On the vote in Iowa: fear. Tension. Hopelessness.

Presidential elections traditionally speak of future aspirations and offer a vision of a better future, the hope and change of Barack Obama or the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush. But this year, before even a single vote has been cast, a much darker sentiment has taken over.

Across Iowa, as the first nominating contest approaches Monday, voters are plowing through snowy streets to listen to candidates, mingle at campaign events and casually talk about the prospect of World War III, civil unrest and a country falling apart at the seams .

Four years ago, voters worried about a spiraling pandemic, economic uncertainty and national protests. Now, in the first presidential election since the siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, those concerns have metastasized into a grimmer, more existential fear about the foundations of the American experiment.

“There's a sense now in Iowa that we're sleepwalking into a nightmare and there's nothing we can do about it,” said Doug Gross, a Republican lawyer who has been involved in Iowa politics for nearly four decades and ran for governor in Iowa. 2002 and plans to support Nikki Haley in the state caucuses on Monday. “In Iowa, life is not lived in extremes, except through the weather, and yet they still experience this dramatic sense of inevitable doom.”

Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican primary race, is bouncing from the courtroom to the campaign trail, peppering his rhetoric with ominous threats of retaliation and suggestions of dictatorial tendencies. President Biden condemns political violence and argues that if he loses, democracy itself could falter.

Bill Bradley, 80, who served as a New Jersey senator for 18 years, recalled running for Democratic presidential nomination in 2000 and spending more than 75 days in Iowa during his bid. “We debated health care and taxes, which is fair,” he said, adding, “Civil war? No. Third World War? No no no.”

This presidential race, he said, is “a moment unlike any election in my lifetime.”

He added that the 1968 race for the White House “was a pretty tough election, but Humphrey versus Nixon wasn't exactly Trump versus Biden. The difference is so stark in terms of American values ​​and in terms of what the future will be.”

On Thursday, as snow piled up in the parking lot, farmers and ranchers in a ballroom in the Des Moines suburb of Altoona took part in a well-worn political tradition: listening to pitches from Republican presidential candidates eager to woo them.

But among the speeches and campaign promises, there was a once-unimaginable undercurrent in a state that prides itself on being a heartland of America's citizenry.

“There's going to be a civil war — I'm convinced,” said Mark Binns, who had heard earlier that morning from two Republican candidates, Ms. Haley and Ron DeSantis.

Mr. Binns was hardly the picture of a radical: He is a 65-year-old chemical engineer who lives in Kentucky and was in town for the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit. He voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but is unsure who he will vote for this year.

He's even considering avoiding election season altogether. Fearing the possibility of political violence, Mr Binns is considering going to Brazil in November 2024.

“Quite literally, I am allowed to leave the country that week,” Mr Binns said. “The division is too great.”

The fear expressed by Mr Binns and other voters is twofold, although each side blames the other for causing it.

Democrats worry that a second Trump administration could plunge the country into chaos, trample constitutional rights and destroy the legitimacy of elections. Mr. Trump and his supporters falsely claim that the previous election was stolen, that the Jan. 6 riot was not an insurrection and that the Biden administration has used the legal system to prosecute its political opponents. In the years since the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump and both mainstream and fringe elements of the conservative media have started a steady drumbeat of these lies, an attempt to upend the January 6 narrative and undermine the legitimacy of to undermine the government. Biden administration.

The result is a disorienting frenzy of facts and untruths revolving around issues once considered sacrosanct in public life. Recent polls show Americans taking a bleaker view of the future and showing a new openness to political violence.

Just over a third of voters in a Wall Street Journal/NORC questionnaire said in November that the American dream is still true, down significantly from the 53 percent who said so in 2012. October survey According to the Public Religion Research Institute, nearly a quarter of Americans agreed that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save our country” — an all-time high in the poll. In the first weeks of 2024, a host of officials — politicians, judges, election administrators — have withstood threats and intimidation, including bomb threats at state capitols, hoax calls to police and a barrage of violent phone calls, mail and emails.

“What will happen in the next election?” Michelle Obama, the former first lady, said this in a recent podcast. “I'm terrified of what could happen. We cannot take this democracy for granted. And sometimes I worry that that is the case. Those are the things that keep me going.”

As politicians, commentators and voters reach for historical analogies, one of the darkest chapters in American history is evoked again and again: the period leading up to the Civil War. Some see a parallel in the clash between two Americas – now not North and South, but Red and Blue.

Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, mentioned the Civil War during his speech as he withdrew from the presidential race on Wednesday and questioned whether Americans would support democratic values. He told the story of Benjamin Franklin, who was asked by a woman in Philadelphia what kind of government the founding fathers had given the country.

“He said to the woman, 'A republic, if you can keep it,'” Christie told New Hampshire voters. “Benjamin Franklin's words have never been as relevant in America as they are today.”

David Blight, a historian at Yale University, is amazed at the way his once obscure academic specialty in the Civil War has become a topic of current debate: In recent months he has been repeatedly asked to speak and write about whether that period of struggle has lessons for today.

Mr. Blight sees the comparisons. “It's not the 1850s, but there are a lot of similarities,” he said. “When are there times when the division is so terrible that we feel like we are losing it entirely? When do the parts tear us apart in a way that makes us fear for the entire enterprise of this ideal? And we are in one of those cases, there is no doubt about it.”

The fears come despite what appears on paper to be national stability. Inflation has fallen, unemployment has returned to pre-pandemic levels and layoffs remain at record lows. The Federal Reserve plans to cut interest rates several times in the coming year.

The incumbent president and his Republican challengers also speak optimistically about the future. Mr. Biden is promoting economic progress under his administration. Ms. Haley promises to cut federal spending, expand mental health care and rebuild America's image abroad. And Mr. DeSantis says he will cut taxes, curb illegal immigration and crack down on China.

Still, at events in Iowa in the week before the caucuses, voters talked about issues far beyond the standard political debates about the economy, foreign policy, health care and education. Politicians, strategists and voters from both parties described an inescapable sense of foreboding, a sense that something could go dangerously wrong.

When Vivek Ramaswamy appealed to voters at an event in Waukee on Wednesday afternoon, one of the first comments praised the candidate's anti-interventionist approach to foreign policy and brought up the potential of World War III — “that's a threat to all of us , normal people. said the questioner.

To Maria Maher, who sat listening in the back of the restaurant with her youngest son, those kinds of catastrophic thoughts didn't sound shocking. Trump's 2020 defeat convinced her that the country's democratic system was broken and that the government was a “criminal operation.” Mrs Maher, who has a small farm, had raised and homeschooled her nine children on her own after her husband died about 12 years ago following a difficult battle with cancer.

“Voting is a joke, and it is – what is it called again – fraud because of the machines,” said Ms Maher, 62, who was deciding whether to vote for Mr Trump or Mr Ramaswamy. “If we get another phony president like Biden, we will come through the back door. We are going to circumvent the power of the president.”

Dave Loeback, a former congressman and political science professor, said he was concerned about political violence, even in places like Iowa. He was shocked by the divisions in school board elections in his small town of Mount Vernon, Iowa.

“Fear drives both sides, and it can drive both sides to their limits,” Mr. Loeback said. “This is not a good situation.”

For some voters, part of the hopelessness stems from the candidates themselves. It appears that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are headed for an election rematch, despite polls showing both men still deeply unpopular among large swathes of Americans.

As Terry Snyder, a photographer, stood at the bar in an Irish pub on a snowy Tuesday morning in Iowa, she said she was more worried about the outcome of this election than any other election in her life. Ms. Snyder, 70, had ridden through the storm to hear Ms. Haley, but doubted the former South Carolina governor could win the Republican nomination.

Trump was not an option, she said: “He is a dictator. And I don't like that aspect.”

But Ms. Snyder said she was no less concerned about an America that would remain under Biden's leadership for four more years.

Her three grandchildren are now teenagers, and if Biden is re-elected, she said, she worries about their future and a liberal culture that she fears will police what they can say. “I fear that they will be deprived of many of the rights that we have always enjoyed,” she said.