NEVADA, Iowa -- Ben Sasse wanted to be perfectly clear about what he was doing in Iowa smack dab in the dead of summer.

And it's not what you're thinking.

"It's not because I'm looking for a job," he told a gathering of about 120 Republicans inside a modest reception and catering hall on Friday evening. "It's because I'm paying back a debt."

Last fall, the freshman Nebraska senator placed a playful wager with a friendly conservative reporter that his home state Cornhuskers would defeat the Iowa Hawkeyes in college football. Nebraska lost. So in order to make good on his word with Independent Journal Review's Benny Johnson, Sasse was tasked with driving an Uber in the state that just happens to kick off the race for the presidency.

It also just so happened that the Story County Republican Party was in need of a speaker for its annual summer fundraising dinner the very same weekend Sasse's daughters were competing in a Des Moines triathlon. The other two headliner options -- Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Iowa's own Sen. Joni Ernst -- weren't available and Sasse's team was the first to respond to the invite.

Call it a convenient coincidence that it worked out this way. Pure happenstance. Almost accidental.

Never mind that the last time Sasse was standing before this many Iowa Republicans he was warning them against casting a ballot for Donald Trump, becoming the first GOP senator to openly disavow the future president. Or that he threatened to bolt the Republican Party if it embraced Trump, and eventually called for a third party candidate to step into the 2016 election, which resulted in a formal rebuke from his state party at home.

Put aside that before arriving in Story County, Sasse quietly held an additional private meeting with former Iowa GOP chairman Matt Strawn. And pay no mind to the fact this Story County dinner in the past has hosted future presidential candidates like Jeb Bush, Rick Perry and Tim Pawlenty.

Ignore Sasse's graceful dodge of a question from CNN's Jake Tapper about challenging Trump in 2020, declining to rule it out. And simply overlook that piloting an Uber is "a good way to get to know a lot of your constituents - most of them sober," which Sasse said himself.

Aside from all of those things, Sasse's trip looks rather innocuous.

To read into this visit any future political intentions is foolish, even ridiculous, say Sasse's allies, several of whom were so sensitive about a story even hinting at a 2020 White House campaign that they refused to be quoted on the record.

"Ben and I have never had any conversation about him running for president," says Mark Fahleson, a former chair of the Nebraska Republican Party and close friend of Sasse's who accompanied him on the Iowa jaunt. "He generally regards the talk as nonsense."

As Sasse likes to remind people, he is just one of five U.S. senators without prior electoral experience.

But it doesn't take a career politician or an Ivy League degree -- Sasse has two -- to know that merely stepping foot inside an early nominating state breeds speculation about ambition, an attribute Sasse certainly possesses.

"Do I think he has other aspirations? Yes," says a Nebraska Republican close to the Sasse circle. "Has anyone in his camp said as much? No."

This operative sees Sasse as slowly being nudged onto the national stage due to the special circumstances surrounding this president's perpetual political vulnerability and his own unique aptitude to blend old-fashioned conservative principles with a cheery, earnest, Boy Scout-like disposition.

The largest elephant in the Republican room right now is that even party stalwarts aren't sure how the Trump story will end and, therefore, it doesn't hurt to have the wheels greased and the gears pumped just in case the president doesn't survive the Russia cloud or passes on running again or becomes so unpopular there's a window or necessity for an alternative. Like a tornado shelter, a back-up plan is discrete and something you may never have to use. But when the storm hits, using it becomes the best decision you've ever made.

Sasse isn't preparing for anything formally. But similarly to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas , who dropped into Iowa in May, his mere presence here -- on the heels of a national tour for his first book -- marks him as part of the GOP's avant garde outside of Trump. He's a deep thinker, with a witty sense of humor; a cultural conservative with a neighborly aw-shucks smile; a Harvard graduate with the air of, well, a genial Uber driver.

He's Ted Cruz, except you're bound to like him.

