Why Donald Trump Is Probably Going to Romp in Iowa Tonight

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, January 15, 2024

 

Years from now, the 2024 Iowa Caucus will be remembered as “the one with all the blizzards.” Last week, the one week of my life that I’ve chosen to spend in Des Moines, the city received the most snow it’s gotten in a five-day period since 1941.

 

Friday, I was scheduled to appear on Fox News, and thankfully, they sent a car. The roads were still covered in quite a bit of snow, and it was indisputably blizzard conditions — whipping wind, drifting piles of snow, slippery ice. The plows were on the highways, doing their best, but no sane person should’ve been on the roads, or walking the streets.

 

I made my appearance (you can watch here), and then I received the least-surprising flight cancellation of my life. So instead of heading on to the airport, it was back to the hotel for another night.

 

In circumstances like this, the conversation in the SUV inevitably turns to politics. My driver — who was exceptionally skilled at driving in just about the worst possible conditions short of an earthquake — said he was a Trump fan and would be caucusing for Trump tonight. He mentioned that while he didn’t think it was a requirement, he preferred a president who had served in the military. I said I agreed, and wondered whether he saw Ron DeSantis’s service in the Navy during the Iraq War as appealing.

 

Instead, my driver talked about Donald Trump’s time in military school — Trump spent five years at the New York Military Academy in Cornwall-on-Hudson — and said he felt that gave Trump a particular insight into military matters.

 

Right now, the Trump fans in this newsletter’s copious readership are nodding and saying, “Yes, that makes sense,” or “Yes, I feel that way, too.” And the Trump critics are looking at the above assessment and exclaiming, “How can you possibly think that? Trump didn’t serve during Vietnam because of bone spurs! He mocked John McCain’s captivity! He allegedly called Americans who died for their country ‘suckers’ and ‘losers’! Younger veterans preferred Biden!”

 

I mention this anecdote to illustrate the phenomenon that when a voter likes a particular candidate, they figure out ways to believe that their preferred candidate meets their ideal criteria; if that means they have to believe spending 1959 to 1964 in the New York Military Academy is better preparation for the presidency than serving in the U.S. Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps from 2004 to 2010, they’ll choose to believe that. (DeSantis served in Iraq in 2007 as senior legal adviser to the SEAL who commanded Special Operations Task Force-West in Fallujah, Navy captain Dane Thorleifson. DeSantis also did an early stint at Guantanamo Bay. And we can also point out that Nikki Haley’s husband, Major Michael Haley, is currently deployed to Djibouti in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, Horn of Africa. You might think that being a military spouse gives you a particular insight into the reality and lived experience of those who wear the uniform.)

 

If you’re not a fan of Trump, and you see Trump’s ability to generate Democratic turnout as just about the only chance Joe Biden has at a second term, then the Trump fanbase’s ability to always find new reasons to love him and to hand-wave away his glaring flaws is maddening. If you are a fan of Trump, you probably find the idea of abandoning him now in favor of DeSantis or Haley or some other candidate to represent a form of betrayal. Four separate prosecutors have filed charges against him, the Colorado supreme court decided to yank him off the ballot, and the Maine secretary of state did the same.

 

While it’s always possible that Iowa Republicans will surprise us, and the frigid weather and potential crossover voters represent new variables, it appears extremely likely that Donald Trump will win tonight’s Iowa Caucus, and win it by a large margin. The dynamic that is visible in that last Des Moines Register poll is the same one that has been at work in the entire primary: About half the party wants to renominate Trump. The rest is split among DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and a few other options. If DeSantis, Haley, or anybody else wanted to beat Trump, they needed to unify that non-Trump vote, and it is diverse with disparate, sometimes contradictory desires.

 

The MAGA movement is heavily driven by Americans who feel like they don’t recognize their country anymore. Yes, lots of Americans may romanticize their past. They probably mix up better days for the country with the better days for themselves, before the back pain, groaning knees, and the half-dozen pills the doctor told them they had to take every morning. A lot of older Americans feel ignored and devalued, shunted aside and forgotten.

