T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY — Florida Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, right, shakes hands with Iowa Veterans Home resident Adelle Luers during an event on the IVH campus Friday. It was his first visit to Marshall County during the 2024 campaign cycle.

With the Iowa Caucus fast approaching, Marshalltown had experienced something of a lull in Republican presidential candidates visiting over the last few months, but that changed Thursday and Friday when three hopefuls — former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — made appearances here in a span of less than 24 hours.

While Haley did not have a formal event scheduled, she stopped at the Maid-Rite Thursday evening and sat down with the T-R and a reporter from The Wall Street Journal on her way from Waverly to events in Newton and Des Moines on Friday. Recent Iowa polling has shown Haley and DeSantis in a virtual dead heat for second place at 16 percent each behind former President Donald Trump, with Trump still holding a comfortable lead of over 25 percentage points.

During the interview, Haley was quick to note the similarities she noticed to her primarily rural home state.

“It feels a lot like South Carolina because the people are very similar. It’s a lot about, it’s that faith, family, country feel. They’re patriotic. They’re hardworking,” she said. “They focus just on their families and their lives, but they know what they’re talking about. And South Carolinians are the same. And then I look at the state. You know, I was born and raised in a rural part of South Carolina, so so much of Iowa kind of brings me peace — the farms, the areas like that.”

Like most Republicans, Haley doesn’t hold a high opinion of current President Joe Biden’s job performance, and she said her highest priorities if elected would be tackling inflation, securing the southern border and improving educational performance, citing a statistic that only 29 percent of eighth graders are proficient in reading.

T-R PHOTO BY LANA BRADSTREAM Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made his second campaign stop in Marshalltown on Friday. Roughly 50 people attended his event at Legends, and Ramaswamy said his next stop was in Des Moines.

“We need to get government working for the people again because people really feel like they’re working for government, and they don’t feel like D.C. is listening,” she said. “Everything’s more expensive from groceries to gas to their mortgages to insurance… The biggest thing is we’ve gotta build up our economy and get confidence back in the system.”

The flip side of that coin was a question on why Haley, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for two years under the former president, felt it was time for Republicans to move past Trump and choose a new standard bearer for the party. She didn’t shy away from sharing that she had a great working relationship with him and agreed with the majority of his policies, but she also believes his personal baggage will continue to be an issue.

“The problem is chaos follows him. Fairly or unfairly, chaos follows him, and we’ve gotta get past that part of it,” Haley said. “My biggest thing is you’ve got all these wars around us, you’ve got an economy that’s in shambles and you’ve got so much division in our country. You’ve gotta stop the chaos. You can’t fix Democrat chaos with Republican chaos.”

She pointed to polls in swing states showing a wider general election margin of victory over Biden compared to Trump and hoped that Republicans would win up and down the ballot at the local, state and federal levels if she was at the top of the ticket in 2024. Haley characterized her presence in Iowa as “nonstop” and said she wouldn’t be outworked or outsmarted as she works hard to earn every vote.

In dueling recent TV ads, the Political Action Committees (PACs) supporting Haley and DeSantis have taken the opposing candidates to task for their records on China, and the former ambassador pointed to her work in that role as evidence of how tough she has been on the most populated country in the world.

T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, poses for a photo at the Maid-Rite in Marshalltown on Thursday night. Haley made a quick stop after an event in Waverly earlier in the day on her way to the Des Moines area, where she had several obligations Friday.

“No one, if they saw me any day at the United Nations, will question my strength on China,” she said. “Every day, we were giving it to China. I had a team that their job was to make sure that none of them got promoted at the UN, that they didn’t go in and get into those agencies at the UN. We made sure none of their language got into resolutions… I negotiated the largest set of sanctions against a country in a generation against North Korea. It’s what got them to stop testing the ballistic missiles. I negotiated and got them to do something they didn’t want to do.”

She added that she felt DeSantis and his team were “flailing” in their efforts to paint her as weak on or sympathetic to Chinese interests. In regard to another international matter dominating the headlines in recent weeks, Haley rejected calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and said the U.S. should give Israel “whatever they need, whenever they need it” to wipe out Hamas and focus on securing the release of the hostages.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack left over 1,200 Israelis dead, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza as a result of retaliatory attacks by the IDF and fighting between Israel and Hamas.

“I’ve been in those tunnels. They’re incredibly sophisticated. They hold massive amounts of equipment, ammunition. I promise you those hostages are in those tunnels. It’s like a small city underneath Gaza,” Haley said. “But when you look at it, all of their key areas are under hospitals, under schools, under playgrounds because they know Israelis value human life. Hamas doesn’t. They will put women and children up because they know Israel won’t shoot. I know Israel’s being as surgical as possible.”

She commended Israel for attempting to evacuate civilians from the Gaza Strip and worried that a ceasefire would only benefit Hamas without finishing the job of removing the group from power. When asked if there were any issues that had come onto her radar while she was in Iowa, Haley discussed agricultural trade with China and suggested that some of it be rerouted to India along with continuing to expand markets for biofuels made from corn and soybeans.

T-R PHOTO ROBERT MAHARRY Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, left, shakes hands with Iowa Sen. Adrian Dickey (R-Packwood) after arriving at the Iowa Veterans Home on Friday afternoon as Marshall County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jarret Heil stands next to them. DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, took questions from IVH residents before heading to a Des Moines for an event sponsored by The Family Leader.

