In the final run-up to the Iowa caucus, Haley made her closing argument to the state’s voters, pitching herself as the anti-chaos, anti-Trump candidate.

"All the fellas are giving me so much attention,” Nikki Haley told supporters over the weekend in Iowa, on her second-to-last campaign swing before the caucus. Haley was referring to former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, both of whom were devoting more and more time to attacks against her. “She likes the globe,” Trump said of Haley. “I like America first.” Late last week, I came to Iowa to see whether Haley could gain enough momentum to make Trump feel threatened, or at least knock DeSantis aside. “If they’re lying, they’re losing,” she said. She seemed to welcome the attention. On Saturday, Haley travelled by plane from one Iowa town to the next; I followed as fast as I could in a rented Nissan.

Haley had come to a vineyard in Indianola to argue that her brand of moderation—a return to normalcy, an end to the chaos—could beat Joe Biden in the general election. New Hampshire’s governor, Chris Sununu, walked into the packed room and introduced Haley with a story about how he had run a ski resort before he became governor. Since endorsing Haley last month, Sununu has served as Haley’s warm-up guy and affable interlocutor on the trail. He told the audience that they should expect “customer service out of government.” A Haley flack wearing Vineyard Vines held up two fingers—two-minute warning—trying to get Sununu to wrap up his riff. Haley walked out in flare jeans, smiling and oh-hi! waving as “Eye of the Tiger” blasted. She asked who was seeing her for the first time. When more than half in the room raised a hand, she paused and, reassured, launched into her classic town-hall speech.

Back in September, when Trump announced his nickname for Haley—Birdbrain—she responded, “Love this. It means we are in 2nd and moving up fast. Bring it!” For months, Trump’s victory in Iowa seemed inevitable; no one could have imagined that, come January, Haley would cause him much consternation. But, by New Year’s in Iowa, Pence had long since dropped out, and Ramaswamy was mostly relegated to kook status. DeSantis, despite completing the arduous ninety-nine-county Grassley tour and securing the endorsement of Governor Kim Reynolds, still couldn’t stop his operation from being described in hospice metaphors—just make the patient comfortable.

This left Haley, who, in an older iteration of the Republican Party, might have been the front-runner. Iowa, a state that, in past years, shifted profoundly from Obama to Trump, has never been natural ground for Haley, and the state’s evangelical base has largely stuck with Trump. She “has a very narrow lane, a modern Mitt Romney lane,” Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the organization the Family Leader, said. Her only path to victory would be, as he sees it, to convince “Democrats and Independents to caucus for her, to change status for a day.” In Iowa, she was courting voters from the non-MAGA wing of the G.O.P. Trump’s adviser Jason Miller told Politico that DeSantis’s campaign is on “life support, which means it’s Nikki Haley’s turn in the barrel.” The Trump campaign and an allied super PAC are spending $4.5 million on commercials targeting Haley, and they aren’t even bothering with DeSantis.

When I saw Haley in New Hampshire in the fall, moderation was her appeal; Iowa over the weekend was the same story. Without deviating much from her original script, she’s gotten endorsements or support from Americans for Prosperity Action, the Koch network, Wall Street, Silicon Valley billionaires, Democratic mega-donors, and, in Iowa, Marlys Popma, the former head of Iowa Right to Life, who made an ad calling Haley a “sister in Christ.” Last year at this time, Haley was thirty points behind DeSantis in the polls; now they’re less than one point apart. This weekend, most attendees I talked to told me they had come to see Haley because they were undecided. As Barton Swaim put it in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, “People who come to hear Mr. Trump aren’t there to assess him but to see their guy and commune with each other.” Those who came to Haley’s events are still casting about for alternatives.

“I’m here to do some fact-checking,” Jeff, a dentist in a camel coat and a plaid scarf, said on his way into the event at the vineyard. “Why did she allow the Confederate flag to be taken down in South Carolina? And why is the Civil War pertinent to the election?” (Last month, Haley had to walk back a remark about the causes of the Civil War after not including slavery on the first go-around.) Jeff went on, “I’m cynical. This is a dog-and-pony show. I come to see face to face how genuine the candidate is. Unfortunately, this is all just about how the politicians make us feel.”

As she spoke, Haley paced back and forth as she went through her talking points, the crowd applauding in approval:

“I got the call to go to the United Nations, and my honest answer was, I don’t even know what the U.N. does, I just know everybody hates it.”
“We took the ‘Kick Me’ sign off our backs, and America was respected again at the U.N.”
“You can’t get us a budget on time, you don’t get paid.”
“Congress has become the most privileged nursing home in the country.”
“We have got to end this national self-loathing. . . . America’s not racist—we’re blessed.”
“No more whining, no more complaining; now we get to work.”

“Amen,” said Heather, an attorney, standing next to me.

