Ten Republican presidential candidates will visit the Iowa State Fairgrounds Varied Industries Building during the Iowa GOP’s day-long “Growth and Opportunity Party” tomorrow.
It starts in mid-morning and lasts until 5 o’clock and will feature a fair-like atmosphere, with candidate booths and even TVs to watch college football between the speeches.
Many of the candidates are arriving in Iowa today. Mike Huckabee will be making stops in Missouri Valley, Harlan, Audubon and Carroll — part of his quest to hold events in each of Iowa’s 99 counties.
“Winning Iowa is not a sudden explosion, it’s a slow burn and, you know, I’m not the least bit panicked about where we are and where things are going because every day we’re adding chairmen in counties,” Huckabee says. “We have volunteers. We have people in our structure and organization.”
Huckabee won the 2008 Iowa Caucuses and he says it’s because he took the time to meet potential Caucus-goers “person-to-person.”
“You can’t do that behind a rope line,” Huckabee says. “You can’t do that, you know, in a big event where you never go out there and answer questions and touch people. If there’s a better way to do it, I’d love to find out, but having won it before with the most votes anybody ever received in an Iowa Caucus in its history I’d like to think I learned something in that process.”
Here’s the list of the other candidates who’ll be speaking Saturday at the GOP’s event in Des Moines: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio. Each will be given 15 minutes to speak to the crowd. The new Iowa front-runner Ben Carson, will not attend. Carson is holding campaign fundraisers in Tennessee tomorrow.