Seeing rivals like Haley and upstarts like Ramaswamy tie him in early state polls bothers him. One of Pence’s advisers confided in me that they believed Fox News was not as favorable to Pence as the network is to Haley and Ramaswamy.
Still, here in Iowa, Pence and his campaign are working with voters like a farmer rolling a seeder through a barren field with no promise of a good harvest. Or perhaps the best metaphor is barbecue, as his senior adviser Chip Saltsman likes to say: “low and slow” is the way to win Iowa, hitting the big time at the right time. (Saltsman guided former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Sen. Rick Santorum to caucus victories here in 2008 and 2012.) He told me this as Pence turned around and served prime rib sandwiches in a street near Mt. Ayr. “We’re going to need more buns,” I heard Pence say.
After finishing at the grill, Pence wandered into an old-fashioned, single-seat barber shop called Dick’s, where Fox News played on a small monitor and Dick himself ran the chair. Pence had just fallen for an impromptu haircut.
Nearby, Karen Pence looked nervous. “Don’t make it too short,” she said.
“He’s a voter in Iowa,” Pence replied to his floating wife, “can’t do no wrong.”
“A very nice guy,” the barber, Dick Simpson, 80, told me about Pence a few weeks later when I called him. Had Pence won it? Yes, Dick said, he was still showing photos he took of the former vice president. But I didn’t know if I could leave the store to go to the caucus.
Engaged America, Pence’s ally super PAC, said in a late September memo to donors that it has knocked on 500,000 doors across the state and collected data on 50,000 likely caucus attendees. (In 2016, the last contested Republican caucus, only 186,874 people voted.) “Every day is critical at this point,” wrote PAC executive director Bobby Saparow, who served as campaign manager for the re-election bid. of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022. “This race needs to be shaken up, and soon.”
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