DeSantis meets veterans at IVH Friday afternoon

The man who Haley has been seeking to supplant in the polls, Gov. DeSantis, crossed the 94th county off of his list on his “Full Grassley” tour of the state Friday, stopping at the Iowa Veterans Home after his wife Casey previously paid a visit to the Central Iowa Fairgrounds in July.

Once he stepped off of his bus, he introduced himself to local leaders including IVH Commandant Todd Jacobus and Marshall County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jarret Heil (who has endorsed him in the primary). DeSantis, a Navy veteran, then took questions from the residents on a number of topics ranging from balancing the budget to unemployment to foreign affairs ranging from the Israel-Gaza War to combatting Russia, China and Iran.

He took CEOs and politicians to task for “groveling” in front of Chinese President Xi Jinping during a recent trip he took to San Francisco, contending that China is enabling the actions of Iran and Russia as a top trade partner with both countries.

“That is not American strength. That’s surrendering to China,” DeSantis said.

He pledged to lessen the country’s dependence on China if elected and keep Chinese nationals from buying American farmland with a ban similar to the one he signed in Florida. DeSantis was also critical of both Biden and Trump for their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and distribution of stimulus checks, which he blamed for causing the subsequent inflation hitting pocketbooks across the country.

DeSantis also advocated for imposing term limits on members of Congress and building a wall at the southern border to stem the flow of illegal entries into the U.S. and the proliferation of fentanyl.

“We’re gonna stop the invasion. We’re gonna build this wall, and we’re gonna hold the Mexican drug cartels accountable for what they’re doing to this country,” he said.

He said he did not support sending American ground troops into the Gaza Strip but, like Haley, rejected calls for a ceasefire and blamed Hamas for violating the previous ceasefire when it launched the terrorist attack on Oct. 7. He also criticized the UN and other “rogue countries” for their criticism of Israel’s response.

“As the governor of Florida, if someone in the Bahamas was firing missiles into, like, Fort Lauderdale, we would never accept it. We would go, we would squash it, completely squash it in like 15 minutes,” DeSantis said. “And yet Israel’s supposed to live there with a terrorist group that wants to wipe the whole country off the map and push every Israeli into the sea? No. They have a right to defend themselves.”

One of the final questions came from a resident who remarked that everything Biden touches “turns to s***” and wondered how DeSantis would undo it as president. The candidate returned to many of the themes that have defined his campaign — closing the border, expanding domestic energy production, ending “indoctrination” in education while teaching kids about the founding principles and the Constitution, removing politics from the military and holding criminals accountable for the crimes they commit.

“We’re gonna return the government to its rightful owner, which is we the American people, and if we’re able to do all that, we will be able to restore America to what President Reagan called a shining city on a hill, and we have no choice because as of right now, we’re in danger of being the first generation of Americans to turn over, to our kids and grandkids, an America less prosperous and less free than the one we inherited,” he said. “And that would be breaking faith of every generation of Americans from the beginning of our country to the president. Americans have always sacrificed when they needed to to defend freedom and to make sure that future generations were able to have it better than any previous generation. So I’m not gonna sit idly by and let that happen. We are gonna turn America over to the next generation better than how we found it.”

Before heading to Des Moines for a forum with other candidates sponsored by The Family Leader, DeSantis answered a few questions during a brief press gaggle from a horde of reporters — including one all the way from France. In response to a follow up question about his earlier remarks on China, he said the two countries should “strategically decouple” over time in a way that benefits the American economy and American workers.

He was then asked why he had changed his tune on biofuels, noting that he recognized their importance to the agriculture industry in states like Iowa but still did not approve of the Biden administration’s efforts to “force” drivers into electric cars.

DeSantis repeated calls for Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to step down, and, after describing the campaign as a two-man race between himself and Trump in the past, he brushed aside the idea that Haley had made it a three-person race due to her recent upswing in the polls.

“Who are they spending money against? You can talk about this and all this stuff, but they are raining down millions and millions of dollars against me. Everybody’s attacking me. That should show you who they care about,” he said. “The minute that Donald Trump spends $30 million on another candidate is the time when you guys can say there’s somehow (inaudible)… but that’s not happened.”

He once again pointed to his record as governor as proof that he will be the Republican president who delivers on the promises the party’s base would most like to see. Once his bus had left, Jacobus expressed his gratitude that the governor came to IVH as most residents would not be able to travel to see any candidates otherwise.

“It’s incredibly important to be able to participate in the process, and that’s what we saw here,” Jacobus said.

Ramaswamy makes second stop

Ramaswamy met with campaign supporters at Legends American Grill on Friday. It was his second stop in Marshalltown after his Aug. 31 visit.

This time, Ramaswamy pulled into the Legends parking lot with a tour bus, 20 minutes after his event was scheduled to start. Roughly 50 supporters were waiting to hear him, about half the size of his August crowd.

After Ramaswamy’s speech about what he plans to do if elected President, he opened the floor up for a question and answer session. The questions ranged from the expansion of Medicare to foreign policy. One inquiry regarded illegal immigrants and companies which illegally employ them.

“We need to say, ‘We are a nation founded on the rule of law, and anybody who is here illegally will return to their country of origin,'” Ramaswamy responded.