If Ron DeSantis Has a Shot in Hell, It Starts Here
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Even in the basement of the Iron Horse bar and grill, it’s hot in Chariton, Iowa. The woman next to me fans herself with her “Ron DeSantis for President” flyer. A little boy leaning against the barrier between the crowd and the small stage plugs his ears against the too-loud dad rock blasting from the too-big speakers. All anyone talks about is the heat, which is for the birds, a man says wiping his forehead. For the birds.
Ron DeSantis is late to this meet-and-greet, where he is trying to resuscitate his campaign for president. There are almost an equal number of journalists as supporters in the small basement. And the reporters shove through the crowd, apologetically smiling over their shoulders. “The media,” a woman near me sighs.
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DeSantis finally shows up just after “Bohemian Rhapsody” blasts through the speakers. “I see a little silhouette of a man … ” He takes the stage after Wayne County Sheriff Keith Davis. But there is a problem with feedback from the microphone, “Are we going to get it fixed?” DeSantis says. He doesn’t joke about the noise. Doesn’t find humor in the little campaign mishaps.
He starts with his standard line about sending Joe Biden back to a basement in Delaware. He ends with his meditation on flying into Reagan National Airport and thinking that the best monument to America are the rows of headstones in Arlington National Cemetery. He seems tired. And he’s wearing a vest, long sleeves, and pants in the oppressive 100-degree heat.
The tone of the crowd at the meet-and-greet on July 27 is far different from a DeSantis rally on May 31 in Cedar Rapids, one week after he announced his run for the presidency. Then, the crowd had been on his side. Laughed at his jokes about Biden hiding in his basement and loudly applauded when he talked about sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and said schools are for education “not indoctrination.”
In the crowd at the May 31 event in Cedar Rapids, a woman who works as a real estate agent says she is interested in DeSantis because she wants Trump but more effective. And she worries Trump wouldn’t be effective.
For those two months, it did seem like the center of gravity of Republican politics in the state was shifting away from Trump. But if the band of Iowa Republicans were ever stretching away, they seem to be snapping right back.
Five months before the caucuses, DeSantis is relaunching his campaign, trying to find that momentum again. On July 13, DeSantis laid off “fewer than 10” staffers. And then on July 25, he laid off 38 more staffers — more than one third of his campaign. And on Aug. 9, just two weeks after his campaign relaunch, he replaced his campaign manager. Meanwhile, Trump faces a new round of indictments that cast his candidacy under an uncomfortable shadow. Even the voters in Iowa, die-hard Trumpers, sense it. And they are looking for a backup.
DeSantis’ campaign strategy is invested heavily in Iowa. But the strategy has one big problem, and that’s Iowa. After all, the story they tell about Iowa is that you have to come here to win. A sign declaring “Iowa picks presidents” adorns the stage at a Republican fundraiser on Aug. 6. The story goes that if you can shake enough hands or eat enough pork tenderloin, you can get to the White House. It’s a small media market. It’s retail politics. It’s butter cows and delivering speeches on hay bales. It’s a congresswoman playing fiddle and many, many cold mayonnaise-based pasta salads. But with the exceptions of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, the reality is that Iowa is bad at picking the president, especially Republican ones over the past 20 years. In 2016, Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses. Before that, Rick Santorum. Before that, Mike Huckabee. Iowa doesn’t pick the president, they pick the most evangelical reactionary.
After DeSantis speaks, he moves through the crowd with an intense focus. I lean against the wall, avoiding the scrum, talking to a woman who says she’s “a Trump die-hard” and thinks DeSantis is nice. She’s considering him as a backup.
“In case of what?” I ask. “Death? Jail?”
“You never know what’s gonna happen in America,” she answers. “We probably won’t get a fair election.”
Before I can reply, DeSantis sticks his hand in my face. I hadn’t seen him approaching and, caught off guard, I shake it. He turns on the heel of his signature black, heeled cowboy boots and steps on my toe. He doesn’t hear me yelp as he leans in for a selfie with a supporter. “I wonder how often he steps on people with those boots and doesn’t even notice,” says a man next to me.
AFTER THE EVENT, PHOTOGRAPHERS AND camera crews filmed the quaint streets of Chariton. Small-town color. The place where “real people” live. An old man standing on the corner of the street outside the coffee shop is interviewed by four different reporters, hovering over him like vultures looking for a scrap.
These campaign events are attended by only the party faithful who pay enough attention to see the emails or Facebook events. Increasingly, the media is excluded or cordoned off to a corner, where they sit like seagulls perched on a roof, only swooping in to pick up quotes like potato chips off the floor. And not everyone who attends will caucus.
