Iowa is a madhouse as 2016 candidates make final, frantic push for votes

The polls are extremely close on both sides of the aisle. The candidates are scrabbling over, at best, a few hundred thousand voters. The way the votes are cast is…eccentric.

This is Iowa on the day before the first electoral test of the 2016 election. The place is a madhouse, awash in ads and pollsters and journalists and, especially, politicians—grinning, noisy, desperate politicians and their teams, all scrambling to nail down their supporters before the caucuses open on Monday night.

If you live in Iowa, you could have gone to basically any part of the state and found, say, Bernie Sanders making that final push to stun the world and beat Hillary Clinton. You could have gone into some bar and find Chris Christie holding forth. You could have gone into a diner and listened to Ted Cruz, desperate to avoid being outmaneuvered by Donald Trump. You could have seen Trump himself at a rally in front of his personal plane.

On Tuesday, all of that will end, and the whole thing will move fully to New Hampshire. For now, though, Iowa looks like this.