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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

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      Republican Presidential Primary: 7 Numbers That Tell the Story

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      There’s $46,499,124.63. There’s 3 percent. Here are five other figures that shed light on the dynamics at play before Monday’s caucuses.The only numbers that will truly matter in the Iowa caucuses on Monday will be the number of votes tallied for Donald J. Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.But there are a number of, well, numbers that help explain the Republican nominating contest. In most polls, Mr. Trump holds a solid lead, while Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are battling it out far behind in a fight for second place.Here are seven numbers that show how we got here — and what comes next.28 percentage pointsMr. Trump’s lead in the Iowa Poll The bar has been set.In the Iowa Poll released on Saturday evening by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom, Mr. Trump was winning 48 percent of likely caucusgoers. It’s a dominant showing that’s more than the total support measured for Ms. Haley (20 percent) and Mr. DeSantis (16 percent) combined.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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      How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again

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      Blue-collar white voters make up Donald Trump’s base. But his political resurgence has been fueled largely by Republicans from the other end of the socioeconomic scale.Working-class voters delivered the Republican Party to Donald J. Trump. College-educated conservatives may ensure that he keeps it.Often overlooked in an increasingly blue-collar party, voters with a college degree remain at the heart of the lingering Republican cold war over abortion, foreign policy and cultural issues.These voters, who have long been more skeptical of Mr. Trump, have quietly powered his remarkable political recovery inside the party — a turnaround over the past year that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.Even as Mr. Trump dominates Republican primary polls ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday, it was only a year ago that he trailed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in some surveys — a deficit due largely to the former president’s weakness among college-educated voters. Mr. DeSantis’s advisers viewed the party’s educational divide as a potential launching point to overtake Mr. Trump for the nomination.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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      ‘Would a Call From Tammy Help?’ Pressure Grows in Race to Oust Menendez