The Iowa caucuses were attended by only 18.5 percent of registered voters in 2016. State Sen. Matt Windschitl, an early DeSantis endorser, tells me on the phone that it’s really not about the polls at all. DeSantis, he believes, could be tanking in the polls, but could still win the caucus. And that could be the momentum the campaign needs. “For most of those rank and file that are die-hards, they may vote in a primary, but more than likely they’re just voting in a general election or a presidential election,” Windschitl explains. “Those folks out there that actually move the needle in the caucus to convention and primary process are the folks that people need to be paying attention to.” So, he doesn’t pay much attention to poll numbers.
Other state senators tell me this, too — like Sen. Jeff Reichman, who withdrew his endorsement of Trump to endorse DeSantis after Trump criticized Iowa’s governor.
State Sen. Scott Webster was listed as a DeSantis supporter on the Never Back Down PAC press release of Iowa endorsers released in May, but when I call him at his office earlier this month, he says he’s never endorsed DeSantis. Florida’s governor, he tells me, hasn’t been out to his county much. And he’s actually formally endorsed “anti-woke” investor and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. But when I ask him if Ramaswamy has a chance, he tells me the same thing Windschitl and Reichman said: When it comes to the caucuses, anything can happen. Because it’s not about popular sentiment, it’s about who shows up to caucus.
The governor, Kim Reynolds, hasn’t endorsed anyone in the race but has been campaigning with DeSantis and his wife, Casey. And DeSantis has the support, but not the full endorsement, of evangelical group the Family Leader. It’s a small pull away from the gravitational force of Donald Trump. And one that hasn’t gone unnoticed. Trump has declined invitations to speak at the Family Leader Summit, hosted by the far-right, evangelical organization run by Bob Vander Plaats. In 2011, the Family Leader tried to get all Republican nominees to sign a pledge opposing gay marriage.
The day Reynolds signed a near-total abortion ban, with DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley in attendance, Trump attacked her, writing on Truth Social, “I opened up the Governor position for Kim Reynolds, & when she fell behind, I ENDORSED her, did big Rallies, & and she won. Now she wants to remain ‘NEUTRAL.’ I don’t invite her to events.”
Trump also showed up to the Iowa State Fair on Saturday, pointedly avoiding a series of GOP presidential conversations with Iowa’s governor. Meanwhile, DeSantis has teased that he’d think about making Reynolds his VP pick. While DeSantis schmoozes Iowans, Trump is almost taunting them. Sending the message that they are just one of so many states. Despite the provocation, Iowa’s governor and federal delegation are careful not to pull away too hard. No one ever seems to really escape Trump’s orbit.
AT THE DESANTIS EVENT IN CEDAR RAPIDS on May 31, the real estate agent tells me how she doesn’t post on Facebook that she goes to political events because she doesn’t want to be attacked for her beliefs. She doesn’t want me to use her name, and she’s only talking to me because long ago we attended the same church. At that same event, I overhear a man talking to a reporter for a national newspaper. He tells her he’s concerned about the economy and Covid. When she leaves, he sees me staring and whispers that he never tells reporters what really draws him to DeSantis, because he doesn’t want the media to think he’s “discriminatory or something,” but he really does think this “transgenderism thing” has gone too far.
At an event in Cedar Rapids, on Aug. 6, Daniel Barnett, a 60-year-old financial adviser, tells me he loves DeSantis. Because of “how he has stood up to a lot of this craziness that’s going on at the far left and the things that they’re trying to promote, which I tell you on the surface sounds good. Treat people good, accept people who they are, and all that stuff. I mean, that’s all good. But the stuff they’re trying to do is indoctrinate Americans and stuff that’s very immoral. Immoral stuff like the sex education for the children and the supporting the gender changing, if you will. I don’t like that.”
Biden and the Democrats, he explains, “are taking us to an immoral place, very immoral. I want a candidate that follows Christian values. It has to be Christian because this country was founded upon Christianity, following Jesus Christ. And when you pull away from that, that’s when you lose your country.”
A few moments later, he says he doesn’t judge people and how they live, and maybe Trump has been a bit of a playboy, but he gets the job done. Still, he’s looking at DeSantis who he thinks has come out harder than Trump on the woke threats facing our country.
Iowa has an all-Republican federal delegation, a Republican governor, and a Republican-dominated state house. So it’s hard to imagine that Republicans aren’t safe to say what they think. But it’s not about whether someone is under attack, but whether they feel under attack.
