US Elections: Looming Iowa Caucuses Signal Likely Trump Victory
Nick Papanicolaou analyses the Republican nominee race in the run up to the Iowa caucuses, showing where Trump’s rivals faltered.
Photo by Tyler A. McNeil via Wikimedia Commons
The race leading up to Iowa:
Polls suggest that former President Donald Trump has expanded his lead over Republican rivals ahead of the Iowa Caucuses, the key electoral event that represents the beginning of the process that will determine the eventual Republican nominee for President.
Since announcing a third presidential bid last November, Donald Trump’s lead in the Republican primary contest has become virtually unassailable. In national polls, Trump enjoys a fifty point lead over his nearest rival, Ron DeSantis. This represents the largest lead ever experienced by a candidate for either the Republican or the Democratic presidential nomination where an incumbent is not on the ballot.
With less than a month to go before January 15th, when the first votes will be cast by Republicans in Iowa, Trump’s lead stands at ‘only’ twenty seven points in the ‘Hawkeye State’. The former President holds the largest recorded lead in the reputable NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll, earning 51% first-choice support from likely Iowa caucus goers. “The field may have shrunk, but it may have made Donald Trump even stronger. I would call his lead commanding at this point,” said J. Ann Selzer, who conducted the NBC survey.
Data from www.projects.fivethirtyeight.com
According to former Republican strategist Mike Murphy, a convincing Trump victory in Iowa will likely signal the end to any prospect of a contested nomination. While UN Ambassador Nikki Haley will be hoping to capitalise on a recent boost in momentum, which has included securing a string of endorsements from prominent Iowa Republicans, polling data suggests she has reached a ceiling. Her support is yet to surpass 12% nationally, rising to 16% in Iowa.
Although Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was once seen as a clear successor to Trump, a steep decline in his support has since reduced him to battling Haley for second place. Rather than denting Trump’s lead however, Haley’s share of the vote appears to be eating into DeSantis’s support. At last week’s presidential debate, the two candidates largely ignored Trump, attacking one another instead.
Meanwhile, Trump has continued to concentrate his fire on Ron DeSantis. This week, the Republican frontrunner hit out at the Governor’s wife, Casey DeSantis, alleging that she was attempting to “commit organised voter fraud”, after Florida’s First Lady sent an invitation to out-of-state voters to ‘participate’ in next month’s Iowa caucuses. Casey DeSantis had appeared on Fox News with her husband, where she claimed that “you do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus.” Casey DeSantis encouraged “moms and grandmoms to come, from wherever it might be — North Carolina, South Carolina — and to descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”
Our analysis: Trump rivals’ missed opportunities
While Nikki Haley’s support has grown, it seems unlikely that she can challenge Trump in Iowa or in the future. Although the former UN Ambassador has consolidated the minority ‘never Trump’ constituency that attempted to block the former President’s advance in 2016, DeSantis remains far-and-away the second choice of the great majority of pro-Trump Republicans. As the party electorate has shifted firmly to the Right in recent years, DeSantis remains the only other candidate theoretically capable of appealing to a majority of Republican voters.
FiveThirtyEight’s polling average captures the scale of the Governor’s collapse. Reports of internal problems suggest his campaign remains in a desperate state. Yet this was far from inevitable. Though Trump has commanded the loyalty of vast sections of the Republican electorate since first clinching the Presidency in 2016, there have been signs of an underlying vulnerability among GOP voters.
In November 2022, polls suggested that Republican voters were increasingly willing to move on from Trump. Widely blamed for a poor set of midterm results, which saw Trump-endorsed ‘election deniers’ such as Kari Lake in Arizona and Herschel Walker in Georgia underperform compared to more mainstream candidates such as Brian Kemp, the former President began to see his internal support decline. As a result, the share of Republicans who wanted Trump to run again fell from 56% to 47%. While still overwhelmingly popular in the Republican party, Trump’s internal approval rating also dipped sharply from 85% to 71%.
Meanwhile, support for DeSantis skyrocketed. His landslide reelection as Governor of Florida contrasted starkly with Trump’s midterms failure. According to one poll, DeSantis now led Trump in a hypothetical match-up by 52%-38%. Although polls continued to indicate that Republicans cared more about a candidate who could represent their interests rather than one who could beat Biden, perceptions that Trump was electorally feeble threatened to undermine the former President’s reputation for strong leadership. Republicans were not going to reject Trump in his entirety, but concerns over the former President’s electability seemed finally to be taking their toll.
“Not only has DeSantis’s campaign message failed to breakthrough, it has backfired spectacularly.”
Here, DeSantis missed an opportunity. Instead of contrasting his election winning credentials with Trump’s political weakness, the re-elected Governor of Florida attempted to out-Trump Trump, focusing on extreme policies designed to appeal to Trump’s voter base.. But despite DeSantis’ best efforts, including the circulation of clips condemning a younger Trump for speaking in favour of LGBT+ rights, this strategy has, unsurprisingly, failed to convince Republicans that the man who built the border wall, attempted to ban Muslims from entering the United States and appointed the Justices that overturned Roe v. Wade is, in fact, a closeted liberal.
Republican voters continue to believe that Trump will represent their views in office, because he has done so before. Through his ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, vaccine scepticism and advocacy for anti-Trans and reproductive rights policies, DeSantis has won Trump supporters’ respect, but not their votes. He is yet to offer a compelling reason why voters should abandon the former President.
Perhaps the most significant impact of DeSantis’ embrace of the hard-right is that it appears to have closed the door on the electability argument for good. As Biden’s approval ratings have plummeted, Republicans have become more bullish about the chances of a second Trump victory. While the former President leads his predecessor in almost every poll, DeSantis is now the only top Republican that surveys predict would lose to the current President. Not only has DeSantis’s campaign message failed to breakthrough, it has backfired spectacularly.
The Governor’s decision not to make the campaign about electability contributes to growing evidence which suggests the majority of Republicans continue to believe that the last election was irregular, if not necessarily ‘stolen’. However, in a party that adores Trump for his ‘strength’, allowing ‘Sleepy Joe’ to ‘steal the election’ should also raise questions about Trump’s ability to stand up for the MAGA movement. Neither DeSantis nor Haley have trialled this argument, instead competing over who can condemn the Justice Department most strongly for its indictments of Trump. Far from attacking the former President over his alleged criminality, DeSantis has taken the opportunity to amplify the charge that Democrats are politicising the justice system because they fear Trump’s vengeance.
As a former Trump devotee, it might appear opportunistic for DeSantis, in particular, to signal outright support for the charges. However, the Governor’s refusal to portray Trump’s legal jeopardy as a major electoral hazard is baffling. Rather than laying the groundwork for a convincing anti-Trump message in the later stages of the campaign, DeSantis has spent the past few months failing to offer a clear alternative.
With time running out before Trump appears set to dominate the Iowa caucuses, there remain genuine questions over whether his competitors are actually running for President.