Voters venture into sub-zero temperatures today to kick off the Republican presidential nomination race with the Iowa caucuses, the first major test of whether runaway front-runner Donald Trump is as much of a sure thing as he appears.
The ex-president is expected to win the Midwestern state's first-in-the-nation vote easily as he bids to be the Republican standard-bearer against President Joe Biden in November.
But Iowans may have to contend with the coldest conditions in the modern era of presidential election campaigns, with blizzards and a potential wind chill of minus 32 degrees Celsius forecast.
Trump and his leading rivals, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, were forced to cancel appearances in the home stretch as the threat to today's turnout added intrigue to a campaign season that is already something of an unknown quantity.
Trump has been indicted four times since he was last a candidate and is preparing for the potential collapse of his business empire in a civil fraud trial.
"If DeSantis's massive ground effort, coupled with a recent Haley surge, can drag Trump under 50 percent by several points, that will be the first meaningful sign Trump can be defeated," said analyst Alex Avetoom. "This paradigm-shifting reality - that Trump could be defeated - happens if, and only if, the rest of the field consolidates behind one anti-Trump candidate."
For all the talk of miracle bounces, the Iowa race is hardly competitive: a new NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll has Trump at 48 percent among likely caucus-goers, with Haley surging into second place but still only at 20 percent and DeSantis slipping to 16 percent.
"I'm voting for Trump again," 37-year-old trucker Jeff Nikolas said, adding that "he may be bullheaded, but he can actually get stuff done."
The poll was more bad news for Florida governor DeSantis, who has seen his claim to be heir apparent to the post-Trump Republican Party eclipsed by Haley.
The former South Carolina governor is looking to outperform expectations to cement her claim to be Trump's top challenger going into her preferred state of New Hampshire next week.
Iowa is a notoriously poor predictor of the eventual nominee but it is considered crucial for winnowing the field and as a springboard to the next few battlegrounds, which include Haley's home state.