And at every event, candidates, local party leaders, and supporters will tell you America is imploding, America is under attack, we’ve strayed from our values; “wokeism,” “transgenderism,” Bidenism, Faucism, elitism, China, the southern border, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and schools are centers of indoctrination now; it’s all too much. There is moral rot and moral decay. And we are losing our way. Send Biden back to his basement in Delaware. Better yet, send that boss of the Biden crime family to jail. Take America back.
This siege mentality of politics fits the ethos of DeSantis, who looks everywhere from his position of power and sees only enemies. The world of DeSantis is a small claustrophobic place where everyone and everything is against him. He’s intensely private, relying on his wife as his closest confidant. There are reports on how he alienates staff and colleagues. He’s fighting a war against everyone — Bud Light, Disney, and American universities. And he’s even created enemies, like “wokeism.” It doesn’t matter if they’re real; they are real now, words spoken like an incantation, a Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary shouted into the mirror of American politics, repeated until they appear as apparitions behind you to destroy you and him and your children and America.
On the campaign trail, Casey DeSantis often jokes that she tells her husband if the media is not attacking him, he’s not doing a good job. When I ask DeSantis supporters if they are concerned about criticisms of DeSantis, they tell me the same — if the liberal media is mocking him, attacking him, he’s doing the right thing.
But DeSantis has been the butt of a lot of jokes from all sides, not just the media. Trump calls him DeSanctimonious. On X, formerly known as Twitter, people call him DeNazi. Sustaining slings and arrows on all fronts, it’s a lonely kingdom DeSantis has created for himself. To hear him tell it, he’s a righteous ruler on his throne in Florida, alone, fighting the demons of America, who are all around, except, of course, the good men and women who are afraid, the ones who believe he’ll keep them safe.
DeSantis is counting on the fact that there are enough Americans who will see, as he does, a dark and threatening world that needs to be handled with force.
WHEN I TALK TO OTHER JOURNALISTS, they seem to think that DeSantis cannot make it. That this is a foregone conclusion for them. But it’s harder for me to see it from such a distance. The receptionist at my gynecologist’s office wears a DeSantis sticker. At events, I see a secretary at my kid’s school, the parents of my daughter’s friend, my ex-husband’s co-worker, and my neighbor who avoids making eye contact with me — but here they all are applauding, cheering, when DeSantis mentions shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and shooting people coming in from Mexico on sight.
Ron DeSantis isn’t a joke here in Iowa. And everyone seems reluctant to talk about Trump. The indictments have cast the former president’s future into uncertainty. Do they believe it? Do they think he’s innocent? A lot of people shrug and refuse to answer. Barnett, the voter I met in Cedar Rapids, thinks Trump lied, but so what. All politicians lie.
That’s the closest I hear to a full-throated defense of Trump.
Yet Trump’s signs are all over the state, stuck in corn and soy fields — hand-painted wooden signs that declare Iowa Trump Country. He looms over every conversation about politics. Trump doesn’t have to be in the room to command the room. Even at DeSantis rallies and fundraisers, he’s there on red hats and on the minds of people wondering if DeSantis can be the next Trump.
Trump doesn’t have to do meet-and-greets and shake hands at fairgrounds to know he has Iowa in a death grip. While DeSantis has promised to travel to all of Iowa’s 99 counties (the full Grassley) and Pence vowed he’d also campaign aggressively in the state (he hasn’t held many events this summer), Trump isn’t playing that game, turning down invitations to speak at events and holding competing events.
This cycle, unlike 2015’s, no one has outpolled Trump. DeSantis is the closest. And at first he seemed like he was Trump — leaning heavily on the vitriolic rhetoric — but younger and more effective.
And Iowans seem to like him. They’re trying to like him. They show up to his rallies and talk in whispers about Trump’s looming legal troubles and repeat conspiracies that the liberals would never allow an election with Trump in it to be fair enough. But in the end, he’s still the Florida-brand knockoff of whatever Republican voters truly want. And he’s a lot less fun. A crowd that applauds DeSantis will still turn and laugh at him the moment Trump makes him the butt of a joke.
IT’S HOT, TOO, AT THE TOWN HALL AT THE Revelton Distillery in Osceola on the evening of Aug. 3, DeSantis’ final stop on the first day of his 99-county tour. The building is built like a barn with a high-pitched ceiling, and the air conditioning struggles to keep up with the swarm of people. Instead of waving the “DeSantis for President” signs in the air, women fan themselves with them trying to stay cool. Despite the alcohol being served at the cash bar, the crowd is subdued. The most enthusiastic audience member, Denny Lammers, a retiree, claps and shouts that DeSantis should make Reynolds his number two. This draws a bigger applause line from the audience than DeSantis’ crack about Faucism.
