Storm that could bring as much as six inches of snow may stall momentum of insurgent campaigns as candidates make final push across Hawkeye State

In the end, the direction of American politics may all come down to a snowstorm.



Months of fierce campaigning have left both party leadership races too close to call in Iowa as the rural state prepares to become the first, and most influential, to pick candidates for November’s presidential election.

Opinion polls suggest a narrow lead for Donald Trump among Republicans and a near dead-heat between rival Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders ahead of the caucuses on Monday evening.

Yet Trump and Sanders are dependent on support from younger voters and anti-establishment types who tend to turn up less reliably than the party faithful backing Clinton and the more traditional Republicans.

A last-minute gamble by Trump to boycott the final Republican television debate on Thursday night has introduced further uncertainty by lifting the visibility of his closest challengers, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

“Will I get more votes? Will I get less votes?” said Trump as he instead appeared at a rival rally barely three miles up the road from the main debate in Des Moines on Thursday night. “Nobody knows. Who the hell knows?”

What all campaigns and pundits can agree upon is that turnout will be key.

“It’s quite simple,” said Sanders as he made a final rallying plea to volunteers at campaign headquarters in Des Moines before hitting the road for a weekend of frantic rallies.



“If the voter turnout is high, we’re going to win. If turnout is low, we are going to be struggling.”

Fourteen presidential hopefuls have spent all month dashing from bowling alleys and shooting ranges to high schools and farm museums in pursuit of the elusive caucus-goers needed to get their 2016 presidential race off to a winning start.

By Monday, Cruz aims to have visited all 99 counties in the state during the campaign, a feat nicknamed the “full Grassley” after the Iowa senator who pioneered such high-intensity ground game tactics. Mike Huckabee, the state’s Republican winner in 2008, will have made 150 campaign stops this January alone, often in front of barely half a dozen supporters.

But visiting voters where they live is not the same as getting them to come out for you. Only a small fraction of Iowans tend to vote in party caucuses, and uncertainty over turnout will be compounded on Monday night by a major storm due to sweep in from the west and dump 6in of snow on the state by Tuesday.

Iowans are made of sterner stuff than the Washington DC residents still paralysed by the blizzard of a week ago, but roads here are as endless as they are treacherous. A traffic accident recently claimed the life of a young campaign worker for former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and a smaller snowstorm last Monday left ditches across the state littered with cars that had skidded off into the fields like some strange new crop variety.

The vicissitudes of caucus season are a source of private frustration for candidates, many of whom believe this state of corn and hogs and evangelical Christians has undue influence because of its privileged spot at the outset of the lengthy primary process – and can skew selection toward candidates who are unrepresentative of the national mood.

Clinton, who lost Iowa to Obama in 2008, was particularly scathing about the caucus system in a recently disclosed email to her adviser Sidney Blumenthal, in which she claimed the process produced “creatures of the parties’ extremes”.

Judging from yard signs and bumper stickers alone, there is certainly surging enthusiasm in the state right now for candidates like Sanders the self-professed socialist and Trump the rightwing demagogue, promising to challenge those who they claim are creatures of the establishment.

Their campaign messages could not be more different, but they both argue that the huge crowds they are drawing at rallies across Iowa and the country prove these angry voters are representative of a new national mood and more than determined enough to show up and vote.

“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” Sanders told one of many packed rallies he has hosted across the state’s community halls and shopping malls this week.

The increasingly rancorous tone of the fight in both parties suggests the anti-establishment wave may reflect more than just the oddities of Iowa.

One sign that the party system itself is fraying at the edges is the debate process. What was meant to be a simple matter of coordination between officials and television hosts has descended into chaos.

The Democratic National Committee is accused of rigging the process to favour Clinton by staging too few debates and scheduling them on holiday weekends, late on a Friday, or directly after big sporting events. The Republican National Committee meanwhile has struggled to find a stage big enough to hold an excessive number of candidates.

On Thursday, not only did Trump attend a rival event in Des Moines, but he was joined by evangelical favourites Rick Santorum (who actually won in Iowa in 2012) and former Arkansas governor Huckabee, who had been relegated to the “undercard” debate earlier in the evening due to their low poll numbers.

