This article was first published in the On the Trail 2024 newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox on Tuesday and Friday mornings here. To submit a question to next week’s Friday Mailbag, email [email protected].
Good morning and welcome to On the Trail 2024, the Deseret News’ campaign newsletter. I’m Samuel Benson, Deseret’s national political correspondent.
3 things to know this week
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The first votes of the 2024 election cycle will be cast on Monday, when Iowa Republicans participate in their caucuses. (More on that below.) This week will be chock-full of events leading up to voting — a Nikki Haley town hall on Fox News Monday night, a Ron DeSantis one Tuesday night (4 p.m. MST), and a Haley-DeSantis CNN debate Wednesday (7 p.m. CST). My colleague Jennifer Graham interviewed one of the Fox town hall co-moderators here, and I head to Des Moines tomorrow, where I’ll bring you coverage on the ground. Follow along on our website, Twitter, Instagram, or this newsletter.
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Saturday was the three-year anniversary of Jan. 6, and President Joe Biden delivered several speeches over the weekend denouncing former President Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riots. “(Trump is) sacrifice democracy to put himself in power,” Biden said. But some, like Sen. Mitt Romney, view the “threat to democracy” pitch as a “bust” to voters: “Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.” Read more here.
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Did God create Trump to save America? That’s what a new video claims, which Trump himself posted to Truth Social. The video says God made Trump as a “shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave nor forsake them,” and it comes on the heels of a new poll that shows most Republicans view Trump as a “person of faith”; even so, I spoke to several Iowa pastors who saw the video as blasphemous. Read more here.
The Big Idea
The Iowa caucuses, explained
For one day, the eyes of the entire American political universe will rest squarely on Iowa, the Midwestern flyover state. The winner of Iowa’s caucuses just might determine the next president — or, perhaps more likely, a poor performance could kill a candidate’s hopes. Why? Tradition.
Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status began as an accident. It started in 1972, when the Iowa Democratic Party set its caucus date earlier than any other state, a result of its complex voting process — precinct meetings, then county conventions, then the state convention — and slow-moving mimeograph machines that would need time to print ballots for each. The Iowa Republican Party followed suit in 1976, and the tradition stuck: Iowa became the first state to vote in each presidential election.
But Democrats moved away from Iowa this cycle, saying the state is not representative of the country (Iowa is mostly white and rural). Republicans stuck around, though, and on Monday, they officially kick off the 2024 election.
The process goes something like this: Every city has designated precinct locations, based on voters’ home addresses — a church, a high school, a living room — and participants are to arrive at 7 p.m. sharp. The caucuses are open to Republicans only, though voters are allowed to change their party affiliation or register to vote on site.
The word caucus is believed to come from the Algonquian word for “counsel,” meaning a meeting of Indigenous tribal leaders. In the same vein, the Iowa caucuses are treated like neighborhood meetings, where voters gather and talk about why they support certain candidates. The candidates may send surrogates to deliver speeches on their behalf, and after the speeches conclude, each voter fills out a secret ballot.
There is no mail-in or absentee voting; to participate in the Republican caucus, voters must go in person.
“You don’t get a week or a month to vote,” Drew Klein, the director of Americans For Prosperity-Iowa, said. “You don’t even get a day to vote. You have to show up at 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 15.” And in snowy, frigid Iowa, Klein notes, “there are no weather delays.” (Current forecasts for Monday show a daily high temperature of 5 degrees Fahrenheit; by 7 p.m., it will likely be sub-zero.)
Related
In a state with just under 3 million residents and over 700,000 registered Republicans, the standing record of caucus-night participants is 180,000. In 2016, Dubuque County — one of Iowa’s 10 most populous counties, out of 99 — was decided by 27 votes. In 2012, Romney was declared the statewide winner on election night by an eight-vote margin; later, a recount deemed Rick Santorum the victor, by 34 votes.
Those razor-thin margins go far in selecting the eventual Republican nominee. Since 1976, when Republicans first held their first-in-the-nation caucus, a presidential candidate has never finished worse than third place in Iowa and gone on to win the party nomination.
To Iowa Republicans, hosting the first-in-the-nation caucus is a responsibility and an opportunity.
“Iowans are pretty responsible people, because they’re rural people,” Pastor Bill Tvedt of Oskaloosa, Iowa said. “All your cattle die if you don’t get up and feed them at 3 a.m. So they know what responsibility is.”
What I’m reading
Haley’s donors are “a group of people who can buy anything. Except, perhaps, the Republican nomination for president.” Nikki Haley is testing the limits of big money in GOP presidential politics (Natalie Allison, POLITICO)
A visual, county-by-county peek into Republicans’ differing approaches to winning over as many Iowa voters as possible. Inside the GOP candidates’ strategies in Iowa (Sophia Cai and Alex Thompson, Axios)
Iowa evangelicals “were once skeptical of the former president. Now they are among his strongest supporters.” How Trump Captured Iowa’s Religious Right (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker)
One last thing — a reminder to follow our new On the Trail 2024 Instagram account!
Have a question for the Friday mailbag? Drop me a line at [email protected], or reply to this email.
See you on the trail.
Editor’s Note: The Deseret News is committed to covering issues of substance in the 2024 presidential race from its unique perspective and editorial values. Our team of political reporters will bring you in-depth coverage of the most relevant news and information to help you make an informed decision. Find our complete coverage of the election here.
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