Rick Mullen recalls the night in 1991 when he and his wife returned from meeting Democratic candidates at the local convention center. It was months before Iowa’s crucial first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses. He asked his wife her opinion of a young, Southern governor named Bill Clinton. Her reply: “I don’t know, but he sure smells good.” Mullen says he had missed that detail.
In Iowa, the race for the presidency is a feast for all the senses. The voters repeatedly get to see, touch, and smell the candidates months before they are loosed on the rest of the country. In this largely rural state, there is a seemingly unending schedule of county picnics, fairs, and dinner meetings available for candidates to attend, and the sky is the limit for impromptu visits to pizza parlors, greasy spoons, and union halls to meet ordinary Iowans.
It may seem ridiculously early to be talking about the Iowa caucuses. Most political activists here are focused on November’s midterm elections, with three competitive House races in the state and the governorship up for grabs. But people in Iowa know the groundwork-laying process of running for president never really ends. As soon as one election finishes, the jockeying for the next one begins. It’s already underway though the caucuses won’t be held until February 2020. That’s in 17 months.
The better-known likely candidates on the Democratic side—senators Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont—are mostly avoiding Iowa, perhaps to skirt distracting questions about what message they are sending by visiting here. The less-established figures, though, are making repeated trips to Iowa in a tactic political strategists call “Jimmy Carter 2.0.” In this context, the comparison is a compliment: Carter got an early start campaigning in the 1976 caucuses, won them, and went on to the presidency.
Those making frequent Iowa appearances so far include congressmen John Delaney of Maryland, Eric Swalwell of California, and Tim Ryan of Ohio, plus former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley. Delaney, who announced his candidacy more than a year ago, has been to Iowa 15 times already. He has been to all 99 Iowa counties. He’s preaching a centrist message and calling for national civility. Others are taking a more bare-knuckles approach. Michael Avenatti, the porn-star-representing-lawyer-turned-political-candidate, told an Iowa audience last month that his approach to Republicans would be: “When they go low, I say we hit harder.”
Pat Rynard, who runs the political website Iowa Starting Line, thinks the caucuses will be a free-for-all and that candidates are wise to start early. “The 2020 field is going to be competitive and huge,” he says. “Do you have to come out early to Iowa to be in a position to win the Iowa caucuses? No, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. With the field this large and undetermined, why wouldn’t you want every advantage you can get? The sooner you are here, the sooner you have these activists all to yourself, which is going to be hard when bigger names are out and going around.”
In Sioux City, population 83,000, O’Malley attended a Labor Day picnic at a public park, and Ryan is on the calendar for an October dinner at the local carpenter’s union. Closer to the caucuses, candidates will likely fan out to restaurants to encounter potential supporters. A favorite in the past has been Pizza Ranch, a Midwestern chain with 76 Iowa locations. A 2012 headline in the Sioux City Journal declared: “Pizza Ranch Again Blazes Trail to White House.”
Sitting at a folding table in the Woodbury County Democratic headquarters, located in a strip mall anchored by an IHOP in downtown Sioux City, Mullen, 65, says he’s not sure which candidate he will back. A former chairman of the county Democrats, he got his start in politics going door-to-door for George McGovern in 1972. He believes in the process and wants to evaluate the candidates firsthand. He says he doesn’t agree with Delaney’s approach but is open to fresh voices in a party whose leaders are mostly septuagenarians.
“Personally, I’d like to see younger candidates,” he says. “We have a lot of great older people, but I don’t think they should all be out there running for president.”
Inevitably, fair-minded people in other parts of the country ask themselves every four years why America has anointed this small farm state as gatekeeper to the presidency. Its caucus goes first, followed a week later by the New Hampshire primary. Then come Nevada, South Carolina, and Super Tuesday, when nine states are scheduled to hold primaries.
Democrats tend to do best in coastal states and with minority voters. Iowa is in the middle of the country and is 91 percent white. Yet Democrats here insist that the issues that are important to the party nationally are important to Iowans. They are even comfortable embracing some of the party’s more extreme voices, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the self-identified democratic socialist in New York. She has called for abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, enacting government-paid universal health care, and providing a federal jobs guarantee and a “living wage.”
“Most Democrats don’t disagree with what she’s saying,” Mullen notes. “She calls herself a democratic socialist. I don’t know what that means, but most of us agree with her big ideas”—like higher minimum wages and erasing student loan debt—“and all the big things [we need] to have a civil society.”
Another self-described democratic socialist, Sanders, did well here in 2016. He lost the caucuses to Hillary Clinton by the narrowest of margins, 49.9 percent to 49.6 percent. There’s still affection for Sanders inside Pierce Street Coffee Works, a café decorated with porcelain fish, black-and-white photographs, an old Coke machine, and a purple ceiling. Asked if any presidential candidates had stopped by in recent years, a barista says, “Bernie was here last time.”
A second barista turns and gasps, her face lighting up: “Was he?”
Much of the political talk around town centers on the midterm elections. The local Democrats say they’re seeing a lot of anti-Trump enthusiasm. They have crews knocking on doors and staffing phone banks. They’ve marched with Parkland students for stricter gun control and held rallies opposing the border separations of Latino families who come to the United States illegally. A progressive women’s group has become active. “We’re getting people who have never been in and paid attention before,” says Jeremy Dumkrieger, 41, a teacher who serves as the Woodbury County Democratic chair.
Iowa Democrats would love to knock off Republican Steve King, who represents Sioux City and the rest of northwest Iowa in the state’s 4th Congressional District. Most political pros consider that a long shot. Democratic odds are better in the 1st and 3rd districts, held by Republicans Rod Blum and David Young. The Cook Political Report rates Blum’s race as leaning Democratic and Young’s race as a toss-up.
The governor’s race is close, too, and offers a stark contrast in candidates. Kim Reynolds, a Republican who ascended to the job last year when Terry Branstad became U.S. ambassador to China, is the state’s first woman governor. She has a record of conservative achievements, including signing the largest tax cuts in Iowa history and approving pro-life legislation that bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. (Courts have blocked the abortion measure.) Her opponent is Fred Hubbell, a millionaire insurance executive making his first run for office. He’s a big Democratic donor who served on the board of Planned Parenthood. Cook rates this race, too, a toss-up.
Tim Hagle, a University of Iowa political science professor, says the tight races will further draw some of the big national names to Iowa in the next couple months.
Although the presidential nominating process can be criticized for handing too much importance to a handful of early states, the repeat visits to Iowa have advantages for candidates. They can polish their messages, practice meeting voters face-to-face, and learn from early missteps before the media spotlight shines too brightly.
“It’s a good opportunity not just to meet them and ask them questions, but also for the candidates to actually find out what voters are thinking about,” Hagle says. “Sometimes they get in a bubble, and they don’t understand what the issues are, even though they talk about them.”
Soon, the pace of candidate visits will pick up, and Iowans will have even more chances to watch, listen—and sniff.
