Slouching toward Iowa

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, December 21, 2023

 

We’re just weeks away from the Iowa Republican caucus, the crucial, make-or-break first contest featuring Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley locked in a steel-cage grudge match that is tight as a tick, filling both Republicans and the country at large with breathless excitement, and…

 

. . . and . . .

 

. . . and I’m sorry, I can’t go through with this charade. This is not a breathlessly exciting primary. It is a forced march that apparently was over before it started, likely to be remembered for how inconsequential it was.

 

So allow me instead to throw a bucket of cold water on this year’s dispiriting primary process and offer six brutal truths.

 

One: About half the party never considered anyone besides Trump as an option. Yes, you can call me a Never Trumper. I would prefer that the Republican Party nominated any other candidate — okay, maybe not Vivek Ramaswamy, either.

 

What is especially maddening about the 2024 presidential primary is that Republicans were offered a menu of options besides the former president, who has exceptionally high disapproval ratings, drives Democratic Party turnout like no other figure in U.S. history, lost to the incumbent by 74 electoral votes and roughly 7 million popular votes nationwide, and demonstrates the impulse control of an overcaffeinated ferret. And it appears that roughly half the Republican Party was never even willing to kick the tires on options other than Trump.

 

Perhaps the primary was doomed by the Republican National Committee. Trump in 2016 selected Ronna McDaniel to be the party chairwoman and, alas, she has no discernible ability to act independently of him. Not only did the RNC meekly acquiesce to the front-runner when he chose to skip all the debates. It didn’t even object when he scheduled counterprogramming. After the fourth debate, with about six weeks left until the Iowa caucus, the RNC simply declared that it was finished with hosting debates, although it said that candidates were free to accept invitations to debates sponsored by other organizations.

 

Two: It’s possible that nothing that happened this year altered the primary’s outcome in any significant way. In May, in the RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls, Trump was way ahead, at 40 percent; DeSantis was at 28 percent; and Haley at 5.5 percent. As of this writing, Trump is at 47 percent, DeSantis at 17.3 percent, Haley at 14.3 percent.

 

Nationally, in July, Trump led at 49 percent; DeSantis was at 18.5 percent; and Haley was at 3 percent. As of this writing, Trump is at 61 percent (!), DeSantis is at 13.2 percent, and Haley at 10.2 percent. In other words, those lines on the chart haven’t moved much over the past seven months or so. DeSantis is down a bit, Haley’s up a bit, and nobody is close to Trump.

 

Three: The contest may feel over by the night of the Iowa caucuses. Yes, in theory DeSantis has a shot at winning Iowa. Radio talk-show host Erick Erickson turned some heads when he predicted that DeSantis would win the caucuses, since they work differently from primaries. And until all the votes are counted, the contest isn’t over.

 

But . . . come on. A narrow DeSantis win would require both his support to be about 15 percentage points higher than in current polls and Trump’s support to be about 15 percentage points lower. It’s extremely hard to overcome a 30-point deficit in a matter of weeks, and if DeSantis pulls it off, it will rank among the most incredible comebacks in U.S. political history.

 

Ann Selzer’s polls of Iowa for the Des Moines Register and NBC News are good — really good, rated A+ by FiveThirtyEight, with the final poll calling the correct winner 81 percent of the time. In her latest survey of Iowa, Selzer finds Trump at 51 percent, DeSantis at 19 percent, and Haley at 16 percent. No other candidate tops 5 percent. She characterizes Trump’s lead as “commanding” and points out that the departures of candidates including Tim Scott and Mike Pence appear to have helped Trump, not his challengers.

 

And even if DeSantis were to pull off a miracle and win the caucuses, let’s remember we’ve seen Trump lose an Iowa caucus before.

 

On February 1, 2016, Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, 27.6 percent to Trump’s 24.3 percent. Two days later, Trump jumped on Twitter and whined, “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!” If DeSantis does manage to overtake Trump, we’re certain to get more of the same Wah wah wah, I’m the real winner, my opponent cheated.

 

In Trump’s mind, an election can have only two possible outcomes: Either he won legitimately or an opponent stole the election. There’s always some idiot hanging around who’s willing to tell Trump whatever he wants to hear about hacked voting machines or bamboo paper in the ballots or some other cockamamie conspiracy theory.

