Based on my experience watching the Iowa caucuses over the years, I know that polls even one week out aren’t all that helpful. It seems that Iowans make up their minds very late in the process. A prime example is the 2004 Democratic contest which John Kerry won. That result wasn’t easy to foresee. Dick Gephardt was the early favorite and then it looked like Howard Dean had surged into the lead. But when they focused all their attacks on each other, they sank together and wound up finishing behind Kerry and John Edwards. In any case, the winner of Iowa isn’t very predictive of who will win the nomination, particularly on the Republican side. Consider past winners like George H.W. Bush in 1980, Bob Dole in 1988, Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012 and Ted Cruz in 2016.
It appears that two Republican candidates, Tim Scott of South Carolina and Ron DeSantis of Florida, are betting everything on winning Iowa, so it makes sense to look at how they’re doing there in early polls. It’s not particularly encouraging. At the moment, Trump is leading in the 538 aggregation of polls with 49 percent, trailed by DeSantis at 17, Nikki Haley at 11, and Scott at seven. In the most recent poll, Haley has pulled even with DeSantis at 16 percent. So, now we’re seeing articles about Haley’s surge and DeSantis’s decline. On Monday, the Washington Post took a crack at this genre of analysis.
DeSantis began the year widely viewed as the Republican with the best chance to build a winning coalition against the former president — the Trump alternative who could entice Trump critics yet was also in many ways a continuation of Trump’s “America First” platform. But DeSantis’s support has shrunk dramatically since then, eroding on both ends of the party spectrum, interviews with dozens of early state voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, show.
As the article details, when the DeSantis campaign launched their initial pitch to wealthy Republican fundraisers was “Trump without the crazy.” He would offer an America First agenda without all the insanity and baggage. This had the added advantage that Trump was being largely blamed for a disappointing GOP performance in the 2022 midterms, while DeSantis had been reelected in an earthshaking rout in the Sunshine State. It hasn’t worked out as planned.
In order to work, Trump needs to collapse leaving a opening for an America First replacement. But the more Trump’s legal problems mount, the more Republican voters rally to his side. In Iowa, we can see that Trump is currently getting about half the vote, which leaves the others to split up the other half. What’s holding DeSantis back more than anything else is that most of the America First voters have Trump as their first choice, and many non-America First voters are looking at Haley or Scott or are undecided.
So, DeSantis is getting pinched at both ends and he doesn’t have much room to grow. If you want to predict what will happen in the Iowa caucuses, you need to figure out three things.
- How big is the American First pie? Is it well over 50 percent or just below it?
- How interested are the caucus-goers going to be in nominating an electable candidate?
- How is Trump’s electability going to look on the day of the Iowa caucuses?
On the first question, we also want to know how many candidates will still be in the race. This past weekend, for example, Mike Pence dropped out of the race, and his evangelical supporters will have to reallocate themselves among the alternatives. If it were a two-way between Trump and someone else, it might be very competitive. But that seems highly unlikely. The question then is really whether or not DeSantis is the most likely to pick any voters that leave Trump.
And the main reason voters may leave Trump is if they don’t perceive him as electable. But what if they don’t care? What if they simply don’t give a shit? Iowa Republicans don’t have a record of opting for electability, which is why folks like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have won the caucuses.
But if there is to be serious erosion for Trump over the electability question, things will have to look different than they look now. As of today, Trump looks very competitive with Biden in head-to-head national polls. If that changes, then the electability issue will become more of a factor in Iowa. And, I believe, despite DeSantis’s poor campaign, he is still the most logical second choice for America First Trump supporters.
In plain terms, if Trump’s Iowa numbers start to decline from the 49 percent he currently enjoys in the Iowa average of polls, the most likely candidate to gain from that is DeSantis. I don’t believe Nikki Haley will gain at the same rate. Scott might pick up some support, and now that Pence is out, Scott might see a small uptick in the next surveys, but is he really a threat?
A lot is going to happen on the legal front between now and the Iowa caucuses, and I don’t think the electability question will be clear even one week out from the voting. When it comes right down to it, I think a lot of Trump’s support is defensive in nature. People are supporting him because he’s under attack by the legal system. But when it comes time to pick a nominee, people will be more forward-looking and practical. I think Iowa will be a lot closer than the polls indicate right now.
That was the DeSantis gamble at the beginning, and I don’t think he should back off it just because it doesn’t look like it’s working. What he probably should do is double down and begin making the argument that despite what the national polls show, Trump isn’t going to be a viable candidate for the Republicans. If the collapse never comes, then there never really was a chance to beat Trump, and that’s true for all the candidates and all possible strategies they might have employed.
But by positioning himself to be Trump without the crazy, DeSantis has the best chance to be the alternative to Trump. Nikki Haley is the practical choice for voters who want to run a more traditional campaign against Biden. But DeSantis has already spurned the chance to compete for moderate Republicans. If the American First vote is big enough, he should be able to beat Haley provided Trump’s collapse is substantial.
What I am basically saying here is that it is simply too early to predict how Iowa will shake out, or to write off DeSantis’s chances. All you have to do is imagine what happens if Trump’s perceived electability takes a major dip.
Solid analysis, as usual. Trump’s legal troubles are an interesting X factor. On the one hand, he benefits from a “rally round the boss” factor. (“He may be a SOB, but he’s our SOB.”) On the other hand, it provides a steady dribble of bad news about him on a near daily basis, and the pressure seems to be getting to him.
I’m not going to psychoanalyze Trump; there’s no need. Just look at, and listen to politicians who’ve been under prolonged legal pressure (e.g., Nixon, Clinton). It takes a toll, and it sure seems like in his recent campaign appearances Trump is increasingly misspeaking and looking frazzled.
I remain fascinated by the question of what happens if/when Trump is convicted of something. If he’s in jail by April 15…what happens?
Aside from the dancing in the streets of most American cities/urban carnage antifa centers?
Great question. We know he can run for president from prison; Eugene Debs set that precedent over a century ago.
It strikes me that the real question is what Republicans do. Assuming Trump has accumulated enough delegates to win the nomination, do they go ahead and nominate him? (And who’s his VP candidate?) Or do they nominate DeSantis (or Haley, or someone else)?
My big question is how seriously we take the polls. To hear it told, Biden and Trump are about equally popular/unpopular. Are these polls really reflecting intensity of feeling? How this translates into actual votes during an election isn’t clear. I think the most worrisome sign is that Biden attracted a primary challenger – even if not a very significant one. That’s never a good sign.