When the email landed in my inbox late last week, forwarded by a friend in Iowa Republican circles, the subject line— Whose side are you on?—caught my attention. “You guys see this?” my friend wrote at the top. “They must be getting scared.”

The message itself was a battle cry issued by the libertarian wing of our state GOP. “The Republican Party, forged in the fire of the American Civil War, is embroiled in a civil war of its own,” it declared. “Conservatives and liberty activists across Iowa must come together and fight to hold our ground.”


The message was signed by Joel Kurtinitis, a member of the Republican Party of Iowa’s State Central Committee, and sent by Liberty Iowa, a libertarian PAC. But I saw A.J. Spiker’s fingerprints all over it.

For more than a year, my Republican friends and the party activists I’ve known for years have been complaining with increasing intensity about Spiker, a 34-year-old realtor and former Ron Paul aide who is the unlikely chair of the Iowa Republican Party. It’s been a crazy kind of war, complete with Facebook unfriending, rumors and name-calling. Now, Republican Gov. Terry Branstad’s political team is finally gearing up to try to get rid of Spiker. At the governor’s big birthday bash with special guest Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Saturday night, Branstad’s reelection campaign team asked donors to sign up to serve as delegates at the county, district and state conventions so they can take back the party leadership.

Judging from Kurtinitis’s email last week, Spiker and his allies know the fight is coming. “They’re going to show up to the caucuses and conventions, and run you out of the party,” the email warns in a bold font. It accuses the party establishment of championing “liberal policies” and engineering “sellouts.”

“But grassroots conservatives were watching,” it says. “And now we are fighting back.”

***

“Never have I seen the Republican Party of Iowa so dysfunctional,” says Bill Dahlsten, who’s been involved in Iowa politics since 1972, organizing congressional races and serving on his county GOP committee. “A.J. Spiker,” Dahlsten tells me, “is like Rome’s later emperors—the personification of self-indulgence.”

In his short, stormy tenure, he has been accused of abandoning traditional Republican causes in order to promote his libertarian agenda; a common refrain these days is that RPI no longer stands for the Republican Party of Iowa but for Rand Paul, Inc. “The current leadership of the Republican Party of Iowa draws parallels with the Obama administration,” says Andy Cable, the Hardin County GOP co-chair: “seriously ill-prepared, incompetent and owing their loyalties to a view that is contrary to what they mislead voters with, being deceitful as to what their real agenda was.” Regardless of what side you’re on—and everyone here is taking sides—the feud comes at a terrible time, with the state’s first open Senate seat in 40 years up for grabs in 2014 and Branstad running for an unprecedented sixth term.

A.J. Spiker is like Rome’s later emperors—the personification of self-indulgence.”

Our internal battle mirrors the national Republican Party’s ideological struggles, as a new generation of assertive Tea Partiers joins forces with the libertarian-minded followers of Rand and Ron Paul to push aside the GOP establishment. But this is Iowa, home of retail politics. The rest of the country may only pay attention once every four years, when caucus season rolls around and we turn into president-makers, but even long after the cameras have returned to their previously scheduled partisan-warfare-in-Washington programming, we’re still at it back here in Des Moines. And the civil war I’ve been watching unfold over the last two years is one that may well have consequences for 2016 and beyond.

Then again, watching it all play out can seem an awful lot like a petty high school squabble.

A.J. Spiker, a veteran of Ron Paul's 2012 campaign, has stirred unrest in his short tenure as Iowa's GOP chair. | Dave Davidson, Prezography.com.

First, the unfriending. Since last spring, Spiker has been going through his Facebook account and deleting longtime Republican activists and even elected officials; some have raised a public stink about it, like Wes Enos, a former member of the State Central Committee, who posted on Facebook: “He dropped me from his list when I refused to support his re-election.”

Spiker has said he’s just purging political contacts from his personal Facebook page, but that’s not how it’s perceived. Many who were cut say it happened right after they had done something Spiker didn’t like. Spiker unfriended me too after my website, the Iowa Republican, posted a video earlier this year of an argument between Spiker’s executive director and some county chairs. We met for a beer summit afterward to try to patch things up. But nothing changed, and he wouldn’t talk to me for this article.

It’s kind of like letting the geeks in high school have control over everything,” one long-time Republican operative complains. “They think they know how it all works, but in reality, they are completely clueless.”

At first, most Republicans I know thought Spiker’s objective was all about advancing the libertarian cause in 2012, one of those every-four-year-problems that would go away as soon as the presidential election was over. Spiker—who rose to power on a wave of anti-Mitt Romney sentiment in Iowa after Romney blew off the state in advance of the 2012 caucuses—had been Ron Paul’s Iowa vice chairman leading up to Paul’s 2012 primary campaign, and he soon used his new position more as a platform to demonstrate his loyalty to Paul than to promote the party as a whole. Thanks largely to his efforts and those of a small cabal of Paul enthusiasts, the Iowa delegation at the 2012 national convention in Tampa delivered 22 of its 28 national delegates for the Texas congressman Paul, even though he had finished third in the state’s caucuses, after former Sen. Rick Santorum and Romney. Many assumed that throwing the state’s delegates to Paul was Spiker’s endgame, but it now appears he was only getting started.

This July, he attempted to postpone next year’s state nominating convention from June 3 to July 12 without consulting Branstad, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) or other top Republicans in the state. With no clear frontrunner in the Senate primary, Spiker said he wanted to ensure that there would be enough time to certify votes before the convention, but the schedule change would have given the Democratic nominee a big head start. The Republican secretary of state called Spiker’s understanding of Iowa’s election law “misleading” and “false,” and rumors flew that it was all about some plot or another to advance a libertarian-leaning candidate.

After an outcry, Spiker relented and moved the convention back to June. Still, five county GOP organizations—including the two largest— called for his resignation. The Polk County GOP accused Spiker of causing “a cloud of distrust and anger” and showing “utter and total disregard—bordering on contempt—for its own candidates and activists.”

The tensions in the party were on display at the Iowa GOP’s Reagan Dinner in October, which featured Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), another Tea Party favorite. David Fischer, Spiker’s co-chair, opened the event by trashing the party’s “old guard.” Spiker followed up by saying, “The one thing the permanent political establishment believes is [that] the dirtiest word one can utter is the word ‘principle.’”

When it was his turn to speak, Governor Branstad chose to take the high road. “We need to capture the spirit of Ronald Reagan,” he said. “He taught us the 11th commandment: Speak no ill of other Republicans.” But the subtext of his remarks was clear, as everyone in the room knew of the escalating feud between Spiker and Branstad, who have sparred over a proposed gas tax, the relevance of the Ames straw poll and fundraising. Last month, when the Associated Press published a (very misleading, in my opinion) article about how Branstad is at odds with the GOP base, Spiker promoted the story on the party’s official Facebook page.

The Facebook wars had gotten even zanier in September when Spiker urged Republicans to “NOT give in to any illegal searches of your car,” a response to a scheduled (and perfectly legal) traffic checkpoint near Des Moines. Spiker managed to turn the whole thing into a pointless days-long controversy that hurt the GOP’s standing with law enforcement and once again pissed off the old-line party establishment. “When the party encourages people to audio and video record the traffic stops and send the state party copies of the tapes,” says Darrell Kearney, who served as the RPI’s finance director from 1999 to 2010, “it makes you think we need some adults running the place for a change.”

Undoubtedly, the Spiker follies have hurt the party’s fundraising as traditional GOP donors stay away in droves. In six of the first nine months of 2013, the Republican Party of Iowa spent more money than it took in—an unheard-of failure. For the entire year, the Iowa GOP is in the black by just over $40,000, according to their Federal Election Commission filings. Part of the reason, my sources tell me, is that Spiker only brings in speakers who adhere to his libertarian philosophy—like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz. And while they’re both big gets , the Iowa GOP has chosen to hold only small-dollar events with each.

Spiker expresses his enthusiasm for libertarian stars on his Facebook page, but some says he's also used Facebook to wage an internal party war.

“It’s kind of like letting the geeks in high school have control over everything,” one long-time Republican operative complains. “They think they know how it all works, but in reality, they are completely clueless.”

***

Here’s the catch about this fight: there’s very little Spiker’s adversaries can do to oust him before his current term expires in January 2015. The 18-seat Republican State Central Committee is dominated by libertarian Republicans who got elected because of the Paul campaign’s strong organizing in 2012. They re-elected Spiker to a second term last year.

If Spiker gets re-elected, some fear he'll somehow use his position to steer caucus votes to Sen. Rand Paul in the 2016 election. | Dave Davidson, Prezography.com.

Should anyone care about this feud outside of Iowa? Does it matter for 2016—and beyond? I think it does. If Spiker gets re-elected, how can any Republican candidate other than Rand Paul—or someone else like him—trust that he’s going to get a fair shake with our state party, the party that, after all, is charged with setting up the first-in-the-nation caucuses and counting the votes? And if you can’t trust the process, why bother to show up?

Craig Robinson is founder and editor-in-chief of the Iowa Republican . He served as political director of the Republican Party of Iowa during the 2008 caucuses and worked on the 2000 caucus campaign of businessman Steve Forbes.