WAUKEE, Iowa — Evangelicals are likely to stay splintered for much of this year, and it’s difficult to see the influential bloc of voters coalescing behind a single favorite before next February’s Republican caucuses.

A forum that drew nine likely presidential candidates and 1,200 activists to a church here Saturday night, along with a dozen other events around the Hawkeye State this weekend, reflected how crowded the competition already is for the support of social conservatives.


Former Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee, who won the 2008 caucuses, still has deep appeal in this community. But there is lots of interest in first-time candidates, like Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio and even Bobby Jindal. And retreads like Rick Perry and Rick Santorum should not be totally written off; each could become a factor.

A splintered religious right could allow a relative moderate like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie – both of whom skipped the cattle call at Point of Grace church – to win the caucuses with a plurality, a fear expressed quietly by leaders of the movement.

With that in mind, here are the 10 biggest takeaways from three days on the ground in Iowa:

Republican candidates are sharpening their attacks on the business community

Trying to capitalize on populist anxieties in the Heartland, a procession of candidates lashed out at corporate power.

Jindal lamented the way that Republican governors of Indiana and Arkansas backed off their full-throated support for religious freedom laws in the face of boycott threats and pressure from employers like WalMart. “Corporate America is not going to bully the governor of Louisiana,” he said, getting a standing ovation.

Walker, the Wisconsin governor, and Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, argued that corporate interests only support legal immigration because they want to keep labor costs down.

“Those ‘labor costs’ are American families,” said Santorum. “We’re keeping down the wages of working families, and that’s not a party I want to be a part of!”

“When times are tough, the last thing we want to do is flood the market,” added Walker.

Huckabee, who decries the outsize power of “corporatists” in the GOP, warned about four decades of stagnant wages – which, by the way, includes the period Ronald Reagan was president. He also said he’s against giving the president fast-track authority for trade and cannot support the Trans-Pacific Partnership without more monitoring and policing mechanisms.

“Where some people talk about trickle-down economics, in other words when the economy is doing well, it will eventually trickle down and everyone will feel the effect of it; the inverse of that is true,” Huckabee said in an interview. “When the economy starts going south, it’s not the people at the top who feel it first; it’s the people at the bottom.”

Santorum called for an increase in the federal minimum wage and complained that Republicans bail out Wall Street and auto companies, but insist the principles of Adam Smith apply to the little guy.

Even Carly Fiorina, formerly the CEO of Hewlett Packard, attacked the proliferation of “crony capitalism” in her speech. She blamed Dodd-Frank for solidifying the power of too-big-to-fail banks at the expense of smaller community ones.

Rubio will play to win in Iowa

On his first trip here since kicking off his campaign earlier this month, the Florida senator announced that he will play hard. “We are going to be here often,” he told more than 100 people crammed into a state senator’s living room for an ice cream social in Ankeny. “We want to win the caucuses in this state!”

Sitting down with the Des Moines Register editorial board, the senator said his wife and kids will spend time on the ground during their summer vacation. He said his 12-year-old daughter has been doing research online about Iowa’s state fair and she’s getting excited for some of the musical acts.

Rubio has signed brand-name consultants in New Hampshire and his inner circle is full of South Carolina hands, but he’s yet to sign a big-deal Iowa consultant. People on the ground say that his team has been quietly reaching out to potential junior-level staff.

Pundits speculated that his support for comprehensive immigration reform, a topic he omitted in his Saturday night speech, would prompt him to focus more on New Hampshire or later primary states. But Rubio, a surrogate on Huckabee’s 2008 campaign, predicted his brand of retail politics will resonate here. He believes he can position himself as a bridge candidate with appeal to both establishment and grassroots voters.

“It takes me back to running for state representative and city commissioner; this is how we did it, one house at a time,” he said after the ice cream social. “Iowa voters are going to take time to study all the candidates…We’re going to try to win everywhere we can.”

Scott Walker showed range

He’s not as good at public speaking as Rubio, but Walker is way better at firing up a crowd of activists – especially Christian conservatives – than Bush. The son of a pastor catapulted to the top of the polls after a fiery January speech at a Des Moines cattle call sponsored by Congressman Steve King. Stylistically, with a raised voice and swinging arms, that speech could have been delivered by Howard Dean on Caucus night in 2004.

