DAILY TRIFECTA: The Bataan Death March Of American Politics Begins In Iowa
What's the definition of insanity?
TITLE: Trump’s challengers find their Iowa campaigns no match for MAGA ‘movement’
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/2795726/desantis-haley-grapple-trump-maga-movement-iowa/
EXCERPT: Hourlong lines in the cold, authorized and unauthorized Make America Great Again merchandise, highly produced “how to caucus” videos — former President Donald Trump may be the messenger, but he has undisputedly inspired a movement.
That is what Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are up against in Iowa as Trump averages a 30 percentage point advantage on his primary opponents before the Republican Party’s 2024 opening nominating contest on Monday.
Before Trump’s Mason City rally last weekend, Debbie Neuberger, who read about the campaign stop in “the newspaper,” underscored how most of the people packed into the North Iowa Events Center were for the former president and “they’re going to vote, vote, vote.”
“He’s just awesome,” the Clear Lake haunted house owner, 60, told the Washington Examiner. “People love him. They love him. No matter what, they love him. The more they try to knock him down, the more we love him, the more we go out and help him.”
After a crowded Trump campaign meet-and-greet with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in rural Keokuk, Sandy Johnson, a precinct caucus captain for the former president, repeated she would never be “not voting for Trump until he, for some reason, is no longer the candidate.”
“There’s always been something about Nikki that I have not liked,” the Keokuk retired retailer, 79, said. “Now Ron DeSantis I like, but then I think he’s probably just a little shallow. I think Trump is really deep. I mean, you might not like his personality, which a lot of people don’t, but that man is sincere, and he’s honest, and he has been through — she said it right when she said ‘persecution.’ They went after him from the get-go.”
Johnson underscores DeSantis’s predicament, more so than that of Haley, with the Florida governor’s personality and politics appealing to similar likely caucusgoers as Trump.
Dallas County Republican Chairwoman Kelley Koch, who represents a region close to more liberal Des Moines, contended DeSantis, in particular, was “misadvised” and that “98%” of Iowa Republicans had decided for whom they would be caucusing “a while ago” but did not share their decision with pollsters or reporters.
“All the other guys never really entered the picture,” Koch said after a drop-in with Donald Trump Jr. in Urbandale. “The reason why, and I mean this sincerely, our country is so messed up right now, with so many problems, that we don’t have time for a rookie.”
TITLE: The Iowa Way: The state is fiercely proud of its role in sending presidents to Washington. No one wants to admit that it’s all fallen apart.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/iowa-caucuses-2024-results-trump-republican-election.html
EXCERPT: Although the Iowa caucuses are still a local contest, the wildly polarized news environment and an increasingly homogenized political system have flattened it. It’s not just the looming presence of Donald Trump as the first former incumbent to mount a comeback bid in the modern era but also the sense that the very nature of American politics has changed—at least for now.
Because for as much as Iowans still treasure their long history of boosting underdogs into winning victories, a Jimmy Carter or a Rick Santorum couldn’t come out of Iowa successful in the modern era. It’s an age when the endorsements of online influencers or podcasters carry as much weight as those of local elected officials and political viability is assessed as much by the arbitrary thresholds used to determine the stage for televised debates as by grassroots organizing. The frenzied on-the-ground politicking of the past has given way, increasingly, to 30-second campaign ads and cable news hits.
The result is a politics that has become increasingly generic. Pet local issues have faded from the stump speech—after all, Fox News does a lot more segments about trans athletes in high school sports than ethanol.
It’s not that the candidates haven’t been putting in work.
Ramaswamy’s race around the state has meant, at times, clocking half a dozen appearances a day. Nikki Haley is working the crowds that come out to see her, telling people to ignore the polls and media—but also, by the way, did you see the Wall Street Journal poll from the end of last year that showed her beating Biden by 17 points in a hypothetical matchup? In early December, Ron DeSantis completed a “full Grassley,” the local term for the significant undertaking that is visiting every one of Iowa’s 99 counties.
This is a ritual that politicians have long performed to demonstrate their seriousness about competing not only in the state’s more populous areas but in its rural parts, which include vast, sparsely populated tracts far from commercial airports. It’s easy to fly into Des Moines or Cedar Rapids, but showing up in Adams County or Palo Alto County requires real effort. Traditionally, this wasn’t just an effective tactic to woo rural voters—it was a message as well, an effort to convince caucusgoers that a candidate deserves their support because he is campaigning for it the right way, the Iowa way.
A candidate not doing that is Donald Trump. He won’t make it to even 20 counties by caucus night. In November, Trump held a raucous rally in a high school gymnasium in Fort Dodge, a fading factory town 90 miles northwest of Des Moines. It was an event where he did absolutely everything one is advised not to do as a politician here. He denigrated local elected officials, saying he was responsible for the 2022 reelection of Chuck Grassley, the state’s nonagenarian senator, who began his undefeated electoral streak in the state during the Eisenhower administration. Trump also took credit for the victories of the state’s other senator, Joni Ernst, as well as the governor, Kim Reynolds, whom he spoke of with scorn because of her support for DeSantis.
He was casual even about the need to attempt to campaign in Iowa. As Trump riffed on the podium—about, in this case, his desire to reoccupy Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and his insistence that the audience watch the 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate—the former president casually mentioned that he’d “be back four or five times, maybe six times before the election,” in a state where Ramaswamy had rented an apartment for the home stretch.
Trump’s reward? A lead of 51 percent to 19 percent over DeSantis, his closest competitor in the benchmark Des Moines Register poll of the state in early December. It was the largest lead recorded in the poll’s history for any competitive Iowa caucus.
TITLE: The Iowa Pizza Chain That Explains How Our Politics Became So Dysfunctional
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/13/iowa-pizza-chain-dysfunctional-politics-00135095
EXCERPTS: Pizza parlors are no longer communal meeting spots in small towns where national concerns are set aside. Patronizing one like Pizza Ranch now comes coded as a conservative political act, much like sleeping on one of Mike Lindell’s pillows tags you as someone skeptical about the 2020 election or carrying your produce in a New Yorker tote bag means you’re ready for a Biden second term. And in a primary where Donald Trump blots out the sun and only national names break through, gathering dozens of people in a room is not how you win the caucuses anymore.
Since the birth of both the caucuses and Pizza Ranch, both have nationalized. What struck me about my time at Pizza Ranches is how I never heard an Iowan ask a question with a local spin. They wanted to know about the candidate’s foreign policy, about their plans for the border, about whether Biden was a hologram. There weren’t any questions about biodiesel or ethanol subsidies or soybean prices.
Forty-three years after the first Pizza Ranch opened, our fractured politics and society are visibly on display there — both in terms of direct political campaigning, but also the way political tribalism has seeped into so many aspects of our personal lives, with local communities and idiosyncrasies flattened along the way. In all my time eating alongside voters at the restaurants, I never met someone who described themselves as a Democrat.
All of this made me wonder about the types of places candidates visited before Pizza Ranch, and what Pizza Ranch had replaced as it grew to its hundreds of locations across more than a dozen states: The mom-and-pop pizza shops and watering holes that hadn’t yet been left- or right-coded. I wanted to go back in time and visit those places, and taste that food — food that presumably wasn’t as formulaic in its flavor profile.
Instead, I find myself hearing the same iteration of the same stump speech at yet another interchangeable Pizza Ranch, where all localized quirks have been sanded out of the food and the politics, built by corporate and campaign consultants to be choked down by consumers instead of neighbors.