Posted on 01/12/2024 8:52:58 AM PST by Miami Rebel
Forecasters are warning that “life-threatening” blizzard conditions are heading toward Iowa this weekend ahead of the caucuses on Monday.
A blizzard warning has been issued over much of Iowa for Friday into Saturday, with several areas under a winter storm warning, as well, the National Weather Service (NWS) advised.
NWS predicts that 3-5 inches of snow could fall in Des Moines, and some areas could see up to 8 inches over the next three days.
Winds are expected to increase Friday and create life-threatening blizzard conditions overnight into Saturday. Temperatures are expected to be dangerously low throughout the weekend and into early next week, with the wind chill down to minus 45 degrees, NWS said.
The high temperature Sunday in Des Moines is predicted to be minus 5, and on Monday, it is expected to be minus 3 degrees, with temperatures dipping into the negative double digits overnight.
The storm is shaking up the GOP primary as candidates attempt to make a final pitch to voters in the Hawkeye State.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley has canceled all of her Friday in-person events scheduled in Fort Dodge, Le Mars and Council Bluffs. The events are now set to be telephone town halls, her campaign said.
The super PAC supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has postponed events in Clear Lake and Marshalltown due to “unsafe weather conditions,” and the events in Pella and Coralville will be monitored throughout the day.
Dave Vasquez, the national press secretary for the Never Back Down super PAC told CNN that they are well-prepared for any challenge on caucus night, including severe weather. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, David Polyansky, told CNN the subzero weather “matches our grind-it-out mentality.” He said the campaign looks forward “to forcing our opponents to try and match our campaign pace when it hurts to breathe outside.”
In a campaign event Thursday, DeSantis acknowledged the cold will play a factor in the caucuses, and he asked voters to “brave the elements” and show up to support him.
Former President Trump said last week the only way his campaign is hurt is “if you stay home.”
A senior Trump campaign adviser said in an emailed statement on Friday that the campaign is confident local government will ensure roads and parking lots are cleared and accessible to voters for the caucuses.
“We know that local governments take civic engagement seriously and will do what is necessary to facilitate a smooth voting process for Iowans on Monday night,” the Trump campaign official said.
The Hill has reached out to the Haley and DeSantis campaigns for more information about events this weekend as the winter weather rolls in.
According to The Hill’s partner Decision Desk HQ, Trump leads with 54.4 percent support in Iowa. Haley is in second place with 17.4 percent and DeSantis follows closely behind with 15.9 percent support.
A friend was just telling me about her near death experience while living in N Dakota. On her way to work her car got stuck in a snowdrift. She decided to get out & walk a block back to her home. Immediately felt the sensation of sleepiness & wanted to just sit down. Had to force herself to keep walking. People don’t realize how powerful that deep cold is.
Climate change is here have no doubt
Too much rain, too much drought
Run in circles, scream and shout
It’ll cook your brain and freeze your feet
Too much rain too much heat
Snow coming soon no relief in sight
Tornados and floods you better run for your life
Climate change is here, better hide in fear.
They need more money or it gets severe
Too much rain too much drought
Run in circles, scream and shout.
In 2008, Clinton couldn’t buy Iowans’ love. So she bought them snow shovels.
By David A. Fahrenthold, washpost.com, June 6, 2015
AMES, Iowa — In Phyllis Peters’s garage, there is a snow shovel. A nice one: green, shiny, with an ergonomic steel handle. It came from Hillary Rodham Clinton. And it plays a part in a modern-day political legend, about some of the strangest money a candidate has ever spent.
Eight years ago, Peters was a volunteer for Clinton’s first presidential run. She had been an admirer of Clinton since her time as first lady. But just before Clinton lost the Iowa caucuses, her staffers did something odd: They bought shovels for Peters and the hundreds of other volunteers. “If you’re in Iowa, you have a snow shovel” already, Peters said. But she accepted. To be nice. This is Iowa. “We’re not rude people,” Peters said.
Today, the story of Clinton’s snow shovels is being told again in Iowa, as supporters worry that her second campaign could repeat the mistakes of the first. For both those who gave out the shovels and those who received them, they came to symbolize a candidate who never quite got their home state.
Clinton doesn’t face near the same challenge in Iowa in 2016. But the state still matters as a test of basic politics, a gauge of whether she has gotten any better at connecting with the people she wants to vote for her.
Last time around, Clinton tried to win over Iowans with bloodless logic, touting her résumé and her grinding work ethic. When that fell short, Clinton’s well-funded campaign — unable to buy her love — started buying everything else.
An expensive chartered “Hill-a-copter.” A $95,000 order of deli sandwiches. And 600-odd new snow shovels, some of which still sit, unused, in basements and garages across Iowa.
The idea behind them seemed to be that Clinton’s own voters might be so old, or so un-enthused, that they wouldn’t leave the house if it snowed. And that Clinton’s own Iowa volunteers — if sent on a voter-rescue mission — might not be prepared for . . . winter. In Iowa.
“It’s sort of like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take a snow shovel,’ ” said Marisue Hartung, one of Peters’s fellow Clinton volunteers in Ames. “But why?”