 

Unsurprisingly, the slogan “Make America Great Again” is going to resonate with people who feel like everything from the state of the country to the state of their personal lives used to be great, or at least better, but has declined in recent years or decades. There’s a line from Bob Dole’s 1996 acceptance speech that applies here:

 

Let me be the bridge to an America than only the unknowing call myth. Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquility, faith and confidence in action. And to those who say it was never so, that America’s not been better, I say you’re wrong. And I know because I was there. And I have seen it. And I remember.

 

Trump’s supporters are absolutely convinced that things were better in the 1990s, the 1980s, the 1950s, or some other earlier decade — and that with some policy changes, those glory days can be substantially restored or recreated.

 

And there are indeed some new and different problems in America today. Americans did not always see a half-dozen or so day laborers hanging around the Home Depot or Lowe’s, probably in the country illegally, looking for work and getting paid under the table. Shoplifting used to be a problem associated with juvenile delinquents, not such a severe problem that toothpaste, soap, and deodorant now get locked up in the store. When someone was caught stealing something, even small or cheap, it was still considered a crime that warranted punishment; very few people thought that the value of what was stolen had to meet a threshold of $1,000 for the crime to be considered a felony.

 

Going to college was never cheap, but attending a four-year public college costs 64 percent more than it did 20 years ago, and attending a two-year public college costs 59 percent more than it did 20 years ago.

 

I thought Peggy Noonan’s 2022 insight about the changing nature of violent crime was an important one:

 

In New York, and the country more broadly, the scary thing isn’t that crime is high, though it is, though not as high as in previous crime waves. What’s scary is that people no longer think the personal protective measures they used in the past apply. Previous crime waves were a matter of street thugs and professional criminals, and you could take steps in anticipation of their actions. Don’t walk in the park at night — criminals like darkness. Take the subway in rush hour — criminals don’t like witnesses. Don’t be on Main Street at 1 a.m., but do go to the afternoon parade.

 

You could calculate, thereby increasing your margin of safety.

 

Now such measures are less relevant because what you see on the street and in the news tells you that more than in the past we’re at the mercy of the seriously mentally ill. You can’t calculate their actions because they can’t be predicted, because they’re crazy.

 

Every headline about crime, every video of a caravan of migrants heading to the U.S.–Mexico border, every story of an innocent person being pushed onto subway tracks by a mentally ill homeless person, every lunatic teacher spotlighted on LibsOfTikTok, every rally by young activist types who are convinced that Hamas and the Houthis are the good guys and Israeli civilians and cargo ships are the bad guys is further evidence to this crowd that the world is spinning off its axis. And they’ve concluded that no one reasonable or polite could possibly fix this mess.

 

Sure, 77-year-old Donald Trump is a man of the past. The past is where these people want to go.

 

(Intriguingly, the fact that then-78-year-old Joe Biden beat all other contenders in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary suggests that the Democratic Party has a decent number of people who want to go back to the past, too. Except the past the Democrats want to go to is one of high membership in unions, Roe v. Wade being the law of the land, the White House press corps barely mentioning a president’s health issues, and entering the country without permission not being a crime.)

 

Plus, there’s the sunken-costs theory. If you’ve voted for Donald Trump twice, you’ve probably been called deplorable, racist, sexist, xenophobic, hateful, and a threat to the country. A lot of Trump voters probably believe that abandoning their candidate now would represent a concession that his critics were right.

 

And we can’t have that, now, can we? After all, it’s just the presidency at stake.

 

ADDENDUM: In that Des Moines Register poll:

 

More than 6-in-10 likely Republican caucusgoers — 61 percent — say that it doesn’t matter to their support if former President Donald Trump is convicted of a crime before the general election By comparison, 19% of likely Iowa caucusgoers say a Trump conviction would make it more likely that they’d back Trump, while 18 percent say it would make them less likely to support the former president in the general election.

 

At first glance, those statistics sound like good news for Trump, but if 18 percent of Republicans vote third party, or for Biden, or leave it blank, that’s actually terrible news for Trump’s chances. In 2020, roughly 94 percent of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump. In 2020, 88 percent of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump.