MASON CITY, Iowa — The Iowa caucuses are just four days away, but the race is still wide-open for the Republican presidential candidates vying for a top-three finish in the first-in-the-nation voting.
The fluidity of the race has all the candidates working overtime in a mad dash to reach as many Iowans as possible before the Jan. 3 caucuses and make the case that they are the candidate who could beat President Obama in 2012.
The pressure the campaigns are feeling in the walk-up to the caucuses is most evident in the candidates’ packed schedules. All of the candidates with the exception of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who is not competing in Iowa, have scheduled at least three campaign stops a day until the caucuses — with some making as many as half a dozen appearances in a single day.
“The best thing I can do is show [voters] that I’m going to be here,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said Thursday when voters questioned his earlier absence from the state.
“Of course I want to win Iowa,” he said. “Everybody wants to win Iowa.”
After months of virtually ignoring the Hawkeye State, Romney decided to go all in on Iowa. Romney is heavily favored in New Hampshire, where he has spent most of his resources, but is now trying to shorten the nominating process by dominating Iowa as well.
Romney must finish strong in Iowa because “if he doesn’t win, it will look like a failure,” said Jeff Stein, a political analyst and Iowa caucus historian.
Expectations for other candidates are lower and a strong finish by any one of them could be read as a “win,” analysts said.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is starting to struggle after surging in the polls over the last month. His free-fall in the polls was underscored Thursday at an event at which reporters appeared to outnumber voters.
Gingrich attributes his nosedive to a slew of negative advertising that his rivals and other political organizations are airing on Iowa television stations.
Meanwhile, as Gingrich plunges another candidate is surging for the first time. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, the only candidate who couldn’t break into double digits in the polls until this week, is the only candidate who has taken a traditional, retail-politics approach to winning over Iowa voters, spending all of his time traveling the state to make the case that he is the conservative alternative to Romney.
Santorum’s surge is due to in part to Iowa’s Christian and evangelical leaders, who have coalesced around him after months of dividing their support among a number of candidates, including Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Since winning the Iowa straw poll in August, Bachmann’s support has plummeted. Bachmann’s state chairman, Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson, walked out on her this week and endorsed Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.
With the race still so fluid, Stein said some voters may just cast their vote for whoever is ahead in the latest polls.
“My fear is that they are going to wait and see the last polls and there might be a bandwagon effect for whoever is doing well,” Stein said. “I hope that’s not the case.”
