A cold coming we had of it. Icy winds blow across the plains, numbing the face and cutting to the bone. Stranded cars and tractor trailers lie abandoned at the side of highways. Snow is piled high on the side of every road in the state capital, where giant icicles hang off buildings. Candidates’ yard signs and children’s playgrounds have been enveloped by a white blanket.
Welcome to Iowa, often described as the centre of the political universe at this stage of the US electoral cycle, but currently feeling more like the outer reaches of our solar system.
It is here, amid wind chills of around -40F (-40C), that Monday will witness the dawn of the 2024 presidential election, the first since the insurrection of 6 January 2021, when US democracy itself hung by a thread.
The brutal weather has proved timely for reporters in need of something to talk about ahead of some particularly anticlimactic Iowa caucuses. Democrats are not actively engaged this time, while the Republican race has never been such a foregone conclusion: Donald Trump in an avalanche.
The only suspenseful questions on what is expected to be the coldest caucus night ever are: will Trump exceed 50% of the vote and will Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the UN, eclipse the one-time rising star Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida?
A third-place finish could snuff out DeSantis’s singularly joyless effort, which has come to resemble a death march in a state that demands retail politics in its purest form. At an event at his campaign office in a drab building in West Des Moines on Saturday, a Queen hit boomed out from loudspeakers: “Don’t stop me now / I’m having such a good time, I’m having a ball.”
The harsh reality is that this is still Trump’s party and neither DeSantis nor Haley managed to stake out their own identity. Chuck Todd, chief political analyst at NBC News, told Meet the Press that Republicans held “robust debates” about their ideological direction in 1964, 1976 and 2016 but not in 2024.
“There really isn’t a debate about whether Trumpism is the right direction for the party; the debate is about Trump,” he said. “And I think that’s probably the mistake that Haley and DeSantis – they haven’t figured out how to make the case that Trump’s first term was a failure. You may have liked the issues he focused on, but his inability to solve these problems is why we have the problems we have today. And they seem to be afraid of making that argument.”
But there is also a bigger picture, a new test of institutions after years of assault by Trump and the “Make America great again” movement. The Iowa caucuses are the first stop on the long and winding road to an election that will reveal whether the twice impeached, quadruply indicted former president is a historical aberration or destination.
Jon Meacham, a presidential historian and informal adviser to Joe Biden, said on the MSNBC network on Sunday: “I think the central question for American democracy at this hour is, are you willing to vote for someone with whom you may differ on policy, but in whose fealty to the constitution you do not doubt? Or do you vote for someone who has demonstrated again and again that he’ll put himself above everything else? Pretty straightforward.”
Meacham worries that, after nearly 250 years, the spirit of the declaration of independence and constitution are in grave jeopardy. “I do believe that this experiment needs to go on and I just worry – and I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am given the evidence of the last, what, almost 10 years now – that a re-elected Trump would not only damage that experiment, but he damn well might end it.”
There are plenty of reasons to suspect he might be right. A Trump rally at a snowy college campus in Indianola on Sunday was shown a now-notorious “God Made Trump” video which claims that the former president is the Almighty’s gift to mankind. Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor who once said he would not do business with Trump, turned up to endorse him, foreshadowing other spineless Republicans who will surely fold. Honoured guests included the British demagogue Nigel Farage and the self-declared Islamophobe Laura Loomer.
Looking on, while shepherding a visiting group of British students, was the veteran political consultant Frank Luntz. To his own surprise and dismay, he would now bet on Trump beating Biden in November. “It’s because Trump seems to be getting stronger and stronger and Biden seems to be getting weaker and weaker,” he said, sounding like Cassandra.
Indeed, Trump is approaching the primary with the swagger of an incumbent but heading into the general election with some of the insurgent energy he displayed in 2016. There will be some irony if the Iowa caucuses, a flawed and fragile yet beautiful exercise in democracy in church basements and school gyms, unleash a new authoritarianism on the world.