But Sasse is walking a political tightrope between staying true to his authentic self and adjusting to the popular whims of a Trumpian party. His once blade-sharp critiques of Trump have noticeably dulled. During his nearly 50 minutes of remarks at the dinner here, he never even mentioned the president -- who remains popular with core Republican activists -- by name.

Ivan Moore, who sits on the committee that debated the options for a dinner speaker, says there were some Story County Republicans who "were not as happy as they could be" about the selection of Sasse, given his past remarks about Trump.

"There are a number of people, even on our central committee that questioned it. But who are you going to get? People are busy," Moore says.

Regardless, the county party pre-sold more tickets to this off-election year dinner than any other in history, in part due to the stinging rebuke of Sasse by state party chairman Jeff Kaufmann at a Trump rally in Iowa last month.

Kaufmann called Sasse "sanctimonious" and told a crowd that if Sasse didn't like Trump he should "stay on your side of the Missouri River."

"After the comments of our chairman, it just blew up," says Jeff Ortiz, co-chairman of the Story County GOP. "We doubled sales overnight."

Shortly after the flare-up, Kaufmann phoned Ortiz to smooth things over and convey he wasn't trying to sabotage the event, but for his goal of filling seats and collecting ticket revenue, Ortiz couldn't have been happier.

"Keep it coming," he told Kaufmann. "People love a food fight."

Sasse is not inclined to fight Trump or any Iowan right now. (When Tapper played Sasse the clip of Kaufmann's jab on "State of the Union," Sasse coolly replied, "I don't know who that guy is.")

While Sasse has used Twitter to express his frustrations about Trump's incendiary attacks on the press and what he views as the president's troubling courtship of Russia, he's been carefully restrained in interviews and speeches.

Before this Iowa audience, he instead chose a new, safer foil for the moment: Senate Republican leadership.

In lamenting the GOP's struggle to craft a passable plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, Sasse chided Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's fallback option for a bipartisan fix.

"What does the Republican Party decide to send national signals about over the last 48 to 72 hours? 'Well, if we can't repeal and replace it at once then maybe we should just start working with Democrats to fix Obamacare.' The exact opposite of what we ran on," Sasse said. "It's bad policy, it's bad politics, but it's also just fundamentally deciding that keeping your word is not something you need to take very seriously."

It was one of his most popular assertions of his repertoire.

"I'm about as conservative as they get and I'm really ticked off at the Republicans," says Sheryl Soden, after Sasse's speech wrapped. "I am mad as hell. They've had seven years to work on this. We've got the presidency and now it's like, 'Oh, now we really have to come up with something.'"

Soden squarely and resoundingly blames Congress, not the president, for the stalemate.

"Trump has got his hands full. Congress is screwing it up royally," Soden says. "And I'm about as ticked off at the Republicans as I am the Democrats."

It's a sentiment that Sasse smartly sniffed out beforehand.

It's far riskier to whack your party's president in a room full of loyal, grizzled Republicans than it is on Twitter, which is predominantly consumed by a sympathetic audience of journalists, political insiders and Beltway elites.

Sasse's message to Iowans was a far safer play: A pox on Washington that blames both parties for systemic policy and political deficiencies.

A sampling:



"The center of the world can never actually be Washington D.C."

"Most of the really big problems we face right now really aren't Republican vs. Democrat. Because neither of these parties are actually that interesting."

"None of us should have that much of our identity invested in a political party."

Taken together, the comments contained an independent instinct, serving to downplay his association with the majority party in the land led by a president he declined to vote for. A generous interpretation of these remarks is that Sasse is fundamentally an intellectual who would rather build policy bridges than hurl political bombs.

His critics say it reveals his self-serving ambition, allowing him to separate himself from the difficult fights embroiling Washington. And those critics come from both sides of the spectrum.

"What is he doing in Story County?" asks Mike Kennedy, a 25-year Republican activist from Omaha who is a withering critic of Sasse. "It's like he's nationalized the office. It's the senator above it all, playing on the national stage. I think the visit to Iowa is to test a sounding board for a constitutional alternative. He wants to be the Trump alternative."

