Michael Kruse: “Due to the sheer scale of the field, an around-the-clock, screen-scrolling amount of attention paid to national polls, national media and social media, and a pervasive, almost debilitating trepidation about picking the ‘right’ person to challenge Trump, how people perceive the candidates elsewhere is influencing how people are perceiving them here. National storylines are crowding out local issues. And in the last few fraught, fluid weeks heading into Monday’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, national chatter about who can win in November was weighing down Iowans’ brooding about who should win now.”
“I’ve heard it again and again of late, all over this state, so many Iowans wracked by indecision, practically paralyzed by dread that a choice they once relished might somehow irrevocably alter the arc of an election they suspect could be the most consequential of their lives. Spooked that they might pick wrong, they are searching desperately for the comfort of a national consensus that’s elusive because it doesn’t exist.”
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