ANKENY, Iowa — Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are spending the final hours before tonight's Iowa caucuses in the snowy I-80 and I-35 corridors, courting suburban voters who want an alternative to GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.

💡 Why it matters: The late rush in Iowa is a snow-covered version of election battles to come across the U.S. in 2024, as both parties fight for voters in suburbs that aren't heavily Republican red or Democratic blue, Axios' Sophia Cai and Linh Ta write.

• In Iowa and beyond, suburban voters generally are more likely to be college-educated, more affluent and more likely to live in moderate battleground precincts than rural voters who, in Iowa, have largely favored Trump.

💼 Case in point: Ankeny, the largest suburb in the fast-growing Des Moines area, goes back and forth in its political leanings. In 2021, the suburb's voters elected a conservative school board whose members campaigned against masks in schools and on giving parents more control.

• That flipped last year, when four candidates promoted by progressives were elected after campaigning on equity and supporting LGBTQ students.

🔎 Between the lines: Haley's emphasis on Iowa's suburbs has focused on counties that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) won in the 2016 presidential caucuses. The former UN ambassador is hoping to find support from moderate Republicans.

• DeSantis is competing with Trump for rural evangelical voters and has often leaned on his wife, Casey DeSantis, and Iowa's popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, to make his pitch to suburban voters.

📷 14 photos of Iowa campaigns.

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The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in support of Israel and against militarism as he became a leader of America's Civil Rights Movement.

• Today, with the Middle East in turmoil, both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict say his remarks show that he'd favor them, Axios' Russell Contreras writes.

Why it matters: King's words from the middle of the 20th century are often cited to bolster contemporary political positions without historical context — and debates about the Middle East are no different.

🇮🇱 Almost immediately after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, supporters of Israel pointed to King's words expressing support for the Jewish nation.

• Israel "is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world," King said in the widely shared video.

🇵🇸 Supporters of Palestinians have pointed to speeches King gave against violence, the Vietnam War and military action on oppressed people as evidence that he would have opposed Israel's bombing of Gaza.

• Demonstrators supporting the Palestinian territories have staged civil disobedience marches to urge a ceasefire, sometimes holding posters with MLK quotes.

💬 "First and foremost, he always was for nonviolence. So I can be sure that he would be for a ceasefire" in Gaza today, King's son, Martin Luther King III, tells Axios.

• "I don't know the answer to the Middle East. What I do know is that my father would be for the support of all humanity, whatever that looks like. And today, it does not look like humanity is existing in an appropriate way in the Middle East."

Read on.

Republican presidential campaigns have poured an unprecedented $124 million into video and TV ads in Iowa, Axios Sara Fischer writes from estimates by AdImpact, an advertising data firm.

🔎 Zoom in: As of Friday, 46% of all Republican presidential primary video ad spend ($270 million) had been spent trying to pursue Iowa voters.

• In the two weeks leading up to the caucuses, groups supporting former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley spent $7.8 million on ads, followed by ads for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ($6.1 million), pro-Trump ads ($3.5 million) and ads supporting businessman Vivek Ramaswamy ($127,000).

🥊 Reality check: While ads can help build name recognition, Iowa caucus-goers have come to expect in-person courtship above all else.

• "It looks like Trump's caucus to lose, and the biggest spender won't be the victor in Iowa on Monday," says Tim Lim, president of Lim Consulting and a Democratic consultant.

🔭 Zoom out: Advertising on U.S. elections and advocacy issues is projected to hit $16 billion this year, up 31.2% from the 2020 presidential election.

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Above: Workers shovel snow inside Highmark Stadium, home of the Buffalo Bills, yesterday.

• The Bills face the Pittsburgh Steelers in a wild-card playoff game at 4:30 p.m. ET today. The matchup, which was supposed to be played yesterday, was postponed due to the extreme weather.

Travel bans were in effect around the stadium yesterday. But people walked with their shovels to help clear out the field and stands, ESPN reports.

• The Bills offered $20 an hour and free food to volunteers.

President Biden raised over $97 million for his reelection effort in the final three months of 2023, his campaign announced this morning.

• Why it matters: It's Biden's strongest fundraising quarter yet. He enters the election year with $117 million cash on hand — likely to give him an advantage over his potential Republican rivals, Axios' Alex Thompson writes.

👀 Flashback: The Biden campaign and associated committees have raised less than former President Trump's reelection campaign did at this point four years ago, but more than then-President Obama's reelection campaign at the same point.

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In a deeply reported piece, based on numerous interviews and trips to Israel, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, paints a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's shaky hold on power.

🖼️ The big picture: Netanyahu has led Israel for more than 16 years, across his various terms — even longer than David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state. Now, Netanyahu's polling is dismal, Remnick reports.

• "He always campaigned on security, presenting himself as the one statesman and patriot who saw through the malign intentions of Israel's enemies," Remnick writes. "Yet with the Hamas massacre of some twelve hundred people in southern Israel, on October 7th, he had presided over an unprecedented collapse of state security."
• "Among the many accusations being leveled at Netanyahu is that he failed a test of basic humanity when he did not immediately and publicly connect with the families of the hostages. ... His more recent attempts at empathy have proved, to many, utterly unconvincing."

🥊 "Historically, Netanyahu will go down in history as the worst Jewish leader ever," Avraham Burg, a former speaker of Israel's parliament who long ago left the Labor Party and joined the leftist Hadash Party, told Remnick.

• "The fury at Netanyahu among centrists and many conservatives is scarcely less intense. Galit Distel Atbaryan, a hard-line minister in Netanyahu's government, resigned after October 7th; she later talked of her 'burning anger' toward him," Remnick writes.

Worthy of your time.

In Richmond last week, three Black legislative leaders accompanied Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) as he delivered his State of the Commonwealth address.

• From left: Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears; House Speaker Don Scott, the state's first Black speaker; and Senate President pro tem Louise Lucas or Portsmouth.

More from Axios Richmond.

NBC Sports says viewers flocked to Peacock for an NFL playoff game that, in most of the country, could be seen only on the streaming service.

• The Kansas City Chiefs' frozen triumph over the Miami Dolphins was the most-streamed event ever in the U.S., and drove the Internet to its largest U.S. usage ever on a single day, NBC announced.
• Crazy stat: Saturday's game, which averaged 23 million viewers across all platforms, consumed 30% of Internet traffic.

Why it matters: It was the NFL's first playoff game behind a paywall — a new frontier in the league's embrace of streaming.

• NBCUniversal paid $110 million for the NFL's first-ever exclusively live-streamed playoff game. It was close to a "make-or-break moment for Peacock," the N.Y. Times said ahead of time.

The Peacock-exclusive AFC Wild Card game reached 27.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

• Dolphins-Chiefs peaked at an average of 24.6 million viewers in the second quarter from 9:15-9:30 p.m. ET.

The game was free in the two home markets, on NBC stations in Miami and Kansas City.

• Peacock delivered its best single day, with a record 16.3 million concurrent devices.

The bottom line: "Both the league and Peacock will be overjoyed by this viewership number," The Athletic's Richard Deitsch writes.

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