THE MEDIA HAVE HEADED, en masse, into Iowa. As usual in a presidential election year, it’s the first preparatory event in America’s whole unfolding primary process. And in Iowa, after a bad snowstorm that interrupted things, even the often sedate New York Times says that campaigning has now returned to “a fevered pitch”.      

Of course this coming Monday will not be a simple Republican primary as such – far from it, since Iowa clings to is traditional and rather distinctive caucusing procedures. (Though just to complicate matters further, Iowa’s Democrats have this year had their choice of a national nominee delayed until March, with a switch to mail-in voting, which has already begun, and will last through the next seven weeks or so.)

At this early stage, with Iowa’s Republicans still reveling in their branding tag “first-in-the-nation,” journalism both local and national is inevitably overcome with the compelling need to judge the mood of Iowans, especially of course Republican Iowans. A public opinion poll is required, and by tradition – since 1943 in fact – it is provided through the patronage of the state’s leading newspaper, the Des Moines Register.

Nowadays, though, it happens with a hefty subsidy from NBC News. Another funder is Mediacom, the cable TV and broadband provider which is well-known in the Midwest, though less so in other parts of the country. But the actual work of questioning the public, by representative sample, is conducted by the Des Moines-based polling organization Selzer & Company – headed by the veteran pollster Ann Selzer (below, right). She has a reputation for being highly accurate, based on her company’s performance at predicting election results from 2008 through 2020.

The most obvious thing to say about Iowa is that its ‘first-in-the-nation’ placement in the campaign calendar ensures that its caucus results often give a disproportionate boost to the winner. And they will also of course, at this still early stage, weed out many of the losers, narrowing the field dramatically.

If Ann Selzer’s predictions are accurate once again … the result is a forgone conclusion – and it’s mathematically extreme. Her latest poll showed Donald Trump to have the support of 51 percent among likely caucus-goers – more than all his rivals put together: Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the now-withdrawn Chris Christie. All combined, they only reached 44 percent compared with Trump’s fifty-one.

So it does seems a done deal … it’s very hard to envisage the eventual Presidential contest being anything other than a replay of the last one – Biden vs Trump. But early indicators like Iowa do nevertheless call for journalistic caution. Many political observers might recall a famously wily politician in Britain of the 1960s and ‘70s — the intermittent Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Perhaps his most-often quoted observation was this: “A week is a long time in politics.” And we have 26 weeks before the Republicans’ nominating convention (in Milwaukee) and (for what they’re worth) nearly 32 weeks until Democrats confirm their choice (in Chicago).

Chicago is well used to hosting Democratic National Conventions – ten times in fact since Conventions started in 1830s. The most infamous time was inevitably in 1968, when the chaotic, violent scenes were memorably captured by among others the immersive journalism of Norman Mailer. It was also the only election year in living memory when the incumbent US President (then Lyndon Johnson) chose not to run for a second term. Could we see that decision being repeated by Joe Biden, in the face of his disapproval ratings of 53%, as against approval ratings of just 40%. Highly unlikely, obviously. The current foregone conclusion will turn out to be the correct conclusion, no doubt – the octogenarian taking on the challenging septuagenarian.

THAT OLD AGE ISSUE gets a lot of rather hopeless, inconclusive, tut-tutting coverage in the American media. Just out of interest, I consulted the Asia Times, a well-respected newspaper founded originally in Hong Kong (before the complete communist Chinese takeover) and whose readership extends through 30 countries mainly in the Far East. It’s a region where conventionally-speaking, old age tends to be greatly venerated. But even in that paper’s editorial columns, America is now being faulted for turning into a gerontocracy.

A tad cutely, Asia Times quotes America’s Teen Vogue magazine as having to explain to its readers that “gerontocracy is government by the elderly.” But more seriously, the paper even foregrounded a disturbing story, never greatly circulated here in America – because of healthcare privacy laws, we can perhaps assume. The story, originally from Stat, the Boston Globe’s specialist medical journal, revealed that Congress’s own pharmacist was filling prescriptions for United States Senators providing them with medications to treat Alzheimer’s Disease. No names were given, naturally.

With an effort at dispassionate balance, Asia Times has weighed Nikky Haley’s call for mandatory cognitive tests for office-holders who are 75 or older … along with the observation that ego is bound to play a part in the problem. Leaders and lawmakers obviously accrue much valuable experience through their advancing years … but they can also get to think they’re indispensable.

Here at home, the New Yorker magazine passed its own magisterial judgement, and at the same time brought the matter down to brass tacks politically. “If Biden were ten or fifteen years younger,” wrote the Editor, David Remnick, “he might well have a clear glide-path to re-election. But he is not, and he does not.”

Turning to what’s more fundamentally at stake, Remnick also concluded …

The real menace is not posed by an elderly politician intent on protecting and renewing a democratic republic; it’s posed by a chaos agent who fomented insurrection and promises to return America to a state of misery.

That fuller sense of urgency crops up again, as we look further ahead than Iowa, to the New Hampshire Primary, two weeks ahead on the 23rd of this month. This second state can still claim to be another ‘first-in-the-nation,’ in that this will be an actual primary, and both major parties are ‘primary-ing’ (if that’s the verb) on that same day.

The voice of a Republican Party of old is being raised again around that state – a frequent venue for pre-primary speeches being Dartmouth College. And the familiar voice is former Representative Liz Cheney (left). Reporters are describing her stumping through New Hampshire, plus of course the obligatory appearance on CBS’s Face The Nation show,  as a “last-ditch effort” to persuade Republicans not to nominate Trump again.

Her language is forthright … if a little forlorn, it has to be said. The headlines have cited her demanding bluntly, “Show the world that we will defeat the plague of cowardice sweeping through the Republican Party.”

And as she has done several times recently, Cheney left open in these latest media appearances the possibility of running as a third-party candidate if or when the Republicans do nominate Trump. That too, it should be said, sounds somewhat forlorn.