2023

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The Iowa frenzy is typically in full force by now.

With less than three weeks until the Iowa caucuses formally usher in the presidential nomination process, White House hopefuls are usually in a heated competition. They fan out across the state and pack as many events into a single day as is humanly possible — all in a bid to appeal to undecided voters and lock down support that could lift them to victory in Iowa and keep them in the race for months to come.

But as the campaign intensifies ahead of the Jan. 15 caucuses, the normal frenzy is subdued. While the schedule is filling up, former President Donald Trump is such a commanding force in the party that some voters worry the contest that normally transforms Iowa into the center of the political world may turn out to be something of a snooze.

“It’s kind of frustrating,” said Jenna Maifeld, a 19-year-old student at the University of Iowa who is eager to participate in her first caucus but is disappointed with the campaign cycle’s lack of competition. “I feel like a lot of people’s voices aren’t being heard.”

There’s still time for the dynamics of the race to shift. And Trump’s rivals are hardly ceding the state to him, working to convince voters that his victory isn’t inevitable. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has effectively centered his campaign on Iowa, pumping it with advertising and crafting a robust travel schedule of events and media availabilities. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is also campaigning throughout Iowa, stepping up criticism of Trump while laying the groundwork for a potentially stronger showing in New Hampshire, where the Jan. 23 primary includes more independent voters.

The question is whether any of those efforts will notably erode Trump’s standing, a prospect some voters find unlikely at this point.

“A lot of candidates are hoping that one of these spears in his back will finally take him down, but I doubt it,” said Nick Peters, a 31-year-old from Prairie City who is also among the Iowa Republicans frustrated by Trump’s dominance.

Trump enters the final stretch before the caucuses facing a host of challenges. He’s the subject of 91 criminal charges related to everything from his handling of classified information to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s top election official have recently declared Trump ineligible to appear on their states’ ballots, decisions the former president is likely to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And Trump is embroiled in controversy over his harsh rhetoric toward immigrants, repeatedly using language that extremism experts say echoes writings from Adolf Hitler about the “purity” of Aryan blood, which underpinned Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of millions of Jews and other “undesirables” before and during World War II.

For now, however, Trump’s baggage appears to be doing little to deter a majority of Republican voters. In fact, Trump has sought to turn his vulnerabilities into something of an advantage, arguing that he’s been indicted on behalf of his supporters. He’s also aimed to turn around concerns that he poses a threat to democracy by accusing President Joe Biden of harnessing the power of government against a political rival. There’s no evidence that Biden or the White House had any influence on the Justice Department’s decision to criminally charge Trump.

It’s Trump’s impenetrable base of support that has left many feeling resigned to seeing his name on the ballot in November.

“If democracy is working fairly and if the country wants him, then it’s going to be him,” said Dylan Kooiman, a 21-year-old student at Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa, who said it would be hard for him to support Trump given his legal battles. “It doesn’t always fall the way everyone wants it.”

Iowans are historically proud of the role they play at the beginning of the presidential election calendar every four years. Voters are accustomed to intimate exchanges with candidates, who pay visits to living rooms, neighborhood centers and county fairgrounds in an effort to connect and persuade.

The pride Iowans take in their role in shaping the presidential contest is also matched with a perennial anxiety that their status may not last forever. The final period ahead of the 2020 caucuses, which focused on Democrats, was unusually muted because many candidates, who were also senators, had to be in Washington to participate in Trump’s first impeachment trial. A bungled effort to report results contributed to Democrats removing Iowa from their leadoff spot, replacing it instead with South Carolina.

Republicans have kept Iowa in the opening position in the 2024 campaign. But like so many traditions, Trump has abandoned some long held Iowa political practices, particularly when it comes to retail campaigning. He’s largely traded living rooms for rallies, prompting some criticism that he’s taking Iowa for granted.

Trump is stepping up his efforts in the closing weeks to prove that he’s willing to work for a win that’s so commanding that his rivals will have to give up. He is, for example, taking the rare step of holding four campaign events over two days in early January, appearing in rural western Iowa, in industrial eastern Iowa along the Mississippi River and stops in between.

If he’s successful, he may be on a path to a race that few Americans appear eager to embrace. Nearly 3 in 10 U.S. adults, or 28%, say they would be dissatisfied with both Trump and Biden becoming their parties’ respective nominees, a recent AP-NORC poll showed.

Independents (43%) are more likely than Democrats (28%) or Republicans (20%) to express their displeasure with both men gaining party nominations.

Rick Hyndman may be one of the thousands of Iowans who wants to support Trump again, but he also thinks Trump needs to speak more to the middle.

In line to attend a Trump rally in Coralville, the 70-year-old local retiree was noncommittal, waiting to hear some signals from the former president that he could appeal to independents to ensure his electability in the general election. Hyndman thinks he could, by focusing on the issues and avoiding putting other people down.

Despite that concern, Hyndman thinks neither DeSantis nor Haley can beat him.

“I don’t see anybody stepping up,” he said. “We’ve been waiting.”

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CHICAGO (AP) — The 2024 elections will be dominated by the presidential contest and the battle for control of Congress, but another series of races is shaping up to be just as consequential.

Crucial battles over abortion, gerrymandering, voting rights and other issues will take center stage in next year’s elections for state supreme court seats — 80 of them in 33 states.

The races have emerged as some of the most hotly contested and costliest contests on the ballot since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the consitutional right to an abortion. The decision shifted the abortion debate to states, creating a “new era” in state supreme court elections, said Douglas Keith, senior counsel in the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks spending in judicial races.

