FAIRFIELD, Iowa—Inside the Raj, an idyllic French country-style spa and resort nestled among cornfields in southeastern Iowa, I asked for the gemstone light therapy, which promised to deluge me with inner peace, expand my consciousness and increase my energy.

But they told me I wasn’t ready. So I had to settle for the tongue reading and pulse assessment. Several minutes into having a bald and shoeless Australian stranger peering at my papillae, I wondered what I had gotten myself into.

I had traveled to Fairfield and nearby Maharishi Vedic City to try to understand the appeal of Marianne Williamson, a spiritual guru running for president. She’s been an object of fascination with the political pundit class, often as the butt of their snarky tweets, but also because her appearances attract hundreds on the campaign trail and thousands on the lecture circuit. She’s been a best-selling author for more than 20 years and—not unlike the current president—has a powerful grassroots appeal in precincts far from the knowing zip codes of Washington and New York.

On Thursday, less than a month before the Iowa caucuses, Williamson laid off her entire staff but didn’t suspend her campaign. “The point of my candidacy has been to tell the heart’s truth and that does not cost money,” she wrote. There are a few places in the country where her heart’s truth resonates more than others. If you look at the highest densities of Williamson donors around the U.S.—as depicted in an August analysis by the New York Times—most fall in the places you might expect: Northern California, Hawaii and seekers’ capitals like Sedona, Arizona. But one is right in the heartland—in fact within a short drive of the gabled white farmhouse made famous in American Gothic.

In these neighboring southeast Iowa burgs of Vedic City and Fairfield—farming communities, dotted by a Family Video, a Pizza King and a Tractor Supply store—Williamson might as well already be president. Long before she declared her 2020 candidacy for the Democratic nomination, Williamson had been cultivating this part of Iowa, holding a number of events for her self-help business—drawing visitors to local haunts such as Revelations, a quirky cafe that prominently sells her books, and staying at the Raj, the resort owned by Williamson’s friends and donors Rogers and Candace Badgett. She campaigned here seven times in 2019—nearly a quarter of the town’s 29 presidential campaign stops, according to the Des Moines Register candidate tracker.