DES MOINES - They call themselves La Macchina, Italian for "the machine," and the name is apt: When you want votes on the city's South Side, this is where you come.
And so Democrats come, knowing that the power brokers who control this pocket of Des Moines specialize in moving votes for their anointed candidates. This year, the machine is cranking for Hillary Clinton, who polls indicate is locked in a tight battle with Barack Obama and John Edwards heading into tonight's caucuses.
"Our people are our people," said Joe Aiello, president of La Macchina, which operates as a civic club. "Our people do exactly what we ask them to do."
When outsiders think of Iowa politics, they envision bunting draped on hay bales, candidates touring family farms, and lots of bromides about rural values. La Macchina represents a grittier, urban brand of politics - more Chicago than Cedar Rapids. In a close race tonight, its influence on the South Side could give Clinton a major boost.
"We're a very powerful group," Aiello said.
La Macchina has long been active in state and local elections; its specialty became distributing and collecting absentee ballots for its preferred politicians. In 2004, the group tried its hand at presidential caucus politics, helping Senator John F. Kerry pull off a surprisingly large victory. US News & World Report reported in 2004 that despite Edwards's strength in Polk County, where Des Moines sits, Kerry won the vast majority of the South Side precincts where La Macchina's leaders have the most influence.
Five days before the 2004 caucuses, Kerry's campaign made at least 27 payments of $500 each to neighborhood figures to turn out supporters, Federal Election Commission records show. The campaign called it "fieldwork consulting." Two key Kerry operatives in 2004 who were in touch with La Macchina, Des Moines lawyer Jerry Crawford and Boston-based field expert Michael Whouley, are now advising Clinton's campaign.
Prominent leaders of the group - which also buys Christmas gifts for needy children and does other charitable work - include John Mauro, a Polk County supervisor, whose brother, Michael, is Iowa's secretary of state and has endorsed Clinton; and Ned Chiodo, a former state representative. John Mauro did not return a call seeking comment, and Chiodo refused to discuss the group's work.
"I don't have anything to say," he said.
The South Side, where Italian families built tight-knit neighborhoods from the early 1900s, sits just across the river from downtown. As many Italian-Americans have prospered, assimilated, and dispersed, the area's cultural fabric has thinned.
But many longtime South Side families, such as the Mauros and the Chiodos, are still stalwarts of the area - attending Mass at St. Anthony's parish, gathering at the Italian-American Cultural Center, and dining at restaurants such as Tumea's, whose bocce ball court out back is put to good use in warm weather.
Some South Side residents and Iowa political operatives say La Macchina's political influence has waned as its leaders have aged, but in a race where every caucus-goer matters, Clinton will take whatever help the network has to offer.
Support for Clinton on the South Side is hardly universal, however. On Sunday night, Obama packed Nathan Weeks Middle School with more than 1,000 supporters, many of them South Siders.
James Maloney, a Polk County assessor who has lived in the area, said he has been hooked on Obama since watching him give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.
"When he gave that speech, he won me over," Maloney said.
Dave Haney, a South Sider and parishioner at St. Anthony's, is still deciding whom to support, but he said Clinton is out of the question.
"Anyone but Hillary," he said as he left Mass on New Year's Eve.
Clinton, meanwhile, is spending the closing hours before the caucuses motivating volunteers and ensuring that get-out-the-vote efforts are running smoothly. Yesterday morning she stopped by a campaign field office in Des Moines with coffee and bagels. She joked about the frigid temperatures, saying, "I've told more young people to buy coats." She tried to warm them up with a rallying cry.
"We're making history together!" she said.
That sense of history is what drew Tina Ward-Pugh, a 47-year-old city councilwoman from Louisville, to drive from Kentucky to Iowa last week to help Clinton make her final push by calling voters, canvassing streets, even directing traffic for campaign events in towns she has never been to.
"She isn't a show horse, she's a workhorse," said Ward-Pugh, who came to see Clinton at First United Methodist Church in Indianola yesterday. "In Kentucky, we know our horses."
Clinton appeared last night on the return of the "Late Show with David Letterman." "Dave has been off the air for eight long weeks because of the writers' strike," she said. "Tonight, he's back. Oh, well, all good things come to an end."
Clinton, like her chief rivals, also aired a final televised message to Iowa voters during last night's evening newscasts. The two-minute message was a sober pitch for her experience: "After all the town meetings, the pie and coffee, it comes down to this: Who is ready to be president and ready to start solving the big challenges we face on day one, and who can solve them?"
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Marcella Bombardieri of the Globe staff contributed to this report; Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.