The story of the snow shovels starts way back in the fall of 2007. At that time, Clinton — a second-term senator from New York — was crushing Barack Obama in national polls,up 20 points. In Iowa, she was up by a handful. But already, Clinton staffers were discovering a problem here:
There were large numbers of elderly people. Shift workers. Single mothers. All people who might be too tired, or too busy, to come out and vote the way Iowans vote: with their feet, in a gym, in a long caucus night of speechifying and waiting around.
“We left, and we all wanted to go drink. It was like, ‘I don’t know what a caucus is,’ ” said one Clinton staffer from the 2008 campaign. “We realized that, like, we were going to lose because we weren’t going to be able to get out all of these Hillary supporters” to stay as long as it took to be counted.
So Clinton needed more people. New people. She was pouring resources into Iowa. But so was Obama, and his soaring message of hope and change was spreading among the kind of people who really would come to a caucus and stay.
To Clinton, by contrast, politics was not about soaring. It was about grinding — a constant, incremental struggle — and she was the candidate who could succeed at it. That might have been true. But it was hardly the stuff of joy.
“We all want change,” she would say. “Some people believe you bring it about by hoping for it. I believe you bring about change by working really, really hard for it.”
The other problem was Clinton’s distance — both emotional and real. Even when she was in Iowa, it felt as if she wasn’t.
Obama “would get on a bus, and he would go from town to town to town, and people would ride on the bus with him. People would get to know him,” said Chris Gowen, who was part of Clinton’s advance team. “Whereas we would fly into Des Moines . . . then dart back to the airport, and fly to northern Iowa, then dart back to the airport.”
“We were spending all this money,” he said. “And you’d never really connect with people.” As the Jan. 3 caucuses approached, Iowa seemed to be slipping away from Clinton. But her campaign still had money coming in — on some days, more than $1 million. And money is for spending. With Iowa still theoretically in play, there would be no prizes for saving it.
“The reality is, the closer you get to an election day, the harder it is to spend money in a smart way,” said Karen Hicks, a senior adviser to Clinton’s 2008 campaign. It was getting too late to buy ad time on television, or print up new fliers, or train new staff, before the caucuses. “It gets harder to spend in a way that you can tie to an incremental vote or caucus victory.”
At a time like that, Hicks said, “you probably should stop spending.”
The campaign didn’t.
It spent big on the “Hill-a-copter,” a Bell 222 with leather seats that the campaign chartered, trying to hit 16 Iowa counties in five days. News reports put the cost at thousands per day.
Even when it worked, this was not a perfect idea. Clinton — seeking to project a common touch — would meet voters by descending from the sky.
An even more last-minute purchase was the $95,384 order of deli sandwiches from the Hy-Vee grocery chain. The Iowa tradition was to bring munchies, not meals. But the Clinton people were worried about their young mothers and shift workers. Would they skip the caucuses if it meant waiting hours to eat?
And then: the shovels.
“I remember when they were ordered. There was an actual conversation about is there anything else, you know. ‘We are sure that we can’t purchase any more phone time?’ ‘Are we sure that we can’t purchase any more flights of mail?’ ” said the former Clinton campaign staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relations with the current campaign.
The shovels were bought, and they were distributed to offices and precinct captains by campaign staff. It’s not clear, from campaign-finance records, what they cost — but it seems certain to have been at least $10,000.
In hindsight, there is debate about why snow shovels appeared to be a better choice than nothing.
Some people saw them as a metaphor: a physical reminder that Clinton’s volunteers were needed to get their people out, come hell or high water — or snow.
“I think the same thing could have been accomplished by giving out a key chain with a snow shovel on it that costs 30 cents,” said the former Clinton staffer.
Hicks said this was a preemptive maneuver, grabbing a valuable resource before the enemy did. And if voters didn’t stay home, there was another worry: caucus sites. Snowy walks. Voters might not make it to the door.
Maybe. But, again, if you live in Iowa, you probably have a shovel.
snip
Huh? Pretty sure we’ve passed the “End of snow” time frame.
Just to be clear, here’s the actual NWS forecast for Des Moines, Iowa.
High temp Jan 15 Mon, -3 degrees F
It is as if the weather machine was set to "**** everything up" and the operator walked away.
3-5 inches? I think we call that a dusting.
Every MAGA person I know is a broken glass, blizzard be damned, Trump supporter. I can’t see the Uniparty goons braving a blizzard for RDS or neocon blood and guts Haley.
FEAR PORN
Probably true, but Laura Loomer tweeted this:
We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military industrial complex. She’s losing in Iowa, and now Iowa is set to get hit with a ONCE IN A DECADE blizzard as Donald Trump is set to dominate the Iowa Caucus.
Is the Deep State using HAARP to rig the Iowa Caucus?
Looks like weather manipulation to me.
Take a look at this weather radar below and how the incoming snow storm accelerated out of nowhere.
Yes, it’s cold.
It’s January in Iowa. Below Zero temps happen annually. Sometimes several times. I lived there for 55 years.
If someone wants to caucus they will. If the cold weather keeps them from doing so, they don’t really want to caucus that badly.
And don’t give me the ‘old and elderly’ thing. Most of those old-timers have their life history of this weather and it doesn’t scare them whatsoever.
So yes, Fear porn.
This prediction doesn’t seem to jive with cold that is happening now & predicted for later. You don’t suppose all that “global warming” stuff is but a load of crap, do you?
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