From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you've gotten sick of seeing presidential candidates on television, in debates or in commercials, you might want to visit Iowa. There you can find candidates in the grocery store, in television. In debates or in commercials, you might want to visit Iowa. There you can find

candidates in the grocery store, in diners, maybe even delivering the sermon at church on

Sunday, or shaking hands and kissing babies like mad. We've been talking about the Iowa caucuses

forever, it seems. And now it's just weeks away. The next debate among the Democrats

is on Tuesday in Des Moines, and the New Yorker's Eric Latch has been covering the campaign,

and he's stationed in Iowa.

Eric, I've been a journalist for a long time, but I've never had the pleasure of covering

a presidential campaign, and I'm kind of jealous, to be honest with you. And one thing is to

watch it on television

and read about it and so on. What's it like day to day covering the weeks running up to the Iowa

caucus? What do you do? Where do you go? What's it like? Yeah. So, you know, it's a combination

of, you know, the candidates putting together little kind of tours and you're trying to follow them and see what they're talking about and see what the rooms that they're in are like and talk to the people who go out to see them.

But you're long past the living room and diner stage of campaigns, right?

I mean, now you're in high school gyms and auditoriums and things like that.

Yeah, although, you know, the scale with Iowa does not, you know, a big rally is still 800 people. It doesn't, it doesn't ever quite reach the kind of like arena size. The Iowa voters you meet tend to talk more about like, well, I've shaken this person's hand and I've shaken this person's hand and I'm going to make my decision after I've shaken this other person's hand. That counts for everything. Yeah, that counts for a lot, I think. Now, I've got to tell you, Eric, if you'd ask me a week ago, I'd have said that the coming Democratic debate would be like all the other Democratic debates, which concentrated on domestic issues, Medicare for All, climate, all those things.

Yep.

But that's clearly changed with the killing of Qasem Soleimani in Iraq and the retaliation

that took place Tuesday night. How has Soleimani's death shaken up the Democratic primary so

far? In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Soleimani, you had kind of two

ways that the candidates responded. On the one hand, you had Biden and Pete Buttigieg,

most prominently, sort of issuing statements saying, Sulemani was a bad guy, you know,

...