From the Hawkeye State: Samuel Kirkwood

Iowa Is MAGA Country 

Twenty years ago the Iowa GOP caucus, like the rest of the Republican Party across the country, was a very different beast compared to today. Party leadership in Des Moines wasn’t always agreed with, but it was largely respected by the rank and file party members. Endorsements by party leadership and the halo of attending personalities - particularly evangelical preachers like Bob Vander Plaats - carried election-tipping weight. The average caucus-going Republicans would have, if pressed, described themselves as Bush-aligned neoconservatives. The populism of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan was seen as fringe but, importantly, not dismissed on merits. They were merely gauche, but not actually thought of as wrong. That should have been a clue to the GOP Establishment that one day soon populist ideas and personalities would be in the ascendancy.

Enter Donald J. Trump, the man who pulled me into paid political organizing. I had always been interested in politics - I grew up learning of local Iowa politics at my grandfather’s knee. He was a Truman Democrat through and through - spent two years killing Communists in Korea and had a burning hatred for “the Reds,” as he called them, then came home and farmed for 50 years. He’d lobbied the State House to keep large-scale hog confinements out of the state, trying to protect the small livestock producer. He ultimately failed, and I watched the small hog producer go the way of the passenger pigeon across Iowa. This impressed upon me the importance of constant, proactive civic engagement by everyday people.

I watched the controversy surrounding hanging chads in Florida with great interest. I followed the minutiae of state house, city council, and school board races. When the Tea Party rose to prominence, I threw my hat in the ring and got personally involved. By that time I’d become a Republican, the Iowa Democrats were already becoming the party of urban progressivism, as men like my grandfather aged out and passed on, and were quickly being replaced by leftist carpetbaggers unpalatable outside of Des Moines and Iowa City. The 2010 bloodbaths at the state level only accelerated this process, as moderate Democrats were replaced by Tea Party populist Republicans, and only the comparatively hardcore Leftist strongholds of Polk and Johnson Counties remained.

By 2016, I was fully engaged with politics at the national level. During that presidential election cycle, I had initially been a Cruz man, serving as a precinct captain for him in the Caucuses. But unlike most Cruz supporters, I was always comfortable with Trump. So when The Donald secured the GOP nomination, I immediately went to work for him. I was hired as a county officer in southern Iowa, given a list of prospective volunteers, and set to work recruiting canvassers and knocking doors myself. Thus began a career in political organizing that spanned four years, four organizations, and three election cycles. In that time I have personally knocked on 25,000 doors, conducted 7,000 interviews with voters, and trained 300 volunteers and employees to do the same.

So I know how to read a political battleground, and I can say with confidence that Trump has had Iowa sewn up for at least six months, if not longer. Since May, I have knocked on several thousand doors and conducted nearly 1,000 interviews. My anecdotal experiences are supported by polling over the last six months - DeSantis has strong support across Iowa… among independents who, for the most part, won’t be voting in the GOP Caucus. His primary supporters come from those who like the policies of Donald Trump, but not his personality. This opposition is, thus, soft and will coalesce behind Trump once DeSantis inevitably drops out.

And, yes, that is inevitable. The DeSantis campaign was doomed from the start, because it was a campaign run by and for the GOP Establishment, and that institution still believes it is 2004 and Karl Rove can predict the future with his whiteboard. They act as if 9/11 is still fresh in the memories of voters, and there is still a hunger for foreign intervention born from that insecurity. They act as if the utter catastrophe that is the southern border and our nonexistent immigration policy can be ignored. They act as if the average GOP voter can still be bribed with promises and distracted from not noticing the outright collusion with Democrats and the Deep State, nevermind the chronic inaction. They act as if endorsements from big local names like Vander Plaats can still win votes.

But that time is now long passed. The average Iowa voter doesn’t care whom their pastors tell them to vote for because those pastors folded when the Iowa Supreme Court rammed same-sex marriage down our throats; when mask mandates were imposed, workplaces shuttered, and churches closed; when pastors dithered for twenty years on the issue of preserving unborn life. It was the grassroots that organized the responses to all of those issues, not the GOP Establishment, and certainly not the professionally evangelical quasi-politicians. Time and time again, for the last two decades, whether it was pro-life legislation, or pro-gun legislation, or successful judge recalls, it was the grassroots that organized these victories, never the establishment.

We, the People, of the Republican Party of Iowa have finally come to realize that we don’t need the GOP establishment anymore. They do not stand for our values or our interests, only their own power and opportunities to grift. Unfortunately, Ron DeSantis hasn’t clued into this, and shackled himself to the very same establishment that we know views us in contempt.