Tales of love from the Iowa campaign trenches

A lot of what-ifs hang on the Iowa caucuses.

What if it snows and people stay home? What if the precinct captains goof up the results?

The future of the free world could take a turn on Monday night and with it, the careers of the candidates in the spotlights. But personal fates hang in the balance, too, for the people standing right behind them.

In 2007 what if Des Moines lawyer David Adelman hadn’t delivered a box of campaign stuff to then-Sen. Barack Obama’s headquarters in Chicago? What if staffer Liz Rodgers hadn’t greeted him at the door? And what if her boss hadn’t transferred her to Des Moines?

Would she have spent her first Christmas away from home eating Chinese food with a Jewish guy? Would they be married now, raising three kids in a nice house on Ingersoll Avenue?

“I could have just left that box at the front desk,” said David Adelman, who was supporting former Sen. Chris Dodd’s campaign at the time. Adelman made the Chicago delivery for a friend from Obama’s Des Moines office, back “before they raised a quarter of a billion dollars and could have paid for postage.”

The Adelmans, both 34, are just one of the uncountable couples who have fallen in love on the Iowa trail of both presidential and statehouse campaigns, crossing paths in a noisy field of expert networkers and rabid extroverts. Sometimes when the campaigns heat up, so do the staffers' personal lives.

“You work your ass off,” Liz Adelman, a Virginia native, said of the caucuses. “You work so hard for a cause that you’re passionate about, and it’s such an exciting, thrilling night to be here in Des Moines.”

“But it’s sort of surreal, too,” she added. “You don’t think about what’s next.”

For NBC reporter Alex Moe, 28, “next” meant climbing aboard former candidate and U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s chartered plane for New Hampshire on caucus night in 2012, while the Iowa results were still unclear. She flew off without even leaving a glass slipper for Derek Flowers, 32, the GOP operative who had caught her eye.

They’d met at a debate-watch party, “but I don’t recall she asked me any questions,” said Flowers, a Creston native.

She saved those instead for their first date, at the south-side Johnny’s Italian Steakhouse the week before Christmas.

“It started out normal, but then she went full-on reporter,” Flowers said. “The whole dinner was just a grilling. She asked everything from ‘What’s your dream vacation?’ – I don’t even know what that’s supposed to tell you – to ‘Would you consider yourself a clean person?’ By the time we left, I figured she’d figured out pretty much everything about me. If she liked what she heard, great; if not, well, I guess that’s that.”

The two are still dating four years later. He splits his time between Des Moines and Washington, where she covers Capitol Hill.

“I may take some heat for that in this article,” Flowers said. “Even her 9-year-old brother wants us to get married. Elected officials ask, ‘What, no ring on your finger? When are you going to propose to that girl?’ ”

Elected officials seem to enjoy playing cupid. Former Iowa House Speaker Christopher Rants likes to take credit for setting up two of his former communications directors, Tim and Josie Albrecht, respectively 38 and 35.

“We’re not sure he deserves the entire credit,” said Tim Albrecht, “but we did ask him to deliver the dinner prayer at our wedding reception” in 2009.

Tim Albrecht, who worked for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012, explained he and his wife met while campaigning for Republican legislative candidates. They clicked partly because they both understand the demands of politics.

“People on campaigns end up together because the significant other or eventual spouse understands you’ll have to be on the road or take a late-night phone call or step out to send a text,” he said. “There’s a level of understanding there.”

There are also common interests.

New caucus-themed show has staffers sleeping with the enemy

On a campaign staff, “you really find people who are like-minded and who get excited about the same kind of issues,” said Danville, Ia., native Degee Wilhelm, who met her Ohio-born husband, David, when they were both campaigning for then-Sen. Joe Biden in 1987.

They tied the knot 26 years ago and settled in Ohio. David Wilhelm went on to become the Democratic National Chairman, and both Wilhelms campaigned for Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama. But they got their start, together, during that hot summer in Iowa.

“You’re in that pressure cooker, where you’re around the same people all day every day,” Degee Wilhelm said. “You get to know your coworkers really well, and if you go out for a drink at the end of the day, they’re the ones you go with.”

As the campaign manager, David Wilhelm drafted a half-joking waiver staffers had to fill out if they wanted to date each other or, God forbid, someone from a rival campaign.

“We kind of had this joke that he’d have to sign off on our waiver himself,” Degee Wilhelm recalled. “But we kept it quiet.”

Sam Roecker and Lara Henderson tried to keep their relationship secret, too, but they weren’t so lucky. When they were in the thick of Democrat Brad Anderson’s 2014 campaign for Iowa Secretary of State, Roecker brought his yellow Lab to the office one day. Good ol’ Ozzie immediately spotted Henderson in a glass-walled conference room and persistently whined to see her.

“It was a dead giveaway,” Roecker, 27, said.

“That’s how everyone found out,” Henderson, 23, added.

Both work now for Link Strategies, a political communications firm, and plan to get married in 2017 – “a non-election year,” Roecker said.

CNN’s Sara Murray, 29, and Washington-based TV reporter Garrett Haake, 30, are also waiting until after the general election to get hitched. They got to know each other on Romney’s campaign bus as it criss-crossed Iowa in 2011.

“There’s no chance we would have met otherwise,” Haake said.

The sparks flew pretty fast, and they tried, unsuccessfully, to hide them.

“It’s hard to keep a secret from a bunch of reporters with nothing better to do than keep an eye on whatever everybody else is up to,” Haake said. “You’re literally trapped on a bus with people whose job is to find things out.”

He was embedded with NBC at the time, and she was writing for The Wall Street Journal, so technically, they were rivals. That got “awkward” sometimes, he said, recalling the night rumors flew that Romney would tap Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate.

Haake said he and Murray “were both stalking around hotel rooms, avoiding each other, looking over each our shoulders.”

So who got the scoop?

“I’m not at liberty to say,” he said, “because I’d still like to get married.”

That race is long gone, but the rivalries still linger. After all, reporters and campaign aides wouldn’t do what they do if they weren’t naturally competitive. In 2020 or 2024, newlyweds from the caucus trenches may be bragging about who spotted whom first on Twitter or hook-up apps like Tinder or Grindr. (One Register staffer who uses Tinder has noticed a lot more Des Moines traffic on the the app as the campaigns have ramped up.)

Liz Adelman, the former Obama staffer, still wonders how she never got a photo with the president even though her Dodd-supporting husband did.

“It’s still a sticking point,” David Adelman joked.

She took her revenge when they both flanked Hillary Clinton for a photo last week at the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines.

Liz Adelman cropped her husband out of the picture – you know, because “he’s so tall, and Hillary and I are the same height,” she said. The edited shot is now the profile image on her Facebook page.

By now, though, the couple tries to see the bigger picture. David Adelman lost a race for the Des Moines City Council during what turned out to be a rocky week and a half back in 2009.

“My grandma passed away, I lost the election, (our son) Michael was born, and my grandpa passed away all within 10 days,” he said.

“And I’ll tell you: The best way to get over a lost election is to have a child.”

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Did you find love on the campaign trail?

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