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      In a series of calls, a person in contact with the Senate campaign of Gov. Philip Murphy’s wife pressured a student Democratic group not to endorse her chief rival in the New Jersey race.The College Democrats of New Jersey were preparing to make an endorsement in one of the country’s most closely watched U.S. Senate primaries when calls began to come in from someone in touch with the campaign of Tammy Murphy, the presumptive front-runner and the wife of the state’s governor.The caller, a female college student who works as a youth coordinator for the Democratic State Committee, wanted to know what Ms. Murphy’s campaign could do to block the group from endorsing Ms. Murphy’s main rival, Representative Andy Kim.“Would a call from Tammy help?” the woman said she asked, while indicating she was relaying a message from the Murphy campaign.Then, in a series of calls over the next two hours, the pressure from the caller, Keely Magee, escalated to warnings — about funding and future job prospects for leaders of the College Democrats, according to several people involved in the discussions and a recording of one call.In an interview, Ms. Magee said the Murphy campaign had not asked her to pressure the group on its behalf. But she acknowledged being aware that members of Ms. Murphy’s campaign staff “wanted to do something to prevent the endorsement,” and said she was receiving text messages from a Murphy campaign consultant, Dave Parano.On the recorded call, Ms. Magee described Mr. Parano as a co-worker who had “talked directly” to the campaign manager and was “very, very close with the Murphys.” Mr. Parano did not respond to messages seeking comment.The effort to stop the endorsement failed. On Wednesday, both the College Democrats of America and the New Jersey chapter issued full-throated endorsements of Mr. Kim, a South Jersey Democrat running against Ms. Murphy for the chance to oust Senator Bob Menendez.The episode offered a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the high-stakes political battle playing out as New Jersey’s first lady, a first-time candidate, struggles to gain grass-roots traction in her bid to unseat Mr. Menendez, who faces federal bribery charges.With support from her husband, Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a second-term Democrat, Ms. Murphy has been endorsed by many of the state’s most powerful Democrats and has raised a record amount of contributions in her campaign’s first six weeks. Yet several polls suggest that she continues to trail Mr. Kim by a wide margin.Ms. Murphy and Representative Andy Kim are the front-runners in the race to unseat Senator Robert Menendez, who is facing criminal charges.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesAlex Altman, a spokeswoman for Ms. Murphy’s campaign, said Ms. Magee’s comments were “totally and completely inappropriate, and they in no way represent this campaign or what we stand for.”“They were made by a young person with no connection to our campaign, one who seemed eager to help, albeit in a misguided manner,” Ms. Altman added.Ms. Magee, a 21-year-old Rutgers University junior, has worked part time as a paid youth coordinator for the Democratic State Committee for several years.Ms. Magee said her main objective had been to persuade members of the College Democrats’ executive board to halt an online endorsement vote that was underway and remain neutral instead. She said she believed that statewide Democratic organizations should not pick sides before a primary and was worried that a group she was responsible for guiding might face repercussions for doing so.“It wasn’t coming from a place of threatening at all,” she said.But students on the other end of the calls said they had felt threatened, so much so that they recorded the final call to have proof of the exchange if they were penalized later. The students then gave Mr. Kim’s campaign access to the recording, which was also shared with The New York Times.“I felt a mix of shock and fear,” said Nate Howard, 20, a Princeton University junior who is vice president of the New Jersey chapter of the College Democrats and participated in the call with Ms. Magee that was recorded. “Shock because: Why are these people threatening us? Are we really that important?”According to the recording, Ms. Magee warned the students that an early endorsement of Mr. Kim could harm their future job prospects, deprive their organization of as much as $2,000 in funding and hurt their odds of being selected as delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.