Judy King, a progressive from Lincoln, Nebraska, who made the three and a half hour drive to Nevada, essentially agrees: "He's running for president. He's trying to look like an independent kind of guy instead of a Republican or Democrat. He comes off as a cute kid. He really does. But he's kinda lying to us."

As Sasse he went on about health care here, his remarks were measured, blasting Obamacare's decimation of individual insurance markets while at the same time acknowledging the entitlement has "helped a number of particular people, and we shouldn't toss those people off their insurance."

To both Kennedy and King, if Sasse was genuinely attempting to fix health care, he would be back back in Nebraska holding open town hall events with constituents or sponsoring an amendment, the way Cruz did.

The knock against Sasse isn't that he doesn't know or care enough, it's that since he's come to Washington, he's played it safe, avoiding writing legislation and intervening in the biggest policy fights in order to preserve his golden reputation.

For someone with the reputation as a wonk, his tenure thus far has been "a whole lot of style, not a lot of substance," says the Nebraska Republican who is close to Sasse's circle. "His biggest political weakness in getting in front himself. The biggest political mistake is becoming inauthentic. He has to be careful."

An unlikely defender of Sasse's is former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who participated in a series of health care debates with Sasse before he ran for Senate.

Dean calls Sasse a friend and says he grew to respect him because "he's one of the few people on the right that doesn't make stuff up."

"Do I think he's capable of coming to practical solutions? Yes I do, which I don't think of most people in that party. I debate a lot of people on health care and the thing I like about him is you don't get an ideological argument about stuff. You can argue about how health savings accounts work. He understands what they really do and knows they aren't the answer to everything," Dean says. "I would put him in the category of [John] Kasich without the edge. He's a smart guy who mostly knows what he's talking about. He's a practical guy."

The fact that Sasse is viewed as lighter strands of both Kasich and Cruz by different people demonstrates the political risk in trying to be everything to everyone.

Nebraska has a rich history of senators who have loudly and proudly bucked their party's line. Democrat Bob Kerrey ran in a primary against Bill Clinton and was forever a stick in his side. Ben Nelson was moderate Democrat who was a frequent holdout on progressive legislation. And Republican Chuck Hagel famously broke with President George W. Bush on foreign policy and ended up becoming President Barack Obama's third secretary of defense.

In this respect, Sasse is following a long Cornhusker tradition. But over time, each of those senators got in trouble due to shifting political winds.

Hagel, who briefly flirted with his own presidential bid, may offer the best example. He announced his retirement from the Senate in 2007 after his globalist international perspective took a beating from conservatives who were angry about his disloyalty to Bush.

Kennedy says he sees the same type of sentiment that doomed Hagel brewing against Sasse back in Nebraska. When Sasse decided to give up a seat on the Agriculture Committee -- leaving Nebraska with no senator on the committee for the first time in nearly 50 years -- in order to move to the higher-profile Armed Services and Judiciary Committee, it sent ripples across the state.

"It's the Sunday talk show thing. [Ag] is not sexy. He wanted visibility. Ben's all about Ben Sasse," says Kennedy, whose vocal criticism of Sasse have grown so loud they've earned him a call from Sasse's deputy chief of staff.

Sasse faces re-election to his Senate seat in 2020 -- another race he has yet to commit to. That timing, in itself, would make it more difficult for him to mount a presidential bid.

Fahleson says Sasse is close to invincible at home, and that his critics amount to a small bastion of party activists still sore from their preferred candidate's loss in the 2014 primary.

"If he runs for reelection he'll win, he'll have 5 million in the bank. No one will touch him," he says. "There is no one out there."

Kennedy says Sasse has become more polarizing than meets the national eye.

"I think the party people are very skeptical of him. People are sharply divided on him. There are people who think he walks on water and a true deliverer of the conservative message. And then there's the people in my camp, it's almost Never Sasse. We see right through you. You haven't delivered. Spend time writing bills on rewriting Obamacare, not on how to be parents," he says, taking a shot at Sasse's book.

Three years, of course, is an eternity in politics, both local and presidential.