In Countdown to Iowa, Trump is coasting, while DeSantis and Haley Clash
Negative mailers are filling Iowa’s mailboxes to overflowing. Attack ads are clogging the airwaves. And door knockers fan out from Des Moines to Dubuque and everywhere in between.
The Iowa caucuses, the first contest on the Republican nominating calendar, are poised to play a particularly important role in 2024. But with just 49 days to go, Donald J. Trump’s top rivals are running out of time to catch him as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley give each other a beating in the final sprint to the starting line.
Trump is aiming well ahead in the national polls for an emphatic victory on January 15 in Iowa, which could serve as an early knockout. He leads in public surveys in the state with a margin twice as large as the most competitive match of the past 50 years.
DeSantis, the Florida governor, is betting that Iowa will break Trump’s growing aura of inevitability — and reassert itself as the main rival that will short-circuit Trump’s third presidential bid. Mr. DeSantis, who won the support of the state’s popular Republican governor, is storming through all 99 counties in Iowa, backed by an army of door knockers paid for by his affiliated super PAC.
On Saturday, Mr. DeSantis will visit his final county with an event in Newton at the Thunderdome, a venue whose name appropriately reflects the increasing bitterness and intensity of racing in the state. Mr. Trump will be in Cedar Rapids that same day.
For much of the year, the DeSantis team had maintained that the 2024 primary was a two-man race. But Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, has used the momentum of her debate performances to make it a two-man, one-woman contest.
“The more people see Nikki Haley, the more they like her,” said Betsy Ankney, Ms. Haley’s campaign manager. “The more they see Ron DeSantis, the less they like him.”
Now Ms. Haley, who wore a T-shirt at the Iowa State Fair with the words “Underestimate me – it will be fun,” has been trying to take down Mr. DeSantis from the start. If she can beat Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, his strongest early state, her team believes Ms. Haley would be positioned to emerge as the singular Trump alternative when the calendar turns to two friendlier precincts: New Hampshire, where she has been in second place. , and her home state of South Carolina, where she served as governor.
Revealingly, Ms. Haley’s Allied super PAC has spent $3.5 million on ads and other expenses in the past two months in Iowa and New Hampshire to attack Mr. DeSantis, but not a single dollar in explicit opposition against Mr. Trump, despite his dominant overall. pipe.
“Nikki Haley and her donors are eagerly wasting millions of dollars targeting Ron DeSantis in Iowa,” said David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’ deputy campaign manager, who called this a political gift to Mr. Trump because it makes DeSantis’ most likely second choice supporters. is not Mrs. Haley but the former president.
Mr. Trump’s team has greeted the battle cheerfully. James Blair, Mr. Trump’s national field director, said Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis were “trying to club themselves for the title of first loser.”
“The biggest ever Iowa win is 12 points, so anything above that is a record,” Mr Blair added, arguing that even an upset in Iowa would prove to be just a blip given the former president’s superior organization in the rest of the states. the calender.
Iowa always plays a crucial role in narrowing the field of presidential primaries, but this year it could determine whether there is a close contest at all. Trump’s campaign has told its supporters that this is the case booked its first major television ads to start on December 1 in Iowa, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur, has pledged to spend millions in recent weeks as well, even as his position has fallen since the summer.
“Almost everyone is pushing the chips to the middle of the table in Iowa,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist with years of experience in the state. Only Chris Christie is bypassing Iowa, hoping a muddled result will allow him to break through in New Hampshire.
As the candidates compete for votes, their strategists and spinmeisters look for every possible advantage in the unprecedented but critical contest of setting expectations. Those who surprise or exceed where they are expected to end up tend to emerge with the most momentum – and money.
“If he doesn’t win Iowa, Ron DeSantis has no incentive to continue,” said Ms. Ankney, Ms. Haley’s campaign manager.
Mr. DeSantis’ support has largely collapsed in New Hampshire, where a recent poll showed him in fifth place. The state’s voters tend to be more moderate than Iowa’s, and the lack of a serious Democratic primary means independent parties could flood the fray, which could help Ms. Haley or Mr. Christie.
The Haley campaign has announced plans to spend $10 million on television, radio and digital ads in Iowa and New Hampshire (about $4.25 million has been earmarked for television so far). The DeSantis campaign has done just that announced plans to spend $2 million on television ads in Iowa.