“We have seen attention on state supreme court elections like never before and money in these races like never before,” Keith said.

Heated court races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2023 handed victories to Democrats and saw tens of millions of dollars in TV ads, offering a preview of 2024. They’re also prompting groups to consider investing in states they would not previously have considered.

At least 38 lawsuits have been filed challenging abortion bans in 23 states, according to the Brennan Center. Many of those are expected to end up before state supreme courts.

The ACLU is watching cases challenging abortion restrictions in Wyoming, Kentucky, Ohio, Utah, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska, Georgia and Montana.

“After Roe v. Wade was overturned, we had to turn to state courts and state constitutions as the critical backstop to protecting access to abortion,” said Brigitte Amiri, deputy director at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. “And the stakes are unbelievably high in each of these cases in each of these states.”

The ACLU was among major spenders on behalf of Democrats in this year’s state supreme court contests in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Another big player in recent court races has been the Republican State Leadership Committee, which has said its focus is mainly on redistricting, or the drawing of political district boundaries. The group called state supreme courts the “last line of defense against far-left national groups,” but didn’t say how much it intends to spend on next year’s races or which states it’s focusing on.

In Ohio, Democrats are expected to cast state supreme court races as an extension of the November election in which voters enshrined the right to abortion in the state constitution. The state has more than 30 abortion restrictions in place that could be challenged now that the amendment has passed.

“The state supreme court is going to be the ultimate arbiter of the meaning of the new constitutional amendment that the people voted for and organized around,” said Jessie Hill, law professor at Case Western Reserve University and a consultant for Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights. “That is a huge amount of power.”

With three seats up for a vote and a current Republican majority of 4-3, Democrats have an opportunity to flip the majority of the court while Republicans will try to expand their control. Hill said the “very high-stakes election” will serve as another test of the salience of the abortion issue in turning out voters.

“We saw an incredible number of voters come out to vote on that amendment and an incredible amount of investment in those campaigns,” Hill added. “I think we’ll see a similar attention and investment in Ohio come next year.”

Redistricting also is likely to be a main focus in the state’s supreme court races, given the court will have realigned politically since it issued a series of rulings finding Ohio’s congressional and legislative maps unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans, said David Niven, political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. He expects millions of dollars to be spent on those campaigns.

“There’s often little conversation about these races, but they are just so utterly consequential in very tangible, practical ways that touch voters’ everyday lives,” he said.

Pending legislative and congressional redistricting cases also could play a role in North Carolina.

Republicans in North Carolina are looking to expand their majority two years after the court flipped from Democratic control in the 2022 election. That flip to a 5-2 GOP majority led to dramatic reversals in 2023 on rulings made by the previous court, which had struck down a 2018 photo voter identification law as well as district maps for the General Assembly and the state’s congressional delegation.

Groups on both sides also are expected to focus on Michigan, where Democrats hold a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court. Candidates run without political affiliations listed on the ballot, though they’re nominated by political parties.

Two incumbents — one Democrat, one Republican — will be up for election in 2024. The court recently kept former President Donald Trump on the state’s ballot, denying a liberal group’s request to kick him off. It is currently weighing a high-profile case over a Republican legislative maneuver that gutted a minimum wage hike backed by voters.

In Wisconsin, abortion played a dominant role in the 2023 court race, with Democrats flipping the court to a 4-3 majority in a campaign that shattered previous national records for spending in state supreme court elections.

Liberal-leaning Justice Janet Protasiewicz defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state’s leading anti-abortion groups.

Protasiewicz was targeted with impeachment threats this year over comments she made on the campaign trail about redistricting as Republicans argued she had prejudged what then was an expected case on the state’s heavily gerrymandered state legislative districts. Experts say the controversy is an example of how more money and attention have changed the dynamics of many state supreme court races to be increasingly partisan.

Democrats in Pennsylvania added to their majority on the court after a race with tens of millions of dollars in spending. Democrat Dan McCaffery won after positioning himself as a strong defender of abortion rights.

It remains to be seen whether abortion rights will play a factor in states where party control isn’t at stake. That includes Arkansas, where the court is expected to maintain its 4-3 conservative majority. The seats up next year include the chief justice position, which has drawn three sitting justices.

A fight over abortion could wind up before the court, with a group trying to put a measure on the ballot next year that would scale back a state ban on the procedure that took effect once Roe was overturned.

Abortion rights supporters also aren’t writing off longshot states such as Texas and its all-Republican high court, which rejected the request from a pregnant woman whose fetus had a fatal condition to be exempted from the state’s strict abortion ban.

In Montana, Republicans have spent huge sums to try to push the court in a more conservative direction. The liberal-leaning court is expected to hear cases related to restrictions on transgender youth and abortion. A landmark climate change case also is pending before the court, which will have two of its seven seats up for election.

Jeremiah Lynch, a former federal magistrate running for the open chief justice position, has cast himself as a defender of the court’s independence and has warned voters to expect a barrage of negative advertising. Cory Swanson, a county attorney also running for the post, announced his bid on a conservative talk show and recently vowed to weed out any “radicalized” applicants for law clerks in response to antisemitism on college campuses.

In West Virginia, where conservatives have a current 5-4 majority on the court and two seats will be up for grabs, GOP chair Elgine McArdle said Republicans aim to focus more on judicial races than in years past.

“One area the state party has never really engaged much in is nonpartisan races, including the judicial races,” McArdle said. “That won’t be the case this time around.”

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DeMillo reported from Little Rock, Arkansas. Associated Press statehouse reporters from across the country contributed.

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