Hi, this is Sandra in New York where I'm doing a bit of morning birding along the Bronx River as I walk to work on my first day back from maternity leave.

This podcast was reported at 9.12 a.m. on Monday, April 24th.

Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I will still be appreciated the chance to communicate with nature as I prepare to teach high schoolers.

Okay, here's the show.

I am not a birder, but I appreciate birders. They're a really committed bunch.

Yeah, I'm just curious if the water in air has gotten cleaner because I don't think of birding in nature with the Bronx River, but you know, I hope it's gotten good.

Hey there, it's the MPR Politics Podcast. Susan Davis, I cover politics.

I'm Don Gagne, National Political Correspondent.

And I'm Dominican Montenegro, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

And it's April 2023, which means it's a perfect time to talk Iowa 2024. Republican presidential hopefuls were there this weekend for a chance to meet with a key portion of the party's base. Christian Conservatives, Don, you're in Iowa right now.

You're joining us from Des Moines and you covered the event. So tell us about it and sort of what were your main takeaways.

This was an event sponsored by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition. That's one of the big Christian conservative groups in Iowa.

And they do these candidate cattle calls every cycle. They do multiple candidate cattle calls like this every cycle.

And this one about 1200 people came out. They paid $60 ahead for that. They got to see a bunch of candidates.

Some you've heard of, some with names like Donald Trump and Mike Pence. They were handed a Chick-fil-A box lunch slash dinner as they came in.

So it was a pretty full house. So people here are actually eager to start hearing these candidates.

Mike Pence was first and he, as you might expect, talked about how proud he was to be a part of all the accomplishments of the Trump Pence administration.

And Donald Trump was last and he was not actually here in person. He spoke via a live stream from Florida. And that was how the evening ended.

Don, I love these events because when you get a critical mass of potential candidates in one place, it sort of starts to give you a sense of how they're trying to differentiate, how they're positioning themselves.

And sort of what the issues are that it's clear that this portion of the base wants to hear about. So were there consistent themes or sort of lanes that you saw among the crowd?

There were absolutely consistent themes. But I might also add that people use this event if they're not a household name already in the way that Trump and Pence certainly are, they use the event to introduce themselves to an audience that just hasn't been paying that close attention.

We saw former Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson, on stage talking about his conservative record as governor of that state and the successes he had.

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