Good morning, everyone. I'm playbook co-author Ryan Lizza. It's Friday, January 12th. One week from a possible

partial government shutdown and three days until the Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa,

where I've been this week reporting on what we can expect next Monday night.

To answer that question, I sat down with a man who knows Iowa Republican politics better than just about anyone. David Cottrell, whose caucus experience goes back to 1980 when he was a teenager.

Dave ran the caucuses for the state party in 1996 and has been a coveted operative in the state

for aspiring Republican senators, governors, and presidents. I caught up with Dave at his place

in downtown Des Moines yesterday for a two-hour conversation where we nerded out on everything

you can imagine about the Iowa caucuses.

A full a version of that interview will appear over the weekend in the newsletter.

First, everyone knows that the evangelical vote is important in Iowa and that it powered Rick

Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz to victory in the last three competitive

GOP caucuses.

Well, Dave says this year could be different.

Here we go in 2024.

You would look at it through a 2016 lens and think, well, that's DeSantis.

You know, he's a past the heartbeat bill.

He knows how to talk about these issues.

He picks good culture war

fights for that base, and he was really effective in Florida doing that. So you see him coming,

you think, well, that's the Cruz Coalition coming together again. He announces a bunch of faith

leaders, and then here comes Vanderplots, and he's the biggest name in evangelical politics in Iowa. So you think,

well, okay, they've done that now. But right about the same time Vanderplots comes on, Trump releases

...