Lammers supports DeSantis and likes what he did in Florida to keep it open during the shutdowns. He likes that Iowa stayed open, too. He doesn’t agree with DeSantis about using violence to control the southern border but thinks something should be done. “America is out of control,” he says.
Yet, Lammers tells me that DeSantis’ walk-on song should be “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones. He explains that Iowans probably don’t really want DeSantis, but he’s what we need. We need to move away from “the past” is what Lammers says. And when I ask if he means Trump, he tells me he voted for Trump, he’ll vote for Trump again if he’s the nominee, but that our country needs to “move on.”
Dick Hines, an 80-year-old farmer who still works every day, loves DeSantis and hopes he goes all the way. He stands up at the town hall and talks about losing his wife to cancer five years ago and how his son is battling cancer now, the farm is his legacy, the land and the equipment are all he has left, and it’s no small thing. Fourteen million in assets, but he worries about green energy and ethanol.
When DeSantis answers, he skips over Hines’ story, skips over the cancer, and the sadness, and goes straight to his line on ethanol. Which is basically that we keep it and give people a choice.
Later, I ask Hines about what he thinks of DeSantis, and he talks to me for 40 minutes, explaining how he spent months sitting by his wife’s side as she died five years ago. Hines supports DeSantis. But it’s clear, more than supporting DeSantis, he wants to be seen and heard. The people here want someone who understands them, or at least pretends to. Someone who talks with them, not at them.
ON AUG. 5, DESANTIS IS BACK in Iowa, at Attorney General Brenna Bird’s First Annual Big Barn Bash at the Dallas County Fairgrounds. His campaign sends an email noting that DeSantis has been to Iowa five times since the relaunch. He’s visited 38 counties. And there is also a Times/Siena poll that shows that Trump is below 50 percent among likely caucus goers, so maybe there is a chance, the campaign is hoping. Maybe a small chance.
DeSantis is at a pie auction, and Brenna Bird’s cherry pie goes for $700. Some of the pies, the auctioneer, notes are from the Amish, purchased by donors for the auction. It’s unclear if the Amish, a religious group that as a rule stays out of national and local politics and are strident pacifists, know that their pies are being used to support a politician — one who supports sending troops to the southern border.
The auctioneer rambles, selling gooseberry pie, crinkle custard, a patriotic berry pie, and even a raspberry pie from Gov. Reynolds. While he calls out for bids, people eat a pasta salad laden with Miracle Whip, strawberry fluff (a dessert salad made of Cool Whip, Jell-o, and strawberries), mashed potatoes with the consistency of wet cardboard, and fried chicken with a thin crispy layer that has no flavor and peels away to congealed grease lying thick on the white meat.
DeSantis is the guest of honor at this event. He and his wife Casey come in and talk to the tables with the big-ticket donors, then pile plastic plates with food and sit down. I’m one table away from them, and I watch as they pick through the food, thinking that their reticence is the most relatable thing about them. I eat a little, immediately feeling the pang of a stomachache settling in. Casey, after a few bites, politely covers her plate with a napkin, and smiling as only a former TV-news anchor can, makes small talk with the mother holding a newborn. DeSantis, meanwhile, cuts at his fried chicken with a plastic knife and fork. After a few bites, he picks up a chicken breast and takes a bite, then pieces of chicken fall from his mouth. He puts the chicken down and continues with the plastic knife and fork as if no one has seen.
A few minutes later, he’s onstage. He’s running his lines like a polished machine now. He wants to send Biden to his basement in Delaware [pause for laughter]. He’s going to protect the southern border. And he shipped migrants to Martha’s Vineyard [pause for applause]. He’s added a new bit to his routine where he tells a story about his son loving Field of Dreams. “Is this heaven?” His son asks.
“No,” DeSantis replies. “It’s Iowa.”
Nine days later, on Aug. 12, before DeSantis sits down to talk to Iowa’s governor in a friendly “fair-side chat” that she’s hosting with all the GOP contenders (except Trump, who refused), a plane buzzes over the crowd carrying the banner, “Be likable, Ron!” a reference to Trump’s advice to DeSantis during his run for governor of Florida. When DeSantis finally begins to speak, he’s interrupted by cowbells and chants from protesters, prompting the governor to declare that people needed to be “Iowa nice.”
After, as DeSantis makes his way through the crowds, flipping pork chops at the pork tent, riding bumper cars with his kids, shaking hands, and grabbing selfies, he is shadowed by people wearing pro-Trump shirts and carrying signs that falsely declare that Trump was a “back-to-back Iowa champ.”
