Rick Santorum, winner of the 2012 Iowa caucuses and a repeat Republican candidate for 2016, walked into the Northside Cafe in Winterset the other afternoon and encountered John Reed, a retired lumber salesman. "We've talked before," Mr. Reed told the former senator from Pennsylvania.
Of course, they had. Iowa's politics is personal, intimate. Farmers, insurance executives, bankers, restaurateurs – they all have their chance to grill the candidates, sometimes over chili and fried pork tenderloin sandwiches in downtown lunch spots like the Northside, sometimes in candidate town meetings in rural crossroads, sometimes in suburban living rooms, sometimes in corporate assembly rooms. It makes for a special kind of politics, out of sync with the mass culture of a superpower with a fleet of weaponized drones and an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
This community of 5,094 is the hometown of cowboy actor John Wayne, and on the far side of town is the house where he grew up. About 40 years after his birth, he, along with Walter Brennan and Montgomery Clift, made a film called Red River, about a blistering feud not unlike this season's Republican caucus fight. The poster for that movie describes it as "blazing in its action – thundering in its drama – stirring in [its] sweep." That's a perfect description of the film, and of the drama unfolding in the gentle hills and rugged plains of Iowa, which on Feb. 1 holds its caucuses, the first political test of the election campaign. And the John Wayne credo – "Don't pick a fight, but if you find yourself in one, I suggest you make damn sure you win''– applies just as neatly to the proceedings here.
"The caucus-goers in Iowa make a big decision about who's going to go all the way," Carly Fiorina, the former Silicon Valley executive, said after a recent classic Hawkeye State meeting with uber-informed voters in downtown Des Moines. That decision is just now taking shape, and it reflects great advances, and great reversals, among the more than dozen Republican candidates competing here. Earlier this month, Senator Ted Cruz, the Alberta native who was elected to the Capitol from Texas, overtook billionaire businessman Donald Trump for the lead in at least one poll. That confirms the belief among the state's political analysts that Mr. Cruz is surging, the result of his strong national-security stand in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.
Indeed, when Ms. Fiorina was asked last week about Mr. Trump's vow to bar Muslims from entering the United States, she said the comment had "more to do with Ted Cruz" than with any reasonable assessment of the threat adherents of Islam had for Americans.
This has been – and continues to be – an unusually fluid campaign in Iowa.
The early assessment was that former governor Jeb Bush of Florida was a strong favourite. He has sunk in the polls, to the middle or even the low single digits. Last spring, the Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll showed Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin firmly ahead. Mr. Walker has since left the race. For a time, retired surgeon Ben Carson of Maryland moved into a position of strength. The terror attacks placed a fresh emphasis on national-security fluency, and Dr. Carson was found wanting. Mr. Trump has persistently remained at or near the top of the polls.
Mr. Cruz has shown strength here among evangelical voters, who four years ago gave Mr. Santorum a surprise but slender victory, and he polls well among those who identify with the Tea Party, the new muscular conservatives of the Republican politics. He and Mr. Trump, according to a Monmouth University survey, score well among male voters, with Senator Marco Rubio running well among women, who are far less likely to side with Mr. Trump.
A rule of thumb for Iowa caucuses is that these contests – conducted on a Monday evening in the coldest part of the winter – are dominated by candidates with strong organizations, the better to persuade supporters to venture into the frigid air and to declare their preferences before their neighbours. Iowans are a private people, but this is an uncharacteristically public process.
But it is equally true that those who attend Republican caucuses here are more conservative (and more evangelical) than Republican voters across the country, and that gives a boost to candidates such as Mr. Cruz, who began his campaign last spring with a rousing address at Liberty University, founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell.
This year's caucuses have been marked by reversals of fortunes and allegiances. Those who four years ago sided with Mr. Santorum seem to be drifting into the Cruz camp, with Dr. Carson offering them a halfway house on their political journey. Those who now support Mr. Rubio once seemed likely to support Mr. Bush, his mentor-turned-tormentor. And Mr. Rubio seems to have the air of John F. Kennedy in 1960, with a youthful mien and a vigorous profile – though Mr. Kennedy had the outlook of a learned academic historian and in truth was racked by pain and disease.
On the surface, the campaign here seems to be on the cusp of a holiday respite. The air is turning cool, Christmas decorations are visible on even rural roadsides, restaurant wait staff are donning floppy red elves' caps, and carols ring out in shopping centres.
But in this most unpredictable season in this most unpredictable campaign, anything is possible. It was, after all, between Christmas and New Year's in the 1988 campaign that Representative Richard A. Gephardt of nearby Missouri mounted a guerrilla political ambush on his foes, airing a powerful set of television advertisements about the American trade deficit that catapulted him to a stunning Iowa victory with 31 per cent of the vote. Then, the country felt under attack from auto imports. Now, it feels under attack from terrorists. Those concerns don't take a holiday, and perhaps politics here in Iowa won't either.