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Warren is not so much campaigning as counselling at this point, making an emotional appeal to voters to put their faith in her. According to the Washington Post, a half hour or so before her most recent town halls, Warren has been holding private discussions with “carefully selected voters, from those who are wavering to potential endorsers.” These sessions, which the campaign calls “clutches,” provide an opportunity for Warren to personally address any looming concerns, but it also sounds a bit like group therapy. At the event in Davenport, Warren’s golden retriever, Bailey, who has a luxuriant coat and the easy temper of a service dog, had his own selfie line. “It’s not a competition,” Warren told the crowd. “If it were, I might lose.”

She is also adding notes of moderation to her stump speech. The primary focus is now not on her most ambitious proposals but on what she would actually do, as President, in her first days in office. Universal health care has become using executive power to defend the Affordable Care Act and lower the cost of prescription drugs. Paying off the student loans of forty-three million Americans might be the ultimate goal, but the first order of business is appointing “a Secretary of Education who believes in public education.” The country needs to end its dependence on fossil fuels—but, for now, any new projects in housing, transportation, and electricity should be “zero carbon footprint” by 2030. “I start with things we can agree on,” she told the crowd inside a freshly parqueted gymnasium, at Sudlow Intermediate School, in Davenport, “and I start by treating everyone with respect.”

Iowans famously take their decision-making process extremely seriously, and expect the candidates to do the same. Jessalyn Holdcraft, a marketing professional in Cedar Rapids, who caucused for Hillary Clinton in 2016, developed a spreadsheet to help make her decision. It’s a complicated algorithm that factors in the results of an online quiz, an inspirational score, positions on key issues—“reproductive rights, funding Planned Parenthood, repealing the Hyde Amendment, and post-secondary educational paths”—and each candidate’s answer to the question: “In your first hundred days in the Oval Office, what would you do to support women?” She has personally asked this of each remaining candidate, except Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick. Based on the data, Holdcraft is most likely to caucus for Warren. But, with Klobuchar currently in second on the spreadsheet, she’s not ready to commit. “I like to say that there’s a difference between uncommitted and undecided,” she told me.

Many of Warren’s strongest supporters charted a deeply personal path to her campaign. In July, Pamela Portland moved to Davenport from Ansbach, Germany, where she was a director of public affairs for the U.S. Army, beginning in 2016. After Trump took office, she noticed that the work environment within the military started to change. “People who had to behave all of a sudden did not behave,” she told me. She retired this summer to return to her home state and become involved in the caucus. “Best decision I ever made,” she said. “I didn’t know it was going to be for Elizabeth. But I knew I was going to caucus.” Portland, who wore sleek frameless glasses, a black puffy vest, and a bright pink cashmere scarf, had enlisted in her twenties, and gone to nearby Grinnell College in her thirties, receiving a B.A. in European history. In Warren, who left George Washington University to marry her first husband, and stayed at home with her daughter before going to law school, Portland saw a kindred spirit. “I read her book,” Portland said. “I understood the struggle that she went through.”
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