Saturday night was the annual homecoming dance in Urbandale, a suburb of Des Moines. (Theme: Straight Outta Iowa.) Just before the 8 P.M. start time, teen-age girls wearing dresses—mostly short and sparkly—and boys wearing suits gathered outside the high school’s main entrance, waiting to be let into the cafeteria.

But this was not your average high school dance. This was Iowa, five months before the caucuses. The floodlights of a CNN truck illuminated the scene. A campaign bus, its blue sides emblazoned with “Trump: #Make America Great Again!” in white letters, sat at the edge of the parking lot. Kids posed for pictures on a makeshift stage where, minutes earlier, the man himself had stood, addressing a crowd of about five hundred high-schoolers and more than a thousand adults who had shown up to see the candidate.

Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, was there at the invitation of Anne La Pietra’s senior Advanced Placement Government class.

“Honestly, it started as a joke,” La Pietra said. “I heard about a school that tried to invite Tom Hanks, and I mentioned it that day in class. I was like, ‘What if we got a presidential candidate here?’ We’re Iowa, it could happen.”

Her students started tweeting, e-mailing, calling, writing letters, sidewalk chalking outside candidates’ Iowa offices, asking, “Will you come to homecoming?” in multi-colored pleas.

“We tried to get every party, every candidate,” La Pietra said. “We thought we’d have better luck getting a smaller candidate, but we got the big one.”

(Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Presidential candidate, later tweeted, “Dear Urbandale HS students: Sorry I can’t make the #UHSPresiDance! Hope you have fun at homecoming and I’d love to visit your school soon.” The tweet was favorited more than fourteen hundred times.)

This being high school, La Pietra heard the good news in the usual way: she was called to the office. There, a senior Trump official told her that Trump would love to come to homecoming. That was on Wednesday, the day of the second Republican debate. The students found out two days later, at homecoming coronation.

“It’s awesome for me as a government teacher, because I’ve never seen them this excited about government. Now for the rest of the year, they’re going to be more engaged,” La Pietra said. “We told everyone, whether you support him, whether you don’t support him, it’s fine either way. Just hear what he has to say in person, because that’s so rare. Most people across the country don’t get to have that opportunity. So you do. Hear him out. Then you decide. Hate him, love him, whatever you want to do.”

Urbandale, population forty-three thousand, is a mostly middle-class place, with pockets of wealth and higher-than-average home prices. Like much of Iowa, it’s mostly white, but also has a growing Hispanic population. Urbandale High is the only high school in the district. Twenty-one per cent of the school’s twelve hundred and sixty-seven students are minorities. More than twenty-five per cent are from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

As the sun set, Trump took the stage, sounding a bit like somebody’s uncle, eager to connect with the young folk, but shaky on the lingo.

“First of all, I have to congratulate the J-Hawks,” he said. “You had a big night last night, right? It was triple overtime, and then you broke ’em down. Is that what happened?”

He congratulated La Pietra, whom he called Annie, and the school’s principal. (“I said, ‘Come to New York, run a school in New York. Let’s see how you do with that.’ That’s not so easy, right?”) He thanked Tana Goertz, a former star of “The Apprentice,” who co-chairs his campaign here.

“How are we doing in Iowa?” Trump asked, and then answered his own question: “We’re killing it.” (In fact, according to the latest polls, Trump maintains a sizable lead over the other Republican candidates.)

He turned his attention to the students, whom he described as, “So young. So young and beautiful and attractive.”

He couldn’t help himself from pointing out, “I get millions of dollars to speak, and I’m doing this for nothing.”

“You represent the future,” he told the students, before warning them to stay away from alcohol and drugs and, if they can help it, cigarettes. “Who’s avoiding cigarettes? Who smokes? Raise your hand.”

He added earnestly, “You just have to follow your heart and you’ll be successful. And it may not be pure monetary success, because I know people that are the wealthiest people in the world and they’re not happy.”

Some dance-attendees skipped the hoopla altogether, arriving only after Trump left. Others said that they wanted his picture, but they supported Bernie Sanders for President. During a question-and-answer session, one student asked Trump whether he would consider appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet.

Trump answered, “Would I consider putting a Muslim-American in my Cabinet? Absolutely, no problem with that. O.K.?”

A young woman then asked about his frequent misogynistic comments.

“I think women are the greatest,” Trump said. “I think they’re superior to men. Women. No, let me change that. I think they’re far superior to men. Women are—they’re great. And I will take care of women’s health issues.” After a slight detour into criticizing his Republican opponent Jeb Bush’s policies on women, Trump finished by saying, “I have a great respect for women. As I say, I cherish women and they are the greatest. O.K.?”

Trump then signed autographs and posed with the homecoming king and queen in their crowns, high-fiving the king. Several adults in the crowd said that they appreciated the way he tailored the speech to the students, rather than making the usual canned campaign-stop remarks.

In the two years leading up to any Presidential election, most Iowans need not seek out a candidate to see one. Candidates show up at local restaurants and gas stations, at college football games, at the State Fair. Their ads saturate evening TV. (Though La Pietra said that her students largely avoid this annoyance because they watch everything on Netflix.) This year, with so many candidates trying to distinguish themselves from the pack, some adults are experiencing fatigue. But Trump’s appeal to a teen-age audience seemed to breathe new life into the act.

For those students who will be eighteen come November, 2016, La Pietra said, “They saw that we can make a difference in government. We can get attention not just at the local level but nationally. I’d bet all of them will go vote next year.” (She declined to say for whom.)

As the crowd dispersed, Chaz Nell and Erik Ly, both fourteen-year-old freshmen, took turns posing at the lectern, with hands raised, Nixon-like, in a double “V.”

Nell wore a black suit, a boutonnière in his lapel, and a tie printed with pictures of hundred-dollar bills.

“He signed my tie,” he said giddily, holding it forth as he rattled off a list of great Presidents who, like Trump, were also businessmen.

Ly’s parents are diehard Hillary Clinton supporters. “Ours is a house divided,” he said. He admitted that he fell for Obama’s charms the first time around (when he was seven), but he said that now he is solidly for Trump. The latter-day Alex P. Keaton went on to describe in impassioned detail what he sees as the failures of the Democratic Party.

“Look at the world around us. Radical Islam is on the rise. ISIS is sawing people’s heads off. Putin’s expanding into Crimea. China’s building up their military and hacking our computers. And, frankly, our allies in the Middle East have requested help from us to help them defeat ISIS. Obama did nothing to help them, and now they’re turning to Vladimir Putin for help. He’s trying to grow Russia’s influence, he’s trying to replace us as a world power. This is the disaster of the Obama foreign policy: leading from behind.”

It was suggested that Erik Ly might make a great running mate for Donald Trump.

“The only thing keeping Erik from being president,” Nell said, “is his age and his clip-on tie.”