging on with one hand. He has made around 60 trips to a hundred cities in Iowa over the past year in a long shot bid for the White House. He has embarked on a solemn crusade against Trump in a state where the former president retains a cult-like following.But he enjoys one advantage over his nemesis: whereas Trump has set impossibly high expectations for Monday’s Iowa caucuses, Hutchinson’s performance will disappoint no one: his support stands at 1% in the final NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll. Jonathan Capehart, a host on the MSNBC network, admitted on Saturday: “I’d forgotten that Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, is still in the race.”If life is tough at the top, it can also be hard at the bottom. Over a lunch of chicken and a waffle with syrup at a restaurant in snowy dowtown Des Moines, Hutchinson recalls his struggle earlier that morning for votes in the Iowa caucuses, which require people to show up in person – no absentee voting is allowed.“Somebody said, this lady here is about ready to support you but she has a few questions. So I call her up, spend 25 minutes answering very detailed questions on how I’m going to constrain the growth of federal government and on and on and on, even covering abortion issues and so on. And at the end of it, she says she’s about to get in the car to go to Florida. I said, you mean you’re not going to be in the caucus next week? And she said, no, but I’ll vote for you in November!”They don’t make Republicans like Hutchinson any more. Last year the Politico website called him “the most normal Republican presidential candidate”. He calls himself a “Ronald Reagan conservative”, appointed by Reagan as the youngest US attorney in the country at the time at the age of 31. He served in Congress and was head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the George W Bush administration. Like Bill Clinton, he had two terms as governor of Arkansas.Now 73, Hutchinson launched his White House bid in April in his hometown of Bentonville, pledging to reform federal law enforcement agencies and “bring out the best of America”. He also called on Trump, who had just been indicted by a grand jury in New York over hush money payments, to drop out of the race, contending that the office is more important than any individual.“I believe in traditional conservative principles and Donald Trump has tried to reshape our party into an ego-driven machine that I don’t think reflects well in our country or our party,” he says.In some ways Hutchinson’s past election campaigns in Arkansas, another agricultural state with a similar sized population, were good preparation for Iowa. He has smaller resources than any other candidate but leanness has an upside: fewer cost overheads and fewer bills to pay. As of last September, he had spent less than $1m.“What has been helpful to us is that we didn’t build a Boeing 737 aircraft to campaign on,” he says cheerfully. “We built a Cessna and so it takes a lot less money to keep the Cessna in the air than it does the Boeing.”Despite the metaphor, Hutchinson has often taken long road trips while rival candidates are flying, sometimes in his own car or the cheapest rental available. The New York Times newspaper noted that once, when his flight from Chicago to Des Moines was cancelled, Hutchinson pooled his money with three strangers to rent a car and drove to Iowa for his campaign stops. Glamorous it isn’t.“If you’re a well-funded campaign you’re going to have advanced teams and support but, if you don’t have mega-donors behind you, you’re driving with volunteers or campaign staff three hours to a city in northern Iowa, making calls as you go to donors across the country, making sure that you can keep a campaign going.“You get there and you might have a small crowd. You might be at a Pizza Ranch and you make your case and you take names and you build your organisation one step at a time.”Still, like others before him, Hutchinson found that Iowans take their first-in-the-nation responsibility serious and ask detailed questions about border security and other issues. “I spoke to a group of law students and one of the questions was, what’s your position on the Jones Act? I hadn’t thought about the Jones Act since I was in law school and I’m not sure I thought about it then because I didn’t study maritime law.”There are also differences from state to state. “Here in Iowa, you don’t get asked about climate change and, if you do it is, ‘You don’t really believe in that, do you?’ But in New Hampshire you campaign and they’re very serious about it and you’ve got to pay attention to the consistency of your answers.”If history does remember Hutchinson’s quixotic campaign, it will be for what he didn’t do one night in August in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the first Republican primary debate – the only one for which Hutchinson qualified – moderator Bret Baier asked the eight candidates if they would still support Trump if he is convicted in any of the four criminal cases against him but still nominated.The hands of Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley and Doug Burgum rose in unison. Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence appeared to hesitate but then did likewise. Chris Christie made a strange gesture and claimed that he was wagging his finger. Hutchinson alone kept his hand firmly at his side.What did that moment tell him about the Republican party? “We’re in trouble and it’s actually gotten worse since then. I’m the only candidate in the race that hasn’t promised a pardon to Donald Trump and that’s so fundamental: you don’t promise pardons in the middle of a political campaign.“Secondly, it undermines our justice system where a jury’s going to determine this and for pardons to be out there in the middle of a debate diminishes the importance of what’s happening in the courtroom.”Taking such a stand, Hutchinson could be forgiven for feeling lonely. But he says: “It was lonely when I was about the only Republican in Arkansas. It’s a red state now but when I finished law school, I was told if you’re going to have any career in the law as a judge or a prosecutor, you’d better be a Democrat.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It was a totally blue state – Clinton was the governor – and I fought a very lonely battle building a Republican party in Arkansas and we were successful at that. I’m used to fighting battles that are uphill but important and I see this the same way.”Hutchinson voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but could not stomach the election lies that came in the build-up to and immediately after the incumbent president’s defeat by Joe Biden. “When I saw his refusal to acknowledge the election, but also even the refusal to go to the inauguration, that was un-American to me.“It’s not leadership. I made sure I was there at that inaugural just to showcase the peaceful transfer of power is important and the fact that, even as Republicans, we want the best for America.”Like many, Hutchinson assumed that Trump was washed up after the January 6 insurrection as senior Republicans including Kevin McCarthy finally appeared to break from him. “But then shortly after those clear statements of rebuke and holding him accountable and indicating he’s finished then all of a sudden you see them running down to Mar-a-Lago and empowering him again and so that was almost as a tragic day as January 6. They went down there and kissed the ring.”Since then Trump and his allies have spent three years rewriting the history of January 6. Republicans filibustered the creation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate it and dismissed a congressional committee as a partisan exercise. When Trump was indicted over his part in the insurrection, Republicans bought into his claim of a “weaponised” justice system. He has recently taken to describing rioters who were prosecuted and imprisoned as “hostages”.Hutchinson reflects: “It’s shocking and troubling because this is not something we have to wonder about what happened. We all saw it with our own eyes. It was an attack on police. It was an attack on the rule of law and it was an attack on the Congress.“There’s no doubt what that was and it was not a patriotic act and for Donald Trump to put forth that lie is dismaying, but it’s even more troubling that so many are buying into that language. Whenever I think of hostages, I think of our American citizens and other world citizens that are hostages right now in the tunnels in Palestine by Hamas. What happened that day was not patriotic and those people who did it are not hostages.”As former congresswoman Liz Cheney and others have discovered, such expressions of dissent are regarded as heresy in the Make America great again universe. But on the campaign trail in Iowa, Hutchinson’s conversations with Trump supporters were cordial.He found that they compare the ex-president’s economy favourably with Biden’s and regard him as the unfairly treated victim of a politically biased establishment. But they also expressed concern about his legal woes and whether he can win a general election.“Many of them said, ‘Yeah, I’m for Trump, I know he’s got real problems but I like his policies, I just wish he’d keep his mouth shut.’ You hear that a lot and that reflects to me some very weak support for Trump, that he’s sort of in a default position as an incumbent but if someone else surfaces that can convince them they’ve got the right policy direction for the country and is not chaotic, then those votes can be changed.”Hutchinson adds: “You’ve got Trump at 50%. There’s a question as to whether he’s going to meet those expectations on Monday night and then, secondly, you’ve got probably half of those that are subject to change as you go into this year.”Burgum, Scott, Pence and other candidates have come and gone before Iowa. Even Christie, more pugilistic in his anti-Trump mission, bowed out this week. Yet Hutchinson dutifully marches on. What will count as a good result on Monday, predicted to be the coldest caucus day ever?“You’ve just got to beat expectations. A lot of people have counted us out and so if we can exceed those expectations that should be a storyline. We’ll just have to measure wherever we finish here and see whether we’ve got a sufficient boost to create more momentum for New Hampshire and further down the line.“It’s important, particularly when the number of voices out there is diminished, that there’s someone that speaks clearly who’s in the race because this year is very unpredictable.” More

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      The Iowa Caucuses Are Not a Delightful Game

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      Ah, the Iowa caucuses. So much drama. So much antici … pation. So much money and energy spent on an antidemocratic process in a state with a pretty dismal track record of picking presidential nominees.And yet! Just because the system is flawed doesn’t mean the stakes aren’t real — and brutal. The outcome of Monday night’s Republican vote will be pounced on by the political world and instantly shredded, devoured and digested like a rump roast tossed into a gator pond. It might not change anything. But it also might turbocharge or deflate this or that candidacy as the whole primary pageant barrels toward New Hampshire and beyond.Even before the official results start being reported, the campaigns and their allies will crank the spin energy up to 11. Because Iowa is never really about who wins the actual caucuses so much as about who wins the Expectations Game. And that game comes with a host of ultra-fuzzy question cards: How many “tickets” are there out of the state — meaning, should the third-place finisher be taken seriously? What counts as a second-place victory? What if the first-place finisher wildly underperforms? What if a blizzard or minus 30-degree wind chills keep most people home? (Someone remind me why a state like Arizona can’t go first.)As you can imagine, this is not a lighthearted game like, say, charades or Hungry Hungry Hippos. It is complicated and grinding, the rules shift, and victory is highly subjective, relying on the savvy of the players’ pre- and postgame spinning. And this election, with Donald Trump dominating the race as a quasi-incumbent cult-of-personality leader, the known unknowns are even knottier.What if Mr. Trump cracks 50 percent? (I’m guessing he will but am hoping to be wrong.) If so, is the race basically over? What if he pulls only 45 percent? 40? If Nikki Haley squeaks past Ron DeSantis, should he drop out? What if she smokes him? Could any third-place showing count as a win for Ms. Haley? And my obsession: What degree of belly flop could persuade Vivek Ramaswamy to leave politics forever?The top contenders have approached the expectations game differently. Heading into the final stretch, Mr. DeSantis has been all sass and swagger, predicting total victory. “We’re going to win here in Iowa,” he assured Fox News shortly before Christmas. Bold strategy, but bluffing is perhaps his only hope. The guy has bet everything on the caucuses. If he goes down hard, and certainly if Ms. Haley bests him, you will hear the sound of pundits, political opponents and quite possibly the rest of his disgusted party pounding nails into the coffin of his candidacy. Even so, raising the bar leaves him even less wiggle room to recover from anything other than a first-place showing — which pretty much no one expects.Mr. Trump has been a bit cagier. He has been crowing about crushing it in the polling, pushing the expectations bar ever higher. “The poll numbers are scary because we’re leading by so much,” he bragged at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, last month.But the man is no idiot. He has been hedging his boasts, telling Iowa fans he is a little nervous that he is so overwhelmingly popular that they might feel comfortable skipping the caucuses. “You got to show up,” he urged supporters at the Waterloo event. “Even if you think we’re going to win by a lot.” In case things go sideways, he has laid the groundwork for a quintessentially Trumpian message: I am such a huge winner that I (almost) lost!Ms. Haley is attempting a more complicated game plan. Her politics aren’t well suited for Iowa, where the G.O.P. is dominated by white evangelicals. She hasn’t spent as much time in the state as Mr. DeSantis or built a ground game anywhere nearly as elaborate. Instead, she has gone with a classic Iowa move: making clear that she expects to lose the race. That way, no one expects much from her, and even a lackluster showing can be brushed off or even spun as a win. Thus, we see her spreading the word that she is looking beyond Iowa to the broader playing field — at times perhaps a bit too aggressively, as when she quipped to a crowd in New Hampshire that their job was to “correct” Iowa’s vote.Note: A candidate needs to keep a tight grip on her spin machine at all times lest it bite her on the butt.This is not a new strategy, and Team Haley isn’t lowering the Iowa bar as far as some past campaigns. In the 2000 Republican contest, Senator John McCain, with his maverick brand, opted to officially skip Iowa altogether and insisted that it would be a miracle if he got any support there at all. I still have fond memories from that race (my first presidential campaign) of tracking down Team McCain’s quasi-official point person in Iowa, who was clearly nervous that I might get the impression the senator actually cared about the state.It’s not just the candidates who have a lot riding on Iowa this year. As usual, Mr. Trump is disrupting all the norms and rules, and a Trump blowout would be an embarrassment for some of the state’s traditional power brokers. Notably, Mr. DeSantis worked his boots off to score the backing of the state’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds. He won over Steve Deace, a prominent conservative radio host there. And he went hard after the evangelical kingmakers, securing the endorsement of the most prominent, Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Family Leader. But the party faithful, especially the evangelical grass roots, may very well go all in for Mr. Trump, dismissing the influence of their usual influencers.A Trump rout would also raise questions about the fetishization of Iowa’s retail politics. Iowa trumpets its image as a state that expects personal attention from presidential wannabes, big and small. Witness Mr. DeSantis boasting endlessly about how he has been to “all 99 counties.”But Mr. Trump? He has spent little time in the state, mostly headlining the big, impersonal pep rallies his ego so craves. He has relied heavily on surrogates, and his team didn’t bother fielding a big door-knocking operation. Indeed, it didn’t focus on its ground game much at all until relatively late. Like any entitled celebrity, the MAGA king jetted in and out of the state, in between his courthouse visits and Mar-a-Lago conclaves, leaving the tedious unglamorous stuff to his courtiers.Although it’s not as specifically Iowa-focused, the notion that political debates matter will suffer further decline if Mr. Trump steamrolls the field. It was painful enough watching the non-Trump contenders tear into one another through five debates and 10 hours. The very real possibility that it was all for naught is enough to make one question the entire system.This could be a bad, even dangerous year for the Iowa caucuses in general. Why should Republican presidential contenders lavish all that love on the state just to get thrown over for a guy who couldn’t be bothered to do more than the minimum? The caucuses already have faced criticism in recent years because of operational glitches, the unrepresentativeness of Iowa’s electorate (too white, too old, too rural …) and the exclusionary nature of the process. The Democrats got fed up enough to kill their caucuses this election. What if Republicans start thinking along the same lines?As someone who doesn’t care for the caucuses, I won’t shed any tears if that happens. But I’m guessing plenty of other folks feel differently — especially in Iowa.And so here we go, with so very much at stake. Once more unto the breach.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      It’s Dangerously Cold in Iowa. What Does That Mean for Voting?

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      Vishakha Darbha and Iowa is in a deep freeze. Subzero temperatures — and a blizzard — have thrown many of the weekend’s highly choreographed events into question, leaving observers wondering if the weather could alter the election results. In this audio report from the frozen Hawkeye state, Opinion writer Katherine Miller describes what it’s like to cover the historic caucus and considers how the inclement weather might affect voting.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 48 hours on the Times website.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Maksym Kapliuk/Getty ImagesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha and Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. More