With Iowa's caucuses a month away, Trump urges voters to hand him a blowout victory
Donald Trump was uncharacteristically serious when he implored an audience in eastern Iowa to carry him to a blowout in next month's Republican caucuses.
“The margin of victory is very important, it's just very important,” Trump told about 1,000 people attending a Wednesday rally aimed at organizing campaign volunteers. “It's time for the Republican Party to unite, to come together and focus our energy and resources on beating Crooked Joe Biden and taking back our country. Very simple.”
For the blustery former president, it was both caution against complacency and a sign that he and his team believe the first contest on Jan. 15 can be not just the start of the nominating campaign, but the beginning of the end.
Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win Iowa, one month away from the caucuses. A myriad of wellqualified GOP challengers and anti-Trump groups haven't changed that dynamic after crisscrossing the state over the last year and spending more than $70 million in Iowa on advertising, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. And unlike his first time in the caucuses, which he narrowly lost in 2016, Trump's campaign is now run by Iowa veterans who are not just locking in caucus commitments but building a formidable organization to try to lock in his lead.
Among rival campaigns, most question not whether Trump will win, but by how much — and whether a second-place finisher can claim
momentum for the rest of the race.
“For me, it looked like for a long time there was a narrow lane, but there was a lane, for a not-Trump candidate,” said Gentry Collins, a veteran Republican strategist and former state GOP executive director who ran Mitt Romney's 2008 GOP caucus campaign. “But there isn't really a single alternative people can rally around.”
Trump was the first choice of 51% of likely Iowa caucus participants in a Des Moines Register-NBC News-Mediacom Iowa Poll published Monday. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has vowed that he will win Iowa, had the support of 19%. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has suggested she can beat DeSantis in the state and go head to head with Trump in later primaries, was at 16%.
Next year's GOP nomination is officially an open race. But many primary voters believe Trump was cheated in 2020 when he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden. Multiple government and outside investigations have not found evidence of any voter fraud, despite Trump's frequent
and repeated false claims that are often repeated by many of his supporters.
Trump remains popular with Republicans, both in Iowa and nationally, who credit him for his handling of the economy, the U.S.Mexico border, and his appointment of three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn a federally guaranteed right to abortion.
“You've got basically a quasi-incumbent president,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster and senior adviser to Marco Rubio's 2016 campaign. “Of course, he's got the overwhelming advantage.”
Beyond Trump's builtin advantages, a massive and ongoing effort on his behalf in Iowa reflects the campaign's realization — especially compared to his seat-of-the-pants 2016 effort — that turning out many thousands of Iowans to caucus on a cold January night requires intense organizing.
State Republican Party officials who run the contests and strategists with the various campaigns suggest January's caucuses will break the record of nearly 187,000 people in 2016.
Trump's team says it has collected and processed tens of thousands of commitment cards, most of them coming from his 11 visits to Iowa in the past three months. Aides say the cards are entered into a database within three days before a campaign volunteer replies by phone.
Though Trump has visited far less often than DeSantis, Haley and others, he has drawn more than 20,000 to events since early September, thousands of whom say they are first-time caucus participants.
When asked if they were first-timers, hundreds of people raised their hands at Wednesday's event in Coralville. The audience sat before a stage flanked by large video screens with a QR code and text code that guided them to the campaign's digital portal.
Volunteers circulated around the Hyatt Regency hosting the event, identifiable with their white ball caps emblazoned in gold lettering with “Trump Caucus Captain.”
One volunteer, a University of Iowa student, approached Ginger Marolf as she was waiting in a line of hundreds of people snaking around the hotel. The student asked Marolf to fill out a caucus pledge card and give it back so they could get “an accurate count of how many people support Trump in Iowa.”
After signing her card, Marolf called Trump a fighter for “us, the people” and suggested that she isn't considering any of the other Republican candidates.
“Trump needs to be back in office, like now,” she said, blaming Biden for high prices, an unprotected southern border and global instability.