Haley told the crowd to ignore the polls and the media, then went on to cite a Wall Street Journal poll that showed Trump beating Biden by only a margin of error, with her beating Biden by seventeen points. Haley is often understood as the last remaining moderate in the race, even if her politics would have made her a hard-liner in a previous version of the Party: she first came onto the national scene as a Tea Party candidate. Nonetheless, Iowans I met on the trail often told me things like, “I like that Haley’s not as far over, that she knows how to compromise. She’s a little more compassionate,” Ashley, a stay-at-home mom, said. Joedy, a veteran and former police officer, told me that he and his wife “enjoyed Trump’s four years, but we’re ready to move on. So it’s basically between her and DeSantis. We care about: economy, military, border.”

Later in the day, Haley gave an abbreviated stump speech at Field Day Brewing Company, in North Liberty. She posed for photos while “Woman in the White House” by Sheryl Crow played. “Haley’s kind of the default vote against Trump,” an Iowa City resident who usually caucuses with the Democrats but planned to register as a Republican ahead of the event, told me. DeSantis ads played on the brewery’s muted TVs during the commercial break while Haley spoke. Sununu, in a New Hampshire ski windbreaker, was leaning against the bar, drinking an I.P.A. “Nobody’s going to a Trump rally saying, ‘Hey, I was for Nikki Haley, but now I’m with you,’ ” he told me. “It’s a one-way street. Everybody’s coming to Nikki.” He went on, “The emperor has no clothes.”

At another event, an hour farther east, in Bettendorf, a guy with a Nikki button written in Hebrew script was circulating, trying to show people his book “Make America Kosher Again.” He had a bag full of red yarmulkes emblazoned with the candidate’s name. “I gave some to the campaign, and now they have them,” he told me.

A man named Dave, who works for John Deere, wore Ukrainian and Georgian Legion patches. “I support Nikki because she supports Ukraine,” he said. We were joined by Vitaly, who came to Iowa from Ukraine ten years ago. “I work with rich people who want to get green cards,” he told me. He’d come with several friends from Ukraine, who also live nearby. “Haley feels like someone here in Bettendorf, who tells the ladies, Come here, gather ’round,” one said.

“I’m a Republican, but I listen to NPR,” Camron, a 911 dispatcher standing next to me said. “I’m one of the few people in this country who still loves Mitt Romney.” As Haley walked out, the first bars of “Eye of the Tiger” played—again—and Camron shouted, “We love you, Governor Haley!”

Her standard closing line is about how our best days are yet to come, but before delivering it she tried out a new self-mythology: “With me, you will get a transparent happy warrior that goes out and fights to cut waste all the time.”

Pundits say it’s not up to Iowa to pick the winner of the election but, rather, to narrow the field. Haley’s strong showing raises the sudden possibility that she, and not DeSantis, might emerge as the last challenger to Trump standing. Still, Iowa’s evangelical voters have stuck with Trump, giving him a comfortable margin in the polls. While Trump bashed her as a globalist, Haley was at the Embassy Club in downtown Des Moines to talk to Run GenZ, an organization that recruits “conservative trailblazers” to pursue public office. In town halls and ads, Haley often pitches herself as part of a “new generation,” but this was the first time I’d seen her talking to the generations that would come after her.

In a ballroom on the thirty-fourth floor, young men in blazers sat at round white tables with votive candles, scrolling on their phones and swirling cocktails, waiting for dinner to start. The Haley campaign had seated reporters around the periphery of the dinner, under firm instructions not to mingle with diners. My chair was so close to the table in front of me that I ended up in the background of their selfies. Haley walked in wearing knee-high boots and a black shirtdress, joined by Sununu. Their back-and-forth, framed as campaign tips and advice to young candidates, consisted of remarks such as “be genuine” (Sununu) and “push through the fear . . . trust your gut” (Haley). “I like to be normal,” Haley said. “I like to have fun.”

When Haley delivers her stump speech, she can reliably pause for her laugh and applause lines. “I started doing the books for the family business when I was thirteen. It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized that was child labor!” Here, she gave the cues but didn’t get the reactions; people at the tables in my line of sight were scrolling on their phones as she spoke.

After the introductory prayer, I talked to Caleb Hanna, one of Run GenZ’s founders, who, when he won a seat in the West Virginia House of Delegates, was among both the youngest elected officials in the country and the youngest African-American state legislators ever elected. “My campaign slogan is ‘God, guns, and babies’—but I’m also a big free-market, capitalist guy.” He went on, “I gained respect for Haley after this evening, but I’m still for Trump.” At the end of the event, Aaron Miller, who wore a red tuxedo and is a county commissioner in Tennessee, told me that it was useful to hear from an establishment conservative figure like Haley—“she’s been in these positions of power”—but he wouldn’t vote for her. “Because, at the end of the day, I don’t believe her. I believe Trump.”

Haley comes back to Iowa on Tuesday for a last swing of caucus events, with the goal of consolidating her position of first also-ran. One week from the caucus, she dominates the airwaves, far outspending all her opponents on ads in the state. On Wednesday night, she’ll debate DeSantis; Trump, who has refused to participate in any of the debates, will host a rally with Dr. Ben Carson in Davenport. Haley and DeSantis are fighting for second place, hoping that it becomes something greater.