Democrats may also enjoy a proliferation of unsanctioned debates. The rattled Clinton team requested an impromptu addition to what had been a deliberately sparse official schedule, just before the New Hampshire primary on 8 February.

Sanders, who served as an independent senator before surprising many by seeking the Democratic nomination, has agreed to the request but only if Clinton also calls on the party to arrange more debates later in the year too.

Loyalty to the party hierarchy is similarly thin on the conservative fringe, where frontrunners Trump and Cruz are almost universally loathed by Republican leaders in Washington.

“If you guys ask one more mean question, I might have to leave the stage,” threatened Cruz on Thursday’s televised debate when he became the focus of scrutiny in Trump’s absence.

But perhaps the clearest sign that traditional party boundaries are breaking down on the wide-open prairies of Iowa came last week when former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg let it be known that he would consider running as an independent third-party candidate if the choice in November ended up being between Sanders and Trump.

Though Sanders – the anti-Wall Street firebrand – would love nothing more than to run against two New York billionaires, the scenario remains an unlikely one. Clinton is still well ahead in national polling and confident of her ability to beat Sanders in states where he is less well known, particularly among minority voters in the south.

But a repeat defeat for the former of secretary of state on Monday risks setting off a chain reaction that could upset this carefully mapped-out battle plan. Her Vermont challenger is well ahead in New Hampshire, the next state to vote, and close to receiving a record 3m small donations from supporters who could finance an insurgency that lasts many months to come. Echoes abound of eight years ago, when Barack Obama came from nowhere to win in Iowa and ultimately beat Clinton to the nomination.

Were this to happen, it is even possible that Vice-President Joe Biden could be urged to reconsider his decision not to run in 2016 – raising the uncharted prospect of Biden and Bloomberg competing to peel off disaffected moderates from Trump and Sanders and rebuilding the political centre ground with or without the support of Iowans.

Such scenarios remain strictly hypothetical right now, but a loss for Sanders or Trump on Monday would not be the end of the matter either. These movements may begin at the margins but have been built around a deep loathing for their adopted parties which is unlikely to dissipate overnight and could generate tension for years to come.

An all-out media and ‘get-out-the-caucus’ blitz

Instead, the next 48 hours are due to see some of the most intense campaigning Iowa has ever seen as both parties brace for upset.

Jeb Bush has spent $80m of an estimated $120m war chest flooding the airwaves with negative advertising to target the outsiders. Though Clinton took a brief break to raise money of her own at a gathering of investment managers in Philadelphia, she has been as relentless as Sanders in covering the ground and meeting as many potential votersas possible between now and caucus night.

Iowans are few and far between in a state roughly the size of England and Wales, though, and the Clinton battle bus has run up to an hour and a half late as it rattles between far-flung towns.

But the transport headaches for candidates are nothing compared with the logistical challenges of converting supporters into caucus attendees – especially if the roads are slick with snow.



Campaigns are throwing everything they have into this “get out the caucus”, or GOTC, activity, which ranges from organising transport to hanging signs on doors telling people where their caucus meeting is being held. For some first-timers, the complexity of the caucuses can be daunting, but really, on the night, it boils down to Republican votes cast on paper and Democratic supporters physically standing in groups to register their support for their favourite.

How the Iowa caucuses work: a confusing election process explained Read more

Typically, each political party has close to 600,000 registered voters, but in most election years barely one in five actually show up on caucus night. In 2008, Democratic turnout notably spiked to 39% amid the excitement generated by the Obama candidacy.

With turnout set to be the determining factor, all campaigns are spending a lot of time scrutinising weather forecasts to see what time that storm will roll in on Monday night.

Sanders loyalists like to claim his surge can continue without a win here, but few dispute the stakes in Iowa could not be higher for him. “For the sake of our kids, for the sake of our country, we cannot fail,” the Vermont senator told a crowd of 900 volunteers in Fairfield on Thursday. If his seemingly passionate supporters don’t bother to turn up in droves for the revolution, it’s game over.