The View from Iowa.

• Author: Lounsbury, Jud

As Dr. Ben Carson is about to step into his campaign bus, I begin posing a few questions. A bespectacled man with a mustache starts to say the candidate won't answer, but Carson nods yes.

"Do you have any thoughts on why, for the first time in American history, polls are showing that roughly half of Republicans want a minority for their nominee?" I ask.

Carson smiles, shakes his head no, and demurs, "I just think it's a natural tendency ... there are a lot of minority people, you know, who don't sort of go with the herd mentality and sort of think out of the box."

"Has Obama broken the glass ceiling?" I ask the man who rose to national prominence as Fox News's go-to critic on all things Obama.

"Let's hope so," he says with a hearty laugh as he turns to get on his bus.

President Barack Obama shocked the political world when he won re-election with just 39 percent of the white vote in 2012. The Republicans have been trying to figure out what to do ever since.

The conventional wisdom among Republicans today seems divided into two camps. The first camp believes that if they nominate a minority who is critical of his own community, it's a genius twofer: They have the perfect vessel to point out the truths that would be considered racist by a white candidate; in addition, many minorities will wake up, see the error of their ways, and vote Republican.

The second camp figures the party is better off nominating another white guy who can use racist rhetoric to drum up enough white votes to overwhelm the minority vote. This view was best articulated by RealClearPolitics conservative writer Sean Trende, who argued that Republicans should be focused on white voters who are increasingly moving into the Republican column. Trende says he doesn't see "any compelling reason why these trends can't continue, and why a Republican couldn't begin to approach Ronald Reagan's thirty-point win with whites from 1984 in a more neutral environment than Reagan enjoyed."

For a while this past fall, it seemed as though the first camp was winning the day. In both Iowa and national polls, well over half of Republicans were supporting candidates who weren't white, with African American Carson leading the way and Hispanics Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio not far behind.

But that was pre-Paris and pre-San Bernardino, before Donald Trump picked up steam with his nostalgic invocations of World War II Japanese internment camps. The reality TV star earned his street cred in Republican circles by pushing the claim that President Obama was really born in Kenya, which would, according to redneck lore, disqualify and remove Obama from the presidency. Problem solved!

Trump has also appeared on Alex Jones's fringe but popular radio program that has claimed Obama is part of an "Islamic sleeper cell" that is secretly running "jihad operations."

To sort it out for myself, I went back to my home state of Iowa to see what was really happening on the ground as the campaign for the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus was entering its home stretch.

Iowa is a state with a rich, progressive history, electing progressive-movement heroes like Albert Cummins and Henry Wallace--only to turn around and send Red Scare standard bearer Bourke Hickenlooper to the U.S. Senate and all-around cuckoo bird...