It was only 8.30 on a Saturday morning but more than 100 people were crammed into the back room of Pizza Ranch in Winterset, a small, rural town in Iowa that lays claim to being the birthplace of the film star John Wayne. 

Some of them were there for the breakfast special — a thin-crust pizza topped with gravy, sausage and scrambled eggs. But most had come to see Ron DeSantis, the 44-year-old Florida governor who is one of more than a dozen Republicans vying for the party’s nomination for president in 2024.

Wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt and cowboy boots, DeSantis warned America would devolve into a “woke dystopia” if Joe Biden secured another four years in the White House.

“Our country is in decline. I don’t think it’s inevitable. I think it’s a choice,” DeSantis said, after rattling through a stump speech that touted his ultra-conservative policies in Florida, from a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, to restrictions on teaching about gender and sexuality in primary school classrooms. “I’m not running to manage the decline. I’m running to reverse the decline.”

The Florida governor apologised for rushing out to another engagement but assured voters that he would return to the area. Indeed, he promised to visit all 99 of Iowa’s counties in the months ahead.

For DeSantis, it is Iowa or bust. He is pinning his presidential hopes on the state, where on January 15, Republican caucus-goers will fire the starting gun on the presidential primary process. The Florida governor is not the only one: with just under six months to go until the Iowa caucuses, nearly all of the Republican presidential candidates are betting their futures on Iowa.

They all have the same goal: halting the seemingly inevitable march by Donald Trump to the party’s nomination in 2024.

The calculation is that if they can clip Trump’s wings in Iowa, they will create an opening to steal support away from him in the subsequent early voting states of New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Although Trump is ahead in the polls, some political observers believe there is an opening in Iowa for a challenger. Trump is eschewing the sort of retail, breakfast-at-a-pizza-restaurant politics that defines campaigns in Iowa. Voters in the state also take the responsibility of vetting the candidates seriously and resent the idea that the race might be over before it has started.

For Trump’s opponents, Iowa is vital. “If Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire by landslides, there is no reason for any other state. The die will be cast at that point,” says veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz.

“You have to beat Trump in one of those first . . . states to be viable,” Luntz adds. “The key is to demonstrate that you have some public support.”

Chasing the frontrunner

Despite his mounting legal woes, Trump is the undisputed frontrunner in the increasingly crowded field of Republican hopefuls. According to the latest FiveThirtyEight average of national polls, roughly half of Republicans say they are backing the former president. DeSantis trails in a distant second, on just under 20 per cent. All other candidates languish in the single digits.

There are some signs, however, that lesser-known candidates are eating into both Trump’s and DeSantis’s support in crucial primary states. A Fox Business poll out Sunday showed that in Iowa, 46 per cent of likely caucus goers said they backed Trump, followed by DeSantis on 16 per cent and Tim Scott, the mild-mannered US senator from South Carolina, on 11 points.

Caucus veterans say opinion polls do not paint an accurate picture in a state like Iowa, where voters like to weigh their options.

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“I can assure you the race is much closer and exceptionally wide open,” Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical Christian leader in the state, said on social media at the weekend. “Iowans don’t believe the forced-upon narrative, instead they choose to shape the narrative.”

DeSantis is not the only candidate investing heavily in early voting states. A super Pac supporting Scott said last week that it was planning to spend $40mn on television and digital advertising in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in the coming months. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has already held more than two dozen campaign events in Iowa alone in the year to date.

Thirteen presidential candidates are set to attend the Iowa Republican party’s annual Lincoln Dinner this Friday night in Des Moines. Several are expected to return two weeks later for the famed state fair, where they will pose for pictures with farmers and sample fried foods — practically required activities for presidential hopefuls in Iowa.

“The expectation is that you are going to be here, and you are going to engage in old school, retail politics. You are going to shake hands, you are going to pose for selfies, and you are going to work the room,” said David Peterson, a political-science professor at Iowa State University. “People want to hear you talk and answer questions.”

But it remains unclear whether even the most adept retail politicians will be able to pry Republican voters away from the former president.

Trump has defied sceptics in recent months, with his poll numbers climbing each time he has been indicted on criminal charges, first in Manhattan, and later in Miami. Trump said last week that he had received a “target” letter from the US Department of Justice, raising the possibility of further criminal charges relating to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the coming weeks. A separate criminal investigation looms in the state of Georgia.

That has done little to deter voters such as Joe Van Ginkel, chair of the Republican party in Madison county, Iowa, where Winterset is the county seat. Van Ginkel says Trump “sometimes takes it too far” but has not ruled out caucusing for him in January, or voting for him in a general election next November — even if the former president were convicted of a crime before then.

For now, Van Ginkel says he has already met eight of the Republican presidential candidates, and intends to speak with them all before making up his mind.

One 62-year-old woman at the Pizza Ranch, who declined to give her name, agreed. She says her favourite candidates were DeSantis, Trump and the anti-ESG fund manager Vivek Ramaswamy.

“Why would you close off options?” she says. “I want to hear as many of them as possible.”

Wary evangelicals

The day before his breakfast in Winterset, DeSantis made an onstage appearance at the Family Leadership Summit, an annual gathering of several thousand evangelicals who will wield outsized influence in the caucuses.

As many as two-thirds of Republican caucus goers are expected to be evangelical Christians — a voting bloc that was initially wary of Trump but ultimately embraced his presidency.

The Family Leadership Summit was organised by Vander Plaats, who in several election cycles has endorsed the candidate who went on to win the caucuses. In 2016, he backed Texas senator Ted Cruz, who won the caucuses but lost the nomination to Trump. This time around, Vander Plaats has so far held off on endorsing anyone — but has said repeatedly that he thinks Iowa voters are ready to “turn the page” on from the former president.

Luntz, who conducted focus groups with evangelical voters in Iowa on the eve of the Family Leadership Summit, says Vander Plaats speaks for many, noting there is a “greater degree of frustration with the former president among religious conservatives”.

“Make no mistake, they loved him as president. He remains their hero, and they want the next Republican nominee to follow his agenda,” Luntz says. “But they are tired of all the drama, and they talk about his bullying, that he just insults people . . . they would like to get Trump without Trump.”

Todd Stiles, the 59-year-old lead pastor of First Family Church in Ankeny, a suburb of Des Moines, is one of those voters.

“I don’t think he’ll be able to tame his tongue,” Stiles says of Trump, after attending a meet and greet with Haley on the morning of the Family Leadership Summit. “I do think he was a good president . . . but the tone at the top matters.”

Tony Parenza, a 64-year-old retired sales manager, went to a pancake breakfast with Ramaswamy at a shopping centre in Waukee, another Des Moines suburb, the same morning. He says he caucused for Trump in 2016 but was shopping for an alternative this time.

“President Trump, I voted for him the last two times. I thought he did a lot of good things. But he brings a lot of drama with him,” Parenza says. “It is a distraction to what the causes are . . . I think we need a new start.”

Voters like Stiles and Parenza give Trump’s challengers pause when it comes to tackling the former president head-on. Aside from the bombastic former New Jersey governor Chris Christie — who has spent relatively little time in Iowa and instead focused his campaign efforts in New Hampshire — most of the Republican presidential candidates have refrained from mentioning, let alone attacking, the former president in their stump speeches.

At the same time, they have been wary of taking him to task over his legal troubles. DeSantis last week said Trump should have “come out more forcefully” on January 6 2021 to stop rioters, but has also said the prosecution of Trump is politically motivated.

Trump was notably absent from the Family Leadership Summit, with his campaign citing a scheduling conflict. The previous month, he skipped a “Roast and Ride” fundraiser hosted by Iowa’s US senator Joni Ernst that attracted nearly all of the other candidates. In a snub that is likely to attract criticism, Trump is also expected to skip next month’s state fair, where most of the candidates are scheduled to take part in events with Kim Reynolds, the state’s popular Republican governor.

Trump allies insist the former president remains very popular in Iowa, where he beat Biden by an eight-point margin in 2020. They say given his sizeable polling lead and loyal base of supporters, he does not need to hit the campaign trail in the way that many of his rivals are doing.

But some analysts question whether the former president risks taking for granted the support of Iowans who expect to be courted.

