Even in 2023, presidential campaigning isn’t all poll numbers, TV ads, Twitter flame wars, and fundraising emails. Sometimes, the actual human beings running for the job go out in the world and encounter other actual human beings who vote. I spent Saturday at the Iowa State Fair, mainly in the company of Ron DeSantis as he made his way through the fair. It is debatable whether I learned anything along the way.
The day began with Iowa governor Kim Reynolds holding court at her “Fair Side Chats,” a multi-day series at which she is interviewing twelve of the Republican presidential contenders. Invited but conspicuously absent from that roster are Chris Christie, the only candidate really planting his flag in New Hampshire, and Donald Trump, who is openly at war with Reynolds for not endorsing him. The morning’s slate was Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and DeSantis. The questions and answers were mostly standard stump-speech stuff, but interesting at the margins. Reynolds maintains a public posture of strict neutrality in the race, at least at this early stage — although one can read some tea leaves in her schedule and pronouncements — but regardless of whom (if anyone) she might ultimately endorse, her affection for Haley is apparent and heartfelt. Both are small-town products of heavily rural states, both are their states’ first elected female governor, and both come from accounting rather than legal backgrounds. Still, with a modest crowd in attendance, the first two chats were mostly uneventful, unless you consider Ramaswamy rapping to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” an event (he’s surprisingly comfortable and plausible rapping).
There were no direct shots at Trump, but Haley and Ramaswamy both stressed the need for generational turnover, and Haley talked about the need to move on from “drama” and “negativity” (at a later, better-attended talk at the fair’s “Political Soapbox,” she added “chaos” to the list), while DeSantis declared that “the time for excuses for Republicans is over,” and presented Reynolds with a “no excuses” coffee mug.
DeSantis’s chat was much more eventful. Pro-abortion and LGBTQIA+ protesters (one in “Thank God for Abortion” attire) tried to disrupt the talk with cowbells and whistles, and ultimately had to be carted away by Iowa state troopers. This would be a theme of the day: DeSantis is a textbook case of the guy who attracts flak because he’s over the target. He gets protested because he’s worth attacking. Trouble was compounded when the power went out on the mikes during his closing answer. Another theme: while the DeSantis supporters were more numerous and organized, this is still the stage of the campaign at which everyone is outnumbered by the press. Because I wasn’t wearing a lanyard like the other media there, one reporter tried to interview me.
DeSantis made the obligatory stop manning the grill with Reynolds and Senator Joni Ernst at the pork-producers pavilion, where at least some of the same protesters showed up but were able to create no such scene. I followed him in the blazing sun from there until he left the fair three hours later, during which I went through about five layers of sunscreen and five bottles of water, some of which I had to hold against my phone to keep it from overheating. DeSantis was undaunted.
The Iowa State Fair is an enormous, sprawling event, in which the political candidates are merely a sideshow. It’s the biggest state fair in the country, a once-a-year Disney World of its own on permanent grounds in Des Moines, with scores of food tents, rides, musicians, displays of livestock, tractors, farm and gardening equipment, and the famous butter cow (an annual life-size sculpture of a cow made entirely of butter). It’s imposing to try to find parking anywhere for blocks in any direction.
Walking through this sort of event with a major presidential candidate is a study in contradictions. On the one hand, there’s something royalist and “Make Way for the King!” about a man walking with an entourage of sign-carrying supporters, lesser dignitaries, security, and the press, with people announcing his presence and plowing through the onlookers. I couldn’t avoid a thought of “we’re off to see the wizard” every time DeSantis moved even a little and the whole crowd moved with him. It was hard not to be struck by the absurdity of the entire thing, or to retreat into a certain level of ironic distance from a process that contains a deep well of sincerity and earnestness under all those layers of cynicism. When his wife Casey split off briefly to take one of the kids to a game stand, everybody but me stayed with The Candidate. At another game stand, the press mobbed one side where DeSantis was with Ernst, Casey, and the kids, while some ordinary fairgoers were left alone on the other side to throw things at balloons totally oblivious to doing so 20 feet from a presidential campaign.
On the other hand, the ritual is very American and very republican: DeSantis shook a lot of hands and posed for a lot of selfies with ordinary Iowans thrilled to meet him, and along the way, he had to endure the abuse of various hecklers, be they leftists or Trump supporters (it was sometimes hard to tell the difference), as well as the crushing indifference of the bulk of the crowd to any politician. Probably his best moment of the day was encountering a Special Olympian and his grateful family, who praised DeSantis for keeping things open:
DeSantis did the dad thing with his three small kids, partly as a way of letting us all in to see him acting as a good family man, with the kids wearing adorable coordinated campaign outfits. We watched as he took them on the bumper cars, the Ferris wheel, and to some of the game stands. He drew the line at the hall of mirrors (“I am NOT doing the Magic Maze”), with its potential for bad photo ops, and Casey ended up having to go in to rescue the kids when they inevitably got lost. In the agriculture pavilion to see the butter cow, he carried his daughter on his shoulders as every dad has done at a theme park, but this was the point at which the entourage became a crush, and the kids were no longer having fun. He broke for lunch soon after, and sent the kids off with Casey to have some rides and get a break from the trail.
DeSantis will never be the sort of bigger-than-life personality who charms the pants off everyone he meets, but I saw no sign of him being a bad retail politician as he met again and again and again with people who emerged from the fair crowd. His affect during the entire day was that of a no-nonsense dad navigating a theme park with a lot of patience for things that would wear many men down to their last nerve. Donald Trump made his entrance and exit in just 45 minutes during the same time, and didn’t spend a fraction of DeSantis’s time in the sun. Among the other Republican contenders, only Ramaswamy (who is 38 and also has small kids in tow) can match DeSantis for sheer energy and inexhaustibility. DeSantis even did a live interview with Alexis McAdams of Fox News while walking down the fair’s grand concourse. He also manned the egg stand in a second run through the Ag pavilion without the kids. For a natural introvert, DeSantis is never at a loss for words, and never visibly tired of meeting voters.
It helps to have local sherpas. Ernst, a fellow military veteran, was with DeSantis until after lunch, led DeSantis through the pig pens and to the butter cow, and gamely endured being overshadowed in her own backyard because this wasn’t her show. Representative Ashley Hinson also joined DeSantis for a bit. Less conspicuous to the national press but no less important was Amy Sinclair, the president of the Iowa state senate, who has endorsed DeSantis, acted as the rallying point for the other Iowa legislators in the DeSantis camp, was constantly pulling people forward to meet DeSantis, and was a witty and voluble presence throughout the day. In a state that values its tradition of retail politics and local government, DeSantis will rely heavily on his local validators.
Competing with Trump remains a challenge, and one compounded by the other dozen candidates. At one point, DeSantis and his entourage were marching by a stand of big Trump signs while the speakers overhead blared out a replay of Ramaswamy’s closing from the Fair Side Chat. It may be that all of the campaigning, all of the hustle, all of the listening to voters is pointless; there are still those who want Trump, and cannot be moved. But democracy means that we ask anyone who wants the job to submit to all of this without knowing what the voters will choose as the ending.