His speech here Saturday night was the opposite. He made some in the audience choke up with a powerful, humanizing story about a dairy farmer who died the day before his 2012 recall election. Walker read aloud from a Christian devotional book “Jesus Calling” that he had used to console the man’s widow, who showed up to vote for him despite her husband’s death.

Walker was last on the list of speakers, and the program – which was supposed to end at 9 p.m. – ran an hour over schedule. Many in the crowd were elderly, so they’re not usually out at 10 p.m. on a Saturday. The governor confided ahead of time that he feared the crowd would lack energy when he finally got on stage. It was a testament to the interest level he’s generated here that virtually everyone stayed in their bleacher-style seats until the end of the five-hour program.

Walker did an excellent job of showing the audience that he is one of them. He said he would wrap up his speech as fast as he could because he was eager to head back to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, for Sunday morning services. Speaking earlier in the afternoon at the Machine Shed restaurant, which is known for its cinnamon rolls, Walker noted that the last time he’d visited was during Lent – and it was hard for him because he’d given up sweets.

Mike Huckabee retains a significant reservoir of goodwill from 2008

“There’s no doubt he’s one of us!” the master of ceremonies, Kayne Robinson, a past chairman of the state GOP, said after Huckabee finished his stem-winder.

The former Baptist pastor left no doubt he will announce that he’s running again in Hope, Arkansas, on May 5 and laid out the rationale for another candidacy, essentially to reverse what sees as America’s moral decline.

“Today we’ve got people that think Adam and Eve were on Season Five of ‘Dancing with the Stars,’” he said.

Huckabee, who gave up a Fox News show in January, doubled down on controversial comments from earlier in the week that the U.S. is rapidly moving toward the criminalization of Christianity.”

“Let me clear: I’m not backing off because what I’m saying is true,” he said, to cheers.

Bobby Jindal’s strident, anti-gay marriage position will pay short-term dividends in Iowa

The Louisiana governor, who has worked as hard as anyone to stay in the 2016 conversation but has usually been an afterthought, got some of the most raucous cheers of the night Saturday with his pledge to push for a controversial religious freedom law.

Hundreds of copies of an op-ed that Jindal just wrote for the New York Times declaring his firm opposition to gay marriage floated around the halls. “The governor of Louisiana’s views are not ‘evolving’ with the times,” Jindal said.

Even Huckabee went out of his way to praise Jindal during his own speech: “He boldly took a stand for Biblical marriage. Not only to do it, but to do it in the New York Times, I thought showed real courage.”

Jindal has vastly improved as a public speaker, and he’s staked out turf as one of the most ideologically pure candidates in pack. One problem is that many of the positions he’s staking out would become incredibly problematic for a Republican nominee in the general election. But that’s not what Jindal, who plans to declare his candidacy after he wraps up a legislative session in June, is focused on.

Santorum doesn’t want to talk about social issues

The 2012 caucus winner has been typecast as social conservative, so he made the surprising choice to not talk about abortion or gay marriage – as everyone else did – during an appearance before social conservatives.

Strategists say his goal is to show that he’s a full-spectrum conservative; he believes everyone in the crowd already knows where he stands on these issues, and he wants to broaden his base. That’s all the more important because of how many competitors he has for that vote this time, especially compared to 2012.

The first half of Santorum’s speech focused on the need to offer a new kind of economic agenda, and the rest touted his work on foreign policy in the Senate. He bragged about pushing for Iran sanctions that George W. Bush opposed.

“We’re going to be going up against a Secretary of State, someone with tremendous knowledge … most of it wrong…but someone who is an expert,” said Santorum. “We need to look at someone to go up against Mrs. Clinton was has background and expertise.”

Talking up his credentials, he even bragged that he was recently quoted on an ISIS online magazine under the heading: “In the words of our enemy.”

