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- Iowa GOP voters will head to the polls Monday to cast their ballots in the state's vaunted caucuses.
- A prominent GOP lawyer told The Times that many voters have a sense of "doom" about the 2024 race.
- "You get the feeling in Iowa ... that we're sleepwalking into a nightmare," Doug Gross said.
In less than three days, Iowa Republican voters will endure freezing temperatures to cast their nominations for the GOP's presidential candidate in the 2024 general election.
But in the Hawkeye State, where former President Donald Trump remains hugely popular among the Republican electorate and is the runaway favorite to win the GOP caucuses on Monday, there's a pervasive sense among many voters that the country could be facing perilous times, according to The New York Times.
While the 2020 presidential election was defined by the COVID-19 pandemic and the huge societal changes that it created across the country and the world, the 2024 election — which at the moment is headed toward a likely rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden — has brought forth feelings of anxiety among many voters, per The Times.
"You get the feeling in Iowa right now that we're sleepwalking into a nightmare and there's nothing we can do about it," Doug Gross, a prominent GOP lawyer and backer of former UN ambassador Nikki Haley's presidential campaign, told the newspaper.
"In Iowa, life isn't lived in extremes, except the weather, and yet they still feel this dramatic sense of inevitable doom," he added.
The 2024 election will be the first contest since the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Israel-Hamas war, all major issues that provoke a range of strong reactions among an already-polarized electorate.
While presidential campaigns of the past have featured no shortage of tough and controversial topics, this year's presidential contest has loomed large over the very notion of what values the country seeks to espouse.
Former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, who in 2000 competed against then-Vice President Al Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination, recalled to The Times the days he spent crisscrossing Iowa, which at the time was one of the nation's premier swing states.
"We debated healthcare and taxes, which is reasonable," the 80-year-old Bradley told the newspaper. "Civil war? No. World War III? No, no, no."
Bradley said that the 1968 election "was a pretty tough election" between major party candidates Richard Nixon, a Republican, and Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat, but noted that the contest wasn't fully comparable to a second Biden-Trump election.
"The difference is just so stark in terms of American values and in terms of what is the future going to be," the former senator told The Times.