Never underestimate the unpredictable power of Iowa

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This was the thinking a half-century ago in Iowa, which in a week and a half will hold the first test of the 2024 election: If you build a presidential caucus, they will come.

U.S. presidential contenders have fulfilled the vision Kevin Costner spoke of in Field of Dreams, a film set in Dyersville, Iowa, and have been coming for decades: the preppy (George H.W. Bush in 1980), the presumptive (Walter F. Mondale, 1984), the precocious (Gary Hart, 1984), the provocative (Patrick J. Buchanan, 1988), the presumptuous (Bob Dole, 1988), the plutocratic (Steve Forbes, 1996), the persistent (Dick Gephardt, 1988 and again in 2004) and the preposterous (Donald Trump, or so it seemed in 2016).

“Iowa is a special place, and the utterly unpredictable is sometimes predictable,” said former senator Tom Harkin, who represented Iowa on Capitol Hill for 40 years, speaking just after he had watched, for maybe the hundredth time, The Music Man, another film set in Iowa. “If you use The Music Man as your political guide, you will see how Iowans are not easy to predict.”

Jimmy Carter, who pulled off perhaps the most unpredictable political feat of all, in 1976 saw an opening and opportunity in Iowa, its new caucuses engineered by so-called reformers who created an event that a later generation of activists, concerned that Blacks and Hispanics each comprised less than 3 per cent of the state’s population, would find unrepresentative of a rapidly changing country. The Georgia governor, who two years earlier had appeared on the television program What’s My Line? only to have none of the panelists guess who he was, won the caucuses. And a tradition – really, a phenomenon – was born.

Iowa, like Mr. Gephardt, who won the caucuses the first time he entered in 1988 but didn’t win a single county when he tried again in 2004, persisted. As a result, five Republican political figures with a glint of the Truman Balcony at the White House in their eyes, are canvassing the state right now, fully aware that their presidential hopes could be boosted or destroyed by what a few hundred thousand Corwith, Iowa, soybean farmers, West Chester hog butchers, Council Bluffs agribusiness executives, Staceyville chicken processors, Mason City ethanol producers, Tipton farm-implement manufacturers and Des Moines insurance administrators decide to do on a cold Monday night.

There remains enough uncertainty in Iowa that Mr. Trump is planning to spend considerable time in the state, former governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina is deploying an army of paid canvassers there, and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is polishing what is regarded as one of the most comprehensive organizations to be deployed in the state in decades.

“It’s way closer than people think, and people are going to be very surprised on caucus night,” said Denise Brubeck, the deputy director of the influential Church Ambassador Network and president of the Capitol Region Republican Women. “When you’re neutral like I am, you can see who is door-knocking, and that makes a difference, and who is doing face-to face conversations, which is really important.”

The easy prediction, of course, is that Mr. Trump will skate to a convincing victory. The polls show that, and many Iowa political observers agree.

“Trump’s probably in the driver’s seat, but things could change quickly,” said Steve Scheffler, the Republican National Committee man who is president of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition and is unaffiliated with any candidate, in an interview. “He has a ground game that is leaving no page unturned.”

But the polls also once showed that former governor Ronald Reagan, with Midwestern roots and a star turn as a radio announcer on Des Moines’ WHO, would glide to victory in 1980. Instead, former United Nations ambassador George H.W. Bush won the Iowa caucuses but lost the GOP nomination to Mr. Reagan. Mr. Bush tried Iowa again in 1988, lost to Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, but ultimately won the nomination and, months later, the White House.

“If a candidate does less well than is expected, whether he’s a front-runner or anyone else, it’s going to signal something to the national media,” Mr. Bush said shortly thereafter. “Iowa did it before, Iowa will do it again.”

Other Republican surprise winners: former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (2008) and former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania (2012).

“Things can change at the end and anything can happen,” Mr. Santorum said in an interview this week. “I’m living proof of that.”

It’s in the DNA of the state, which cultivates rebellion along with corn and pork.

In the years after the Civil War, Iowa was ground zero for the protest movement against what historian Leland Sage called “the railroads and other oppressive corporations, real or imagined.” The radical Populist Party nominated an Iowan, James B. Weaver, for president, and he won five states in the 1892 election. Another Iowa radical, former vice-president Henry Wallace, whose storied family produced the influential Wallaces’ Farmer magazine, led a breakaway party in 1948 but finished in fourth place with less than 3 per cent of the vote.

In the period between the Weaver and Wallace campaigns, Iowa experienced a 1931 farmer rebellion over a law requiring the testing of cows for tuberculosis, a 1932 episode that saw dairy farmers furious over low milk prices blockade 10 highways leading into Sioux City and a 1942 contretemps known as the Margarine War, an uproar prompted by Iowa State University’s distribution of a pamphlet suggesting that butter and margarine tasted about the same and had roughly equivalent nutritional values. The state’s butter producers reacted with fury, and after multiple protests the pamphlet was withdrawn.

Today’s political wars are being conducted with less passion but arguably greater implications.

“It’s a very competitive field,” said Chris Wehrman, a member of the executive committee of the Polk County (Des Moines) Republican Party. “My sense is that anything could happen on caucus night. This is an unusually ambitious caucus period. All of the candidates are running very hard and very fast.”