Oliver Laughland: best queue
“You just can’t trust ’em,” said Karen, a fifty-something white woman queuing with me outside a Donald Trump rally in Janesville, Wisconsin. “I mean, most of them are Isis. That’s a fact.”
Karen was talking about the European migration crisis and, unfortunately, I felt compelled to nod along, paranoid about blowing my cover. My application for press entry to the event was not approved, and so I had to queue outside for over eight hours posing as a member of the public. I told some of the more dedicated attendees who were keen to vet out protesters and media, that I was just a “writer visiting from London, intrigued by the Trump phenomena”.
But Karen remained skeptical. She asked me to join the rounds of applause for the police as they patrolled the event, she asked about my political views, my family and my ethnicity.
Once she was satisfied I was no intruder, which involved a number of white lies on my behalf, she invited me into the fold. She offered to buy me a “Hillary for Prison” badge, and slipped a small edition of the US constitution, complete with a “Make America Great Again” sticker on the front, into my back pocket.
After Trump arrived, she suggested we pretend to be mother and son, so we could both get front-row seats (her husband was a US navy veteran and offered priority entry). I politely declined, but was taken aback, both by Karen’s deeply racist views and her warm generosity.
Lauren Gambino: worst meal
It was the day before the New Hampshire primary and I was following Hillary Clinton around the state on her final push to win over Granite Staters.
But due to a series of unfortunate events that included a 5.30am call time, a grumpy secret service agent and a blizzard, it was 11pm by the time I headed home and I hadn’t eaten a single thing.
When I got to my hotel, I was informed that the kitchen was closed and there was a fat chance I’d get anything delivered in this weather. My only option was their ransacked convenience stand. The only edible option left was a microwavable Thai bowl. But there were no microwaves in the room and the kitchen was closed – so no utensils for me.
I heated some water with the coffee maker in my room and dumped mugs of it into the plastic bowl. The water was lukewarm, not nearly hot enough to cook anything. But I was starving. So I closed my eyes and slurped down the floppy noodles.
David Smith: best Mar-a-Lago moment
Conventional wisdom said it would be electoral suicide. In the thick of the primary season, Donald Trump paraded his membership in the 1% by inviting the world’s media to his gilded age Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. As ever with the swaggering businessman, what didn’t kill him made him stronger.
Beyond the palm trees, the sun was setting in the sumptuous waterway. I walked across the manicured lawns and heard the thwack of tennis balls; when I turned to look, the players stopped and glared back at me. A Romanesque statue stood on a balcony of the 118-room Mediterranean-style mansion once intended as a winter White House. Inside, we took our seats in a ballroom under giant chandeliers, surrounded by white walls, gold trim and outsized mirrors.
Trump sat in the front row, surrounded by his entourage (with plenty of botox and bling) that called to mind John Lennon’s directive: “The people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.”
It felt like being in Versailles crossed with Las Vegas. None of it could help Trump’s credentials as a man of the people, but presumably that is the point: he is a billionaire, he is married to a model, he lives like a Sun King. The sweet smell of success intoxicates those who feel robbed of it.
Paul Owen: best rescue
The New Hampshire primary ended late on a freezing cold Tuesday night with the Guardian team spread out across the state at various “watch parties”, where candidates and their teams gather to celebrate their victories or commiserate over their losses. I had been at Jeb Bush’s party – which was about as exciting as it sounds – at a community college in Manchester, the state’s largest city and the namesake of my hometown.
My boss came to pick me up for the 40-minute drive back to the hotel. But as soon as we got on the highway, our rental car began to stutter, and with a worrying smell of burning coming from the engine it gradually ground to a halt by the side of the highway.
The tow truck crew who rescued us were very friendly. How did they feel every four years when their state was invaded by politicians and media? “Way to fuck up a state,” one replied cheerfully.
Over the previous few days we had been collecting signs and memorabilia from the various rallies we’d attended. Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again sign was clearly visible in the back of our car as I finished talking to the two mechanics.
“I’m glad we saved you, man,” one said as they got back into their truck. “You’re a good guy voting for Trump.”
Adam Gabbatt: best six-foot image of a foetus
Carly Fiorina had briefly risen to the top of the Republican primary polls after announcing her bid for the presidency in May 2015, but by January she was the forgotten woman, desperately in need of a boost to her ailing campaign.
Hoping to win support among Iowa’s plentiful social conservatives, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO ramped up her anti-abortion stance by hosting a “right to life” forum at the end of January.
The forum took place at the Greater Des Moines botanical garden, which is hailed on its website as “an oasis in the heart of downtown Des Moines”. As Fiorina arrived at the venue she encountered a group of pre-school children, visiting the gardens on a field trip arranged by their childcare provider.
