Trump the clear favourite, but still a path for his rivals
Half of Iowa Republicans say they’ll vote for the former president, ... but anything can happen.
“Haley’s gunna get smoked … she’s not up to this.”
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s announcement on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT) that he would bow out of the race for the Republican Party nomination for president was a mixed blessing for erstwhile rival Nikki Haley. The 3 per cent or so of Republicans who were planning to support him might have gravitated to Haley, given their relatively similar politics.
Yet Christie’s candid “hot mic” comments just before his withdrawal speech probably gave them pause and, regardless, were a gift to her main rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who during the final candidates debate with Haley on Wednesday night ahead of next Monday’s (Tuesday AEDT) Iowa caucuses enthusiastically praised the larger-than-life Christie’s political acumen.
Trump once again ignored the official GOP debate on CNN, appearing relaxed in a separate one-on-one interview on Fox News, confident in the knowledge that more than 50 per cent of Iowa Republicans say they will vote for him next week. DeSantis and Haley are tied with about 16 per cent support each, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of relevant Iowa polls.
But anything still can happen on what is expected to be among the coldest polling days in the history of Iowa, a semirural, mid-western state that since 1972 has been the first of the state-based primary contests in the lead-up to election day on November 5.
As the sun sets on a minus-22C (maximum) day, GOP voters (about 180,000, based on the 2016 turnout) motivated enough to brave the icy winds will venture out to local schools and churches to mingle, debate and vote. They will have an outsized impact on whether Trump – who still commands an overwhelming polling lead nationally – becomes the GOP’s nominee once again, and potentially president for a second time. Iowa, population 3.2 million, may supply fewer than 2 per cent of the delegates who pick the ultimate GOP candidate, but political momentum matters.
A shock Haley or DeSantis win, or even a very strong second finish, would snuff out the prevailing inevitability of Trump becoming the GOP nominee once again.
Matt Wells, an Iowa City resident and passionate volunteer for the DeSantis campaign since March, reckons his political hero DeSantis – “he was pretty much the leader of the free world during Covid” – has a good chance of winning outright.
“Trump, for all of the stuff that you see online, is terribly unorganised. He’s got 12 employees in the state, mostly based out of Des Moines – we have 70,” he tells me.
“He did this eight years ago. They thought that they could win based on name ID alone and they lost (to Ted Cruz) even though they were up in the public polls before the day.”
The verdicts across the state’s hundreds of precincts will be tallied and the winner declared later on Monday evening, a process followed with varying quirks in all the 50 US states and territories throughout the year, by both parties. It’s all part of America’s elaborate democratic spectacle.
“We have three kids and I’m going to bring my 11-year-old and eight-year-old to the caucus for the first time,” Peter Cownie, a former veteran Republican legislator in Iowa’s lower house, proudly tells me. “I’ll be curious to see what the weather does for turnout,” he adds, suggesting it may help Haley, his preferred candidate, given her stronger suburban support base. “My wife and I have been very impressed with her. She brings a different tenor to the whole race.”
The 51-year-old Haley, whom Trump routinely derides as “bird brain” despite having once picked her as his ambassador to the UN, has enjoyed a late-in-the-day jump in support, buoyed by a mainstream media that by and large finds her the least threatening GOP candidate. She has polled better than the others in hypothetical match-ups with Joe Biden, the likeliest Democrat opponent. But she has to run the GOP gauntlet first.
“I’d be surprised if she finishes second: it was a pretty big gaffe to speak of the need for New Hampshire voters to correct Iowans,” says Jeff Anderson, director of Washington-based think tank the American Main Street Initiative and director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the US Department of Justice during the Trump administration. In what has been a rocky few weeks for Haley, she also didn’t mention slavery when explaining the civil war.
“In the rural areas she has no support. I couldn’t tell you what a Nikki Haley sign or voter is like,” Wells says.
On Wednesday night DeSantis and Haley squabbled over the hot-button issues that animate conservative politics in the US: immigration, abortion, “woke” culture and government spending. DeSantis performed far better on the night. Haley appeared flustered, accusing her opponent of lying and flip-flopping when such charges, as pundits noted, could as easily be applied to her. But by this stage it probably mattered little.
“I want somebody in the White House who I can tell my kids, ‘Hey, it’d be good if you were like them.’ We haven’t been able to say that in this country in decades,” says Wells.
Cownie, the director of Iowa State Fair, says the contest is “basically personality driven”. “When it comes down to where the rubber meets the road, I’m not sure there are huge policy differences among the candidates,” he says.
Indeed, for Trump’s diehard supporters policy appears to matter little anyway. “I don’t think he’s become more popular despite all the indictments but largely because of them; a whole lot of Republican voters are starting to take this very personally … they’re not going to let this guy go to jail,” Anderson says.
Whatever happens next Monday, however much Haley or DeSantis under or over-perform, it’s unlikely they’ll be leaving the race soon. The winner of the following week’s Republican primary in New Hampshire stands a better chance of ultimately winning the nomination, based on history. But, more important, Trump’s age (77) and looming trials could still see the nomination handed to whoever is left standing by the Republican convention in July.
“It’s not far-fetched to imagine the Republicans are looking around at some point and going: ‘OK, who else can we run?’ ” Anderson says. Polling suggests independent voters would severely mark down the former president if he were convicted. DeSantis, who aligns more closely to the political legacy of Trump, would likely benefit the most in such a case.
“The enthusiasm for Haley is mostly coming from the Acela corridor (the area stretching from Washington DC through New York City to Boston) of New York,” Anderson says.
Second-term Florida Governor DeSantis is often characterised as a younger Trump, who once promoted him, without the legal and political baggage. Haley is widely seen as successor to the two president Bushes and a more establishment Republican figure, which is no longer a selling point in a Republican Party that has become increasingly suspicious of big business, foreign entanglements and the security and intelligence services.
Her advocacy for sending more billions to Ukraine, perhaps the biggest policy division between her on the one hand and Trump and DeSantis on the other, has jaded her appeal among Republicans more interested in solving high inflation and securing the southern border with Mexico.
If effort counted for anything, the brilliant and articulate 38-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the only other notable candidate still in the race, would beat them all. Polling around 7 per cent, the political outsider has attended about 239 events across 94 of Iowa’s counties compared with 24 events for Trump (who instead has chosen to appear in court in Washington and New York City), 99 events for DeSantis and 51 for Haley, according to news website Axios.
“He’s extremely charming, a very easy conversationalist and a damn good tennis player,” Cownie says of Ramaswamy, from first-hand experience. Absent a political miracle, Ramaswamy’s supporters will end up in the Trump or DeSantis column too once he steps out of the race. Christie’s assessment of Haley’s prospects could be on the money.
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