This again? In Frozen Iowa, the press corps ponders a campaign
Maybe it was the apocalyptically cold weather, with wind chills down to minus 43 Fahrenheit. Or the depleted field of candidates and a fear-ridden electorate that fears the first new elections since the rematch of Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson in 1956.
For whatever reason, the usual media circus that accompanies the Iowa caucuses has felt literally and spiritually smaller this year.
The number of recognized journalists dropped to 1,200, from 2,600 four years ago. Some big TV stars stayed home. The lobby bar of the Des Moines Marriott Downtown, once a bustling, gossip-drenched hub of reporters, anchors and agents from Washington and Manhattan, was a ghost town late Saturday night. The weakened atmosphere could best be summed up with a T-shirt for sale in the hotel gift shop:
“Elections 2024: Welp, I guess we're doing this again.”
Between low voter interest, lower debate ratings, and an electoral advantage for Donald J. Trump that has undermined much of the usual tension, signs of media malaise had already emerged before last week's snowstorm left 2 feet of snow on Des Moines dumped.
During a CNN debate, Steve Peoples of The Associated Press noted that the spin room — usually a hothouse of jostling spokespeople — was “basically empty” except for Griff IIa crazy bulldog mascot “whose face tells the story of this campaign.” Dave Weigel, a trail warrior reporting for Semafor, called the caucus a “cold and miserable trudge to Trump's inevitable victory in Iowa.” Jonathan Martin, another veteran correspondent, wrote about “this hopeless excuse of a presidential primary.”
I called Mr. Martin, a columnist at Politico, on Sunday for his take on the Iowa media scene. It turned out he was already back in Washington.
“I just left,” he said, laughing.
Mr. Martin, who previously worked as a correspondent at The New York Times, spent a week in Iowa but returned home when the snowstorm hit and campaigns canceled many of their events. “There are certainly storylines that matter, but there are still so many fewer candidates in the race” than in 2020, he said. “And Trump's advantage is significantly greater than that of previous frontrunners.” For the first time in his long career, he plans to watch the caucus results somewhere other than Iowa.
Some TV networks have also reduced their footprint. “Morning Joe,” the MSNBC mainstay that typically moves to Iowa and New Hampshire in election years, is skipping both states. ABC's David Muir, who reported from Iowa on the 2020 caucus night, anchors in New York on Monday. Norah O'Donnell planned to be in Des Moines, but CBS decided to keep her in Washington after weather disrupted the candidates' plans.
On Saturday, as temperatures dropped below zero, almost every candidate event was canceled. So reporters headed to a West Des Moines office park for a Ron DeSantis appearance, betting that the 10-minute drive from downtown would be short enough not to endanger anyone's life. (The occasional sight of a trailer with a sheared blade stranded on the highway suggested otherwise.)
Inside, Bob Vander Plaats, an evangelical leader from Iowa, rejected the tough polls for his candidate. “The media will not select our caucus winner,” he shouted. “you select our caucus winner!” Unfortunately, a healthy portion of the crowd were members of the news media. If there were Iowans in the room, they were hard to find: A journalist looking for local color approached a visitor who turned out to be an editor at The Times.
News networks still use embeds, which follow candidates across the country, and dozens of TV journalists were in Iowa to cover the caucus. But while elections are usually a good time for ratings and revenue — and star-making opportunities for plucky journalists assigned to an upstart candidate — this year's circumstances are testing even that truth.
The recent Republican primaries, which Trump boycotted, were among the lowest-rated debates in history. Networks are under economic pressure, NBC News just announced dozens of layoffs – and some journalists are wondering whether Trump's legal entanglements will be more decisive than the events on the track.
“I watch the TV and half the time it's legal experts talking about Trump, not the reporters in Iowa talking about Iowa,” said Mr. Weigel of Semafor, as he nursed a rye manhattan at a bar on Saturday evening in Des Moines. “We have reporters out here in unhealthy conditions. I'm thinking, 'I just watched your producer risk hypothermia to see Ron DeSantis. Put down it on!'”
Whether candidates' actions can influence voters is another question. With the increasingly nationalized nature of presidential politics and the rise of social media, Trump is favored to score an easy victory on Monday despite spending far less time in Iowa than his rivals.
“Republican voters are asking what they saw on Fox News the night before,” said Pat Rynard, an Iowa journalist who oversees political reporting for Courier Newsroom, an online site. “There are a lot fewer Iowa-specific questions, or even questions that specifically relate to their own lives or their own jobs. What people are most excited about is what popped up in their Facebook feed.”
Mr. Rynard, whose website Iowa Starting Line was a popular campaign campaign in 2020, said he expected voter turnout to be lower on Monday regardless of the weather. This year's caucus, he said, “just wasn't that interesting or dynamic.”
The same can be said about the reporters' social scene. Four years ago, Washington doyenne Tammy Haddad imported her A-list charity jamboree from Georgetown to Des Moines and called it the Snowflake Garden Brunch. This time she opted out. “A Below-Zero Garden Brunch doesn't have the same vibe,” she wrote in a text message.
Indeed, a crowd showed up at the newly renovated Hotel Fort Des Moines, the headquarters of the Trump campaign team and an assortment of MAGA semi-celebrities like Kari Lake, the former Arizona gubernatorial candidate. Trump aides gathered nightly in the Edison bulb atmosphere of the hotel's cocktail bar, In Confidence, although the place for a speakeasy imposed many rules: A bartender forbade revelers from borrowing a stool from a completely empty table. So much for Iowa Nice.
As for the Marriott lobby, While the sighting of Mitt Romney with his own wheeled bag in 2012 was considered a major event, the usual crowd failed to materialize. Vanity fair once described the bar as “ideal for seeing if there is someone more important or attractive sitting behind the person you are talking to.” This weekend, Josh Dawsey of The Washington Post was heard calling it “dying.”
On Sunday evening, with the caucus just hours away, a handful of journalists lingered over a beer. By midnight it had mostly emptied out.