Along the way, Mr. DeSantis has said in increasingly blunt terms that Mr. Trump would lose a rematch against President Biden. But the energy behind that argument has waned, both because Mr. Biden has slumped in the polls and because Ms. Haley has done even better than Mr. Trump or Mr. DeSantis in such a hypothetical matchup. In some cases, Mr. DeSantis has also done worse than Mr. Trump.
The DeSantis super PAC has spent 10 times more money criticizing Ms. Haley in ads and other expenditures than it has on criticizing Ms. Trump, the data shows. But privately, Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, have expressed disapproval of these ads, according to two people familiar with their comments. Several DeSantis allies recently formed a new entity to explore new avenues of attack on Ms. Haley, but the decision has caused more turmoil within the team, with the CEO abruptly resigning last week.
In Iowa and beyond, Mr. Trump’s team has focused almost exclusively on Mr. DeSantis, who has treated Mr. Trump as his only serious challenger in 2023. Mr. Blair said it was remarkable how much the DeSantis operation spent on attacking Ms. Haley. instead of “trying to grow Ron’s image or hurt the president – because they’ve given up on those things.”
“They’re just trying to keep Nikki Haley from coming second,” Mr. Blair added.
There are two debates scheduled before the Iowa caucuses that could still jostle the momentum. Only the first, on December 6 in Alabama, has been announced; the second is scheduled for January in Iowa. Mr. Trump has said he will not participate in any debates and his team has tried to pressure the Republican National Committee to cancel the rest.
The other wild card is the much-discussed door-knocking operation of Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC that said it has 26 paid political staffers in the state and thousands of volunteers. The group says it has knocked on almost 677,000 doors so far – including three knocks on each home targeted.
Jeff Roe, Never Back Down’s chief strategist, has told people he believes the group’s door knocks on caucus day could be worth as much as 10 percentage points, according to someone who has heard the pitch.
Caucuses, which take place on a typically frigid Monday night at 7 p.m., are much more intense than regular elections and typically benefit the most organized candidates. But some are skeptical that organizing could provide such a big boost.
“DeSantis seems to have the best grassroots work here, but it’s nothing compared to what people have done in the past,” said Andy Cable, a longtime Republican activist in Hardin County, north of Des Moines. “Trump doesn’t need the base. His people will just show up. Nikki arrived late, but I’m not sure she has the actual organization on site to actually do it.
Trump campaign officials say their operation has already collected 50,000 signed cards committing to caucus for him, and 1,800 “caucus captains” for the more than 1,600 precincts. The DeSantis campaign said there were more than 30,000 people who had signed up for him. The Haley campaign declined to provide such data points.
For Mr. DeSantis, the support of Kim Reynolds, the state’s Republican governor, has given him a jolt of energy and she plans to campaign heavily for him through the caucuses, including next Saturday in Newton, Iowa .
There is already a television commercial featuring Ms. Reynolds. “He gets things done,” she says on the spot.
Mr. DeSantis has also won the support of Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in the state who has backed the last three Iowa caucus winners in contested races — Ted Cruz in 2016, Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008, all who lost the final nomination.
White evangelical voters are seen as crucial to any potential DeSantis breakthrough, and the Trump campaign has tried to rally support among church leaders, announcing that their total number of faith leaders endorsed 150 on the same afternoon that Mr. Vander Ruimte made his announcement did.
Judging from the campaign stops, Mr. DeSantis’ 99-county tour appears to have created some momentum in Iowa. He regularly draws crowds of 50 to 100 people to small-town events at pizzerias, coffeehouses and family farms, answering questions and posing for photos.
“I’ve always been a Trump guy, but I liked what DeSantis had to say,” said Ev Cherrington, 86, who heard Mr. DeSantis speak this month at a barbecue restaurant in Ames, Iowa, and said he is now considering who supported him, largely because of the laundry list of policy ideas Mr. DeSantis had mentioned.
But outside the bubble of Mr. DeSantis’ bus tour, a different reality is emerging. When Mr. DeSantis visited his 98th county in Iowa a week ago, after holding about a dozen small public events over three days, Mr. Trump appeared at a rally at a high school gym in Fort Dodge, Iowa. According to The Associated Press, he drew about 2,000 people — more than all of Mr. DeSantis’ events combined.
Nicholas Nehamas And Maggie Haberman reporting contributed.