“Voters might start wondering, essentially, where is he? Why is he not actively campaigning? Why is he not doing what you are supposed to do?” says Peterson of Iowa State University. “Normal rules don’t apply to Trump, so this may not be a problem. But it does give the other candidates the opportunity criticise him.”

While Trump did not go the Family Leadership Summit, one of his loudest supporters, the former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, was there in his place.

Lake, who grew up in Iowa, flew to the state to campaign on the president’s behalf, shaking hands at the evangelical conference before hosting her own meet-and-greet at Mad Meatball, a pizza restaurant in downtown Des Moines.

I don’t care what the establishment says. It’s Trump or nobody

Lake, who is one of the biggest proponents of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him, is widely seen as a potential running mate for the former president. At Mad Meatball, she called on the other candidates to “stand down” and clear the field for Trump.

“This is our guy, the guy that America voted for in 2020, the guy that America needs, the guy that the world needs right now,” she said to cheers from the crowd.

She also tore into DeSantis. “I don’t think I want him anywhere near that White House,” Lake said. “He needs to mature a little bit and grow up. Go back to Florida, serve the people you promised you would serve, and give it a try in 2028.”

Lake’s comments are echoed by Mike Taylor, a local gun shop owner, who says he will never waver from supporting Trump — and hears the same from many of his customers.

“I have always been a Trump supporter. I always will be a Trump supporter. I don’t care what the establishment says,” Taylor says. “It’s Trump or nobody. There is going to be a third party here pretty quick if they try to pull any more shenanigans.”

Taylor accused the “deep state” of unfairly bringing criminal charges against Trump — and says the former president’s legal woes only made him want to fight harder for him.

“I couldn’t name a president that did more for his country than Donald Trump,” he says. “If that don’t touch your heart, knowing what he’s been through, if that don’t make you want to fight for that guy, then you’re not American.”

DeSantis stumbles

Not long ago, DeSantis was seen as the Republican best positioned to take on Trump at the ballot box. But the Florida governor has faced growing questions about his campaign message and strategy in recent weeks and has failed to live up the lofty expectations many had for his campaign.

Hours after DeSantis’s appearance at the Winterset Pizza Ranch, his campaign filed documents with the Federal Election Commission showing it had raised $20.1mn in the second quarter, more than any other presidential campaign. But just 15 per cent of donations came from small-dollar donors — a key indicator of grassroots support — and more than two-thirds came from deep-pocketed individuals who had maxed out their contributions and cannot donate again to his primary campaign.

The campaign has since then sacked several staff members, after the FEC filings showed it burnt through nearly $8mn in the second quarter, with about $1mn spent on payroll-related expenses for nearly 100 employees.

At the same time, DeSantis, who is known for his often aggressive, combative style, has faced persistent questions about whether he has the temperament and acumen to appeal to voters in Iowa and other early states who are looking for a personal touch. After the speech at the Pizza Ranch, several voters said they were disappointed that the governor had taken just one question from the audience.

DeSantis has sought to soften his image in part by campaigning with his telegenic former news anchor wife and three small children. He elicited laughs in Winterset when he warned that his kids would be “unleashed” at the state fair.

But political operatives say that after several mis-steps, including attempts to tack aggressively to the right to outflank Trump on divisive issues such as abortion and LGBT rights, DeSantis will need to refine his core campaign message in the weeks and months ahead — and spell out exactly why voters should choose him over the former president.

“You have got to tell voters how you are going to make their lives better, and you have got to give them a reason to believe,” says Ford O’Connell, a Republican political strategist in Florida who has supported both Trump and DeSantis in the past. “What voters are all coming away with is: if Trump goes down, we might have a pretty decent back-up quarterback.”

A key test for DeSantis and the other Trump challengers will be the first televised Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, next month. Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, has said it is “unlikely” the former president will participate, saying it “really wouldn’t make sense” given his healthy polling lead.

But for others, it will be a significant platform to make their case to Republican voters, and attempt to make a meaningful dent in Trump’s commanding lead.

“At this point, if I were in this race, I would rather be Trump than somebody else,” says Dennis Goldford, a political-science professor at Drake University in Des Moines. “But it is too soon to call. There are more innings in the game.”