WAUKEE, Iowa — Nikki Haley’s Tuesday rally outside Des Moines was a fittingly pedestrian event in this desultory excuse of a presidential primary.

Haley delivered a 15-minute stump speech with the precise same words and intonations of her every public appearance, took no questions from voters before posing for pictures with them and then conducted a Fox News interview beneath the overhang of an Irish pub while ignoring her travelling press corps, who stood without cover in the wind and snow.

It was the cautious performance of a frontrunner, not that of a candidate lagging by double-digits with less than a week before the Iowa caucuses. Which is to say it was typical of her events and altogether reflective of an oddly bifurcated campaign in which Donald Trump is the dominant frontrunner but his two leading opponents are competing against one another as though they’re still in the before times.

Perhaps that’s because with the company they keep it can feel like the same pre-Trump party from which Haley and Ron DeSantis first emerged.

The most memorable feature of Haley’s otherwise forgettable gathering was not what she said but the nature of her audience — and how it explains why Trump is poised to win overwhelmingly in Iowa on Monday but will face the same general election challenges in 2024 he did in 2020.

I struggled to find a single attendee in the suburban strip mall tavern who was not a college graduate. Similarly, the day before, I couldn’t find a Haley admirer who showed up to see her in Sioux City who was not also a college graduate.

“She’s reasonable,” Jim Maine, a Waukee resident, said of Haley. “Originally I was favoring DeSantis, but he just hasn’t connected.”

Maine had no use for Trump, calling the former president “a jilted junior high boyfriend” who “makes up names for people.”

A retiree, Maine was an accountant for an insurance company — “pretty standard around here,” as he put it of Dallas County. Now, none of his neighbors “who voted for [Trump] the last couple of times are going to vote for him again.”

If it all sounds like a windup to a sort of cul-de-sac Pauline Kaelism — I don’t know anyone in our homeowners association voting for Trump! — well, that’s the defining story of today’s Republican Party. The GOP’s traditional, professional class base is eager to move on from somebody they find between embarrassing and appalling, but the party’s beating heart is now Trump-loving working class........

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