In a classic piece of political opportunism, Fiorina lined up with the children for a photo. In a less well-advised move, she then ushered the children, who were aged between three and four years old, into her anti-abortion rally, sitting them in front of a six-foot image of a foetus.
The rally featured Fiorina railing against children being killed in the womb and against organs being harvested from aborted babies. It also included a woman waving a scale model of a foetus at the crowd and telling them: “This is the face of abortion.”
Unsurprisingly, some parents were upset.
“The kids went there to see the plants,” said Chris Beck, father of four-year-old Chatham, one of the children Fiorina appeared with. “She ambushed my son’s field trip.” Fiorina went on to win 1.9% of the vote in Iowa and suspended her campaign 10 days later.
David Taylor: best tractor
On the last Sunday in January, outside of a coffee shop in West Des Moines, Iowa, Garry Leffler gave me a tour of the world’s most patriotic tractor. The 1957 860 Ford, was complete with an airbrushed hologram eagle.
On the top of the hood was a Bible verse, John 3:16, and a cross. “If you look in the clouds right here you can see Jesus in the clouds,” he said, indicating the airbrushed paint job. Leffler had brought his tractor along to a rally in support of Mike Huckabee, but he admitted he was already leaning towards Trump. Leffler was for God, guns and “beating the Clinton machine” – a deep red conservative, but also a great storyteller with a well-articulated set of principles. Agree with him or not, he was properly engaged in the democratic process. And he had a lovely tractor.
Sabrina Siddiqui: best fight involving robots
It was a snow-covered day in Manchester, and polls were offiicially open in the New Hampshire primary on 9 February. Marco Rubio was fresh off the now famous debate in which the Florida senator robotically repeated himself during an exchange with Chris Christie – asserting at least four times that Barack Obama “knows exactly what he is doing”.
The clip subsequently played on loop across the major news networks for two straight days as voters headed to the polls. And so it was no surprise that when Rubio turned up at a polling center the next day, awaiting him were people wearing cardboard boxes, dressed as “Marcobots”.
Rubio did his best while greeting voters to ignore the bots – whose costumes read “Marco Roboto” and “Rubio Talking Point 3000”. But his supporters rose to his defense and eventually a fight broke out between the two sides. No one was seriously hurt, nor were police summoned, but it was a scene to say the least.
Dan Roberts: most moving moment
Meeting voters in the wild can be an underwhelming experience. Watching them vote is another matter entirely. The most moving experience of the 2016 presidential election campaign trail was – for this jaded naturalist – the sight of raw democracy in action during the Iowa caucuses in February.
Four groups of neighbors drifted into a separate corners of a school theater in the suburbs of Des Moines: a roughly equally number of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, a tiny handful of Martin O’Malley oddballs, and a small but equally crucial group of undecideds. One by one, members of the last two groups were picked off by leaders from the first two, who took turns to go over and try to persuade them why their candidate had the better answers for America. The two biggest packs of supporters swelled as everyone picked a viable tribe, until Sanders emerged with one extra Iowan and was rewarded with four of the seven delegates on offer.
Chaotic? Yes. Brutal and open to bullying? Possibly. In other contexts, seeing those of weak conviction picked off by the strong-willed would seem distinctly undemocratic. Yet, by the end of the night, everyone seemed to go home more aware of the instincts and feelings of their fellow citizens, and less convinced that politics is anything other than a messy, bloody, compromise.
Ben Jacobs: most emotional caucus night
On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum held a final event before he would suffer a devastating loss. The underdog winner of Iowa in 2012, Santorum never caught fire this year, despite relentlessly campaigning throughout the Hawkeye State. At a Pizza Ranch restaurant outside Des Moines, the former Pennsylvania senator addressed a room of 80 supporters, most of whom had been with him when he was an asterisk in the polls four years ago and were still with him when he had returned to being an asterisk again.
Everyone knew, though no one would say it, that Santorum did not have a chance of repeating his 2012 miracle on caucus night. It felt like a wake where family members gathered to grieve a loved one as Santorum’s stump speech was tinged with nostalgia and he hugged devoted supporters.
Nicky Woolf: best civil disagreement
@NickyWoolf disagreement among the few protesters that remain. Police watching, stopped now pic.twitter.com/zMMPotS66L
— Nicky Woolf (@NickyWoolf) May 28, 2016
Three hundred or more San Diego police in full riot gear and military fatigues trapped a group of anti-Trump protesters after a rally on a road bridge at dusk on 27 May. They advanced toward the group periodically, firing pepper-balls and beanbag rounds at the group causing everyone to run.
But at one point, a Trump supporter, who had been accidentally corralled with the protesters, became engaged in an animated, fascinating, reasonably civil debate with the protesters around him – drawing everyone around inwards as an enthusiastic audience for the debate. For a moment, the crowd forgot the massed and sinister ranks of armed riot police just yards away.