 

Four: None of Trump’s mistakes or bad moves seem to matter, as half the party doesn’t care and always loves him. By ordinary presidential-candidate standards, Trump is running a terrible campaign. He doesn’t leave Mar-a-Lago much. His tirades on his personal social-media platform, Truth Social, are less coherent than ever, but no one beyond his fan base appears to pay much attention. He skipped the debates and suffered no consequence.

 

The normal rules of politics, campaigning, and public communication do not seem to apply to him. Our Phil Klein wrote in late November, “The simple reason why Trump has been so formidable is that he keeps getting indicted.” Charlie Cooke did a double take and reminded us that the truth of that statement does not make it less crazy: “It’s ridiculous. It reads like a joke. It should be a joke. In any other context, it would be a joke. If you said this to an electorate about anyone else — ‘the reason that candidate is doing so well in the primary is that he’s been repeatedly indicted’ — they’d look at you as if you were on LSD.”

 

The lesson that around half the GOP electorate took from the Trump presidency, Russiagate, January 6, and everything else is that our system of justice is deeply corrupt and operates in a conspiratorial manner, manufacturing false evidence and filing spurious criminal charges against any figure deemed a potential threat to the “deep state.” A portion of the GOP electorate has bought into this mentality so thoroughly that DeSantis and Haley might have had a better shot if they had been indicted on embezzlement charges.

 

Five: Nothing DeSantis does that he gets right matters, because half the party doesn’t care and always looks for reasons to reject him. If you were judging simply by the polls, you would think DeSantis has run the worst presidential campaign of all time.

 

Has he? It’s been flawed, yes. The attempted campaign announcement with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces bombed, and most of the early messaging was way too online. (You never want the word “sonnenrad” and the name of one of your campaign’s speechwriters to appear in the same sentence.) DeSantis’s campaign had what felt like a million “resets,” and apparently his team is beset by infighting. His campaign and his political-action committee have run more than $46 million in television, digital, and radio ads, but right now it looks as if they might as well have set that money on fire.

 

But was DeSantis’s campaign so bad that half to two-thirds of people who liked him in the spring had good reason to jump off the bandwagon? He’s the same guy, with the same stances and accomplishments and controversies in Florida. He visited all 99 of Iowa’s counties, a milestone nicknamed the “full Grassley” after Chuck, the state’s very senior senator. You’d rather have the endorsement of Iowa governor Kim Reynolds than not have it. But there’s no sign it did anything for DeSantis at all.

 

Six: Nikki Haley’s surge is real, as far as it goes, but she’s still climbing from a distant third to a distant second, so this is much ado over little, if not nothing. I don’t mean to pooh-pooh what Haley has accomplished this past year. An outside observer might well have expected South Carolina senator Tim Scott or former vice president Mike Pence to rank among the last few candidates. Probably no candidate benefited from the debates more than Haley did; she was always poised, prepared, and ready to rip Ramaswamy’s head off. But she’s on course for third place in what is functionally a three-candidate race in Iowa, finishing perhaps 20 to 30 points behind Trump in New Hampshire and 20 to 30 points behind him even in her home state of South Carolina.

 

To listen to Trump today is to be invited into a happy fantasy world where he will resolve the Russian invasion of Ukraine within 24 hours, create “freedom cities,” and “lock up” political enemies (“You have no choice because they’re doing it to us”).

 

What’s amazing is that most Republicans nod in happy and eager anticipation as Trump makes these promises, even though he was president for four years and we know what this guy is like in the Oval Office. We know he makes grandiose pledges without the slightest clue about how to keep them (“Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated”). We know that he gave imprudent or illegal orders and that his staff just ignored them, confident that Trump would rarely if ever follow up. We recall that last time, he pledged to build the big beautiful wall and make Mexico pay for it, to stop the flow of drugs into the country “100 percent,” to completely eliminate Obamacare, to pay off the debt within eight years . . .

 

Trump announced in mid June 2015 that he was running for president, so we’re now in our eighth straight year of “yuge” and “the greatest ever” and “many people are saying” and nonsense proposals and conspiracy theories and horse-pucky. This country has real problems — a skyrocketing cost of living, an insecure border, antisemitism running rampant, Hamas as bloodthirsty as ever, Iran still rogue and terrorist, Putin’s forces on the march, and China smelling weakness. The times call for serious, focused leadership. If you have to run around reminding people that you’re “a very stable genius,” you’re probably neither.

 

But roughly half the Republican Party has decided, “Nope! Give me four more years of that guy,” and the other half can’t agree on which candidate would be better even though almost any of them would.