“If Tammy Murphy does somehow win being senator, I’d be careful about ever getting a job in that office or anything like that,” Ms. Magee said. “At least for the first few years of her term until her staff turns over.”Mr. Kim won the endorsement of the College Democrats.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesMr. Howard said Ms. Murphy called him on Friday to apologize. Ms. Magee said Mr. Parano, a political field consultant who also does work for the state committee, had also apologized to her for involving her in the process in the first place.Ms. Murphy’s campaign said that all of the students involved in this “unfortunate situation” should be afforded the “grace, allowance and forgiveness that we all deserve at that age.”In the 2020 election, 67 percent of New Jersey voters between the ages of 18 and 29 cast ballots, the highest rate in the country.A spokeswoman for the Kim campaign said it was excited to receive the college groups’ endorsements, but had no comment about the recording.Mr. Howard said the experience had underscored what he believes is wrong with politics.“For things to get better,” Mr. Howard said, “I believe that it will require courageous people to tell the truth about the inappropriate and frankly gross behaviors of the status quo.” More

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      Subzero Temperatures Are Set to Make Iowa’s Caucuses the Coldest in History

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      When Iowa voters brave frigid weather to caucus on Monday, they will be participating in one of the coldest caucuses in decades — perhaps ever. A brutal combination of prolonged, below-freezing temperatures and strong winds have created conditions for a biting cold on Monday that looks worse than any previous caucus night in the Hawkeye State. Temperatures are not forecast to rise above minus 2 degrees all day, and by the time caucusing begins on Monday evening, the wind chill could drag temperatures to what feels like 35 degrees below zero — an extreme level of cold for even the heartiest of Midwesterners. “If someone is extremely lucky, they might get to zero,” said Allan Curtis, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Des Moines, referring to the best-case scenario for warmth in some parts of the state on Monday. He added: “No matter how you look at it, it’s going to be a bitter one.” The coldest caucus before this year was in 2004, when temperatures did not rise above 16 degrees, according to National Weather Service data. But it’s not the first time that Iowa caucusgoers have had to brave subzero temperatures. During the 1972 caucus, temperatures in Des Moines dipped to a low of minus 4 degrees, though they later rose into the 20s. In Waterloo, roughly two hours north, thermometers that year read as low as minus 11 degrees. This year’s weather has turned what is usually a frenzied and well-funded caucus weekend into a far more subdued affair. Blizzards and icy roads scrambled candidates’ schedules late into the final stretch of campaigning, leaving reporters marooned in hotels and candidates with precious little time to talk to voters with fewer than 72 hours before caucusing begins. It has also stirred some anxiety within the campaigns, as strategists speculate over how the deep freeze could affect turnout. Former President Donald J. Trump, who canceled a majority of his rallies through the weekend because of the weather, said during a radio interview on Friday that he expects “great turnout” from his supporters despite Monday’s arctic temperatures. Nikki Haley, who canceled in-person events on Friday in response to blizzards across the state, asked her supporters during a virtual town hall for Council Bluffs voters to turn out in the cold weather and dress warmly in case there are lines outside of caucus sites. “I know it is asking a lot of you to go out and caucus, but I also know we have a country to save,” she said. “And I will be out there in the cold.” And on Saturday, campaigning in person in Cedar Falls, she was. More

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      The DeSantis Campaign Is Revealing What Republican Voters Really Want

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      If Ron DeSantis surprises in Iowa and beyond, if he recovers from his long polling swoon and wins the Republican nomination, it will represent the triumph of a simple, intuitive, but possibly mistaken idea: That voters should be taken at their word about what they actually want from their leaders.It was always clear, going into 2024, that a large minority of the Republican primary electorate would vote for Donald Trump no matter what — including, in the event of his untimely passing, for the former president’s reanimated corpse or his A.I. simulation. A smaller bloc strongly preferred a pre-Trump and un-Trump-like Republican; this has become the Nikki Haley constituency.This left a crucial middle bloc, maybe 40 percent of the party in my own guesstimation, that was Trump-friendly but also seemingly persuadable and open to another choice. These were those Republicans who mostly hadn’t voted for Trump in the early primaries in 2016, who had regarded him as the lesser of two evils during his tilt with Hillary Clinton, but who had gradually become more authentically favorable toward him over the course of his presidency — because of the judges he appointed, because of the strength of the economy, because they reacted against the hysteria of his liberal opponents, or just because of the alchemy of partisan identification.I talked to a lot of these kind of Republicans between 2016 and 2020 — not a perfectly representative sample, probably weighted too heavily toward Uber drivers and Catholic lawyer dads, but still enough to recognize a set of familiar refrains. These voters liked Trump’s policies more than his personality. They didn’t like some of his tweets and insults, so they mostly just tuned them out. They thought that he had the measure of liberals in a way that prior Republicans had not, that his take-no-prisoners style was suited to the scale of liberal media bias and progressive cultural hegemony. But they acknowledged that he didn’t always seem entirely in charge of his own administration, fully competent in the day-to-day running of the government.So their official position was that they wanted a version of Trump with less drama, who wasn’t constantly undermined by his generals or his bureaucrats, who didn’t seem confused about the difference between tweeting about a problem and actually addressing it. They didn’t want to go back to the pre-Trump G.O.P., but they also didn’t just want to replay Trump’s first term — especially how it ended, with Trump at war with his own public health apparatus over Covid while a left-wing cultural revolution surged through American cities and schools and mass media.Ron DeSantis’s entire persona as governor of Florida seemed to meet this ostensible demand. He had a strong record of both political and legislative success, having moved Florida rightward at the ballot box and in public policy — a clear contrast with Trump, as a one-term president who presided over notable Republican political defeats. DeSantis was a cultural battler who seemed more adept than Trump at picking fights and more willing than many pre-Trump Republicans to risk the wrath of big donors and corporations. His Covid record was exactly in tune with the party’s mood; he exuded competence when a hurricane hit; he fought constantly with the media and still won over Florida’s swing voters. If Republicans wanted to keep key elements of Trumpism but joined to greater competence, if they wanted a president who would promise to build a wall and then actually complete it, DeSantis was clearly the best and only possibility.Those voters still have a chance, beginning in Iowa, to make the choice they claimed to want. But if current polls are correct and they mostly just return to Trump, what will it say about how political identification really works?One argument will be that DeSantis failed the voters who were open to supporting him, by failing to embody on the campaign trail the brand that he built up in Florida and that had built him solid national polling numbers before he jumped into the race.For instance, it’s clear that the ability to wrangle happily with the liberal media is a crucial part of the Trumpian persona, and having showed some of that ability in Florida, DeSantis unaccountably tried to run a presidential campaign exclusively via right-wing outlets and very-online formats like his disastrous Muskian debut. His lack of charisma relative to Trump was always going to be a problem, but he still made it worse by cocooning himself, initially at least, from the conflicts that should have been a selling point.Or again, any Trumpism-without-Trump would presumably need to copy some of Trump’s flair for ideological heterodoxy, his willingness to ignore the enforcers of True Conservatism and promise big — new infrastructure projects, universal health care, flying cars — whatever the indifferent follow-through. And again, while the DeSantis of Florida seemed to have some instinct for this approach — attacking woke ideology in schools while also raising teacher salaries, say — as a presidential candidate he’s been more conventional, running the kind of ideologically narrow campaign that already failed to deliver Ted Cruz the nomination in 2016.But allowing for these kind of specific critiques of how DeSantis has failed to occupy the space he seemed to have carved out, his struggles still seem more about the gap between what voters might seem to want on paper and how political attractions are actually forged.Here DeSantis might be compared to the foil in many romantic comedies — Ralph Bellamy in a Cary Grant vehicle, Bill Pullman in “Sleepless in Seattle,” the boyfriend left behind in the city while the heroine reconnects with her small-town roots in various TV Christmas movies. He’s the guy who’s entirely suitable, perfectly sympathetic and yet incapable of inspiring passion or devotion.Or again, to borrow an insight from a friend, DeSantis is an avatar for the generation to which he (like me, just barely) belongs: He’s the type of Generation X-er who pretends to be alienated and rebellious but actually has a settled marriage, a padded résumé, a strong belief in systems and arguments and plans — and a constant middle-aged annoyance at the more vibes-based style of his boomer elders and millennial juniors.The Republican Party in the Trump era has boasted a lot of Gen X leaders, from Cruz and Marco Rubio to Paul Ryan and Haley. But numerically and spiritually, the country belongs to the boomers and millennials, to vibes instead of plans.This might be especially true for a Republican Party that’s becoming more working-class, with more disaffected and lower-information voters, fewer intensely focused consumers of the news, less interest than the Democratic electorate in policy plans and litmus tests. (Though even the Democratic electorate in 2020 opted against its most plans-based candidates in the end, which is why an analogy between DeSantis and Elizabeth Warren has floated around social media.)And it’s definitely true in the narrative context created by Trump’s legal battles, all the multiplying prosecutions, which were clearly the inflection point in DeSantis’s descent from plausible successor to likely also-ran.If a majority or plurality of Republican voters really just wanted a form of Trumpism free of Trump’s roiling personal drama, a version of his administration’s policies without the chaos and constant ammunition given to his enemies, the indictments were the ideal opportunity to break decisively for DeSantis — a figure who, whatever his other faults, seems very unlikely to stuff classified documents in his bathroom or pay hush money to a porn star.But it doesn’t feel at all surprising that, instead, voters seem ready to break decisively for Trump. The prosecutions created an irresistible drama, a theatrical landscape of persecution rather than a quotidian competition between policy positions, a gripping narrative to join rather than a mere list of promises to back. And irresistible theater, not a more effective but lower-drama alternative, appears to be the revealed preference of the Republican coalition, the thing its voters really want.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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      Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman

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      It’s the latest hot TV genre: a woman in a frigid outpost, bundled in puffy outerwear, trying to uncover truths buried in ice.In the new season of HBO’s “True Detective,” Jodie Foster is a cop trudging through snow trying to solve a murder in a remote Alaska town, described as “the end of the world.” On FX’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” Emma Corrin is an amateur sleuth trudging through snow trying to solve a murder in an isolated retreat in Iceland.And now I find myself in puffy outerwear, trudging through snow in glacial Iowa, trying to uncover truths buried in the ice.I don’t have as much of a mystery to unravel as the TV detectives. The only thing the horde of reporters here is trying to figure out is if Donald Trump will win the caucuses on Monday with a plurality or if he can pull off a majority. No one is expecting a Jimmy Carter/Barack Obama-style upset.A blizzard on Friday froze the action. Drivers skidded all over Des Moines, with cars abandoned on highways. Candidates canceled events and scrambled to do telephone town halls. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny donned fleece earmuffs for live reports. Journalists planning to arrive this weekend faced canceled flights. With Trump and the others scrapping in-person rallies, reporters were left jaw-jawing with one another in the lobbies of the Hotel Fort Des Moines and the downtown Marriott.On Friday evening, Trump posted a video, accusingly telling Iowa, “You have the worst weather, I guess, in recorded history.” Maybe he should have gotten here earlier instead of haranguing the judge in his New York fraud trial on Thursday.Candidates’ surrogates resorted to extreme measures. Kari Lake, stumping for Trump in a yellow sweater — a Hawkeye color for her alma mater — joked that they would use “the ancient strategy” of the telephone to reach voters.Campaign aides to Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley were desperately calculating if the weather could give them an advantage: Maybe some of Trump’s older voters in rural areas who have to drive a long way to caucus would not show up on Monday, which could be the coldest day in caucus history, with wind chills potentially hitting 40 below.But the Trump crew here — including Donald Trump Jr. and Jason Miller — roamed around looking sanguine. “We’re confident, not cocky,” Miller told me.Compared with the poor ground game Trump Sr. had in 2016, when he came in second to “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, as he called him, MAGA world is a model of organization. And that should frighten Democrats.“If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that our grass-roots guys had all been media trained,” Miller said. “Some of these people, because they watch everything the president does, they know any question. It doesn’t matter about whether it be the economy, Biden, witch hunt, Austin.” As in Lloyd. And “the president” Miller refers to is Trump.With a snow day here, I had time to contemplate the real mystery of Iowa: What has happened to America?In January 2008, the Democratic caucuses offered a thrilling contest. In overwhelmingly white Iowa, Barack Obama showed that Americans could propel a Black candidate into the Oval Office. Race was, remarkably, not a big factor in the contest.When I saw Obama at his first event in New Hampshire after his Iowa win, I was still stunned at the result. “Wow,” I said to him. “You really did it.”He looked solemn and a bit blank, recalling the scene in “The Candidate” when Robert Redford, the young, charismatic pol, pulls off an upset over his more seasoned, status quo opponent and murmurs, “What do we do now?”It felt then as if we were embracing modernity and inclusion, moving away from the image of John Wayne’s America.How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one?Of course, every time there’s a movement, there’s a countermovement, where people feel that their place in the world is threatened and they want to turn back the clock. Trump has played on that resentment, trying to drag us into the past, curtailing women’s rights, inflaming voters to “take back America” and, as he said on Jan. 6, exhorting his base to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”Trump is a master at exploiting voters’ fears. I’m puzzled about why his devoted fans don’t mind his mean streak. He can gleefully, cruelly, brazenly make fun of disabilities in a way that had never been done in politics — President Biden’s stutter, John McCain’s injuries from being tortured, a Times reporter’s disability — and loyal Trump fans laugh. He calls Haley “Birdbrain.” Trump is 77, yet he sees himself as a spring chicken. On Thursday, he put out a video on Truth Social mocking the “White House senior living” center, featuring pictures of the 81-year-old Biden looking helpless and out of it.Obama’s triumph in Iowa was about having faith in humanity. If Trump wins here, it will be about tearing down faith in humanity.That it’s happening in a blizzard is fitting. Trump’s whole life has been a snow job.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