Ted Cruz is leaning harder on his record as a Supreme Court litigator

The biggest knock on the Texas senator is that he’s only been in the Senate two years and has not accomplished much, except for his defund Obamacare effort, which led to a government shutdown.

In recent appearances, Cruz has been talking a lot about his work as the state’s Solicitor General to push back on this line of attack.

“I’ve spent the past couple of decades fighting for religious liberty,” said Cruz, who is 44.

You could hear his cowboy boots clank as he paced across the stage, telling the stories of three cases he worked on in which the Supreme Court decided in his favor: displaying the 10 Commandments at the state capitol, restoring “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and protecting a cross from being taken down as a monument on federal land.

Last weekend in New Hampshire, speaking to a gun group, Cruz spoke of his work on the Heller case that restored gun rights in D.C.

Rick Perry made a Biblically inspired plea for a second chance. It might work.

The former Texas governor has been trying to explain to supporters from 2012 why he won’t make the same kinds of mistakes and gaffes this time. After explaining in New Hampshire last weekend that he’s now better briefed on issues, and that his health has improved, this weekend he leaned heavily on his own faith journey to make the case for another opportunity to run.

Perry spoke powerfully about drifting away from God in the Air Force and then returning to the house where he grew up in Paint Creek without a plan for his future. “I was lost,” he said.

“I’m kind of a good example of somebody who got a second chance,” he said. “You look at our Biblical history. We have flawed characters. Moses was incredibly afraid of public speaking, but he led the people to the Promised Land. David was a man after God’s own heart but he failed because of temptation. [Faith eventually led him back to God.] Paul was given that second chance. This is a man who was a professional persecutor of Christians, but on that road to Damascus he was given a second chance.”

“America is a country of second chances,” he added. “I think America is ready for a second chance right now.”

This generated strong applause. Perry was less fluid when it came to talking about the issues than his own personal narrative. But he is loose, having fun and keeping an aggressive travel schedule. Still, he knows that the margin of error for mistakes this time is even lower and that a third chance would be even harder to get than a second.

Rand Paul plans to be the leading crusader against abortion in the Republican field.

Winning over social conservatives is central to the Kentucky senator’s strategy of expanding his base beyond those who voted for his father in 2012 or 2008. He’s decided that being an outspoken supporter of a 20-week federal ban on abortion is one way to do that.

He’s trying to show that he can be a scrappy fighter on the issue. Most Republican candidates are uncomfortable talking about abortion because of sticky questions about exceptions. The GOP blew two very winnable Senate races in 2012 after male candidates got trapped in the thicket of defending rape exceptions.

Paul got into testy exchanges with the mainstream media lately when he was pressed on which exceptions he supports. He declined to say, responding with questions for Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on when she thinks a baby in the womb should get rights. This has played very well in the anti-abortion community.

“I’m tired of us retreating on this issue, and I’m going to push back,” said Paul. “We can win this argument.”

Israel is more of a litmus test than ever before for evangelicals

This crowd has always felt a special bond with Israel, inspired by Biblical passages that say the land belongs to the Jewish people. Four years ago, it was a box all the candidates checked. Now, it is consistently one of the biggest applause lines in their speeches.

Contrary to most coverage, it’s not just about appealing to megadonors like Sheldon Adelson. The Republican Jewish Coalition meeting was running simultaneously in Las Vegas this weekend, and speakers like Cruz and Perry addressed both.

There was a booth called “Iowans for Israel” near the entrance to the sanctuary, where attendees could get free lapel pins that show the Israeli and Iowa flags crossed over each other. A man in the audience waved an Israeli flag every time a candidate said anything good about the country.

“How can it be that our president shows more respect for the Ayatollah in Iran than our allies in Israel?” Rubio asked to loud cheers.

Walker brought the crowd to its feed when he brought up Israel near the end of his speech. “We need a president who recognizes that Israel is an ally and starts treating it like one,” he said.

Fiorina said she’s visited more countries than any of the other GOP candidates. “I remember sitting in Bibi Netanyahu’s office five years ago,” she said. “There were only three people in that office: me, my husband Frank and Bibi Netanyahu. And Bibi Netanyahu wanted to talk then about Iran.”