TRUMP ABSENT AS IOWA CAUCUS TRAIN BEGINS TO ROLL
Haley, Scott visiting state this week after Pence’s appearance
Nikki Haley is swinging through Iowa this week fresh off announcing her presidential campaign. Her fellow South Carolina Republican senator, Tim Scott, will also be here as he decides his political future. And former Vice President Mike Pence was just in the state courting evangelical Christian activists.
After a slow start, Republican presidential prospects are streaming into the leadoff caucus state. Notably absent from the lineup, at least for now, is former President Donald Trump.
Few of the White House hopefuls face the lofty expectations in Iowa that Trump does. He finished a competitive second to Ted Cruz in 2016, and went on to carry the state twice.
Yet in the three months since he announced his bid for a comeback, Trump has not set foot in Iowa, the first place his claim of party dominance will be tested early next year.
To be sure, Trump is making moves in Iowa. On Monday, his team announced it had named a state campaign director, Marshall Moreau, who managed the 2022 campaign of Republican attorney general candidate Brenna Bird. Bird defeated Democrat
Tom Miller, who had been the longest-serving attorney general in the country, first elected in 1978.
Trump has maintained an Iowa political presence, with a national campaign team member, Alex Latcham, based in the state. But Trump held a kickoff rally on Jan. 28 in South Carolina, where his 2016 primary victory sealed his status as GOP front-runner. And he squeezed in a speaking spot earlier that day at the annual state GOP meeting in New Hampshire, where he also won the first-in-the-nation primary seven years ago.
Though the caucuses remain nearly a year off, they remain the first event on the calendar, and some Iowa GOP activists have taken notice of Trump’s absence.
“I found that quite interesting,” Gloria Mazza, chair of the Polk County GOP, said of Trump’s New Hampshire and South Carolina stops. “Because Iowa is first in the nation, doesn’t everybody come here first?”
Meanwhile, others are making inroads.
Though Pence is not yet a candidate, his advocacy group Advancing American Values last week launched a campaign to organize opposition to school policies like one in an eastern Iowa district that has become a flashpoint among conservatives.
Pence was in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday rallying opponents of a policy by the nearby Linn-Mar Community School District that’s at issue in a federal lawsuit.
The school board last year enacted a measure allowing transgender students to request a gender support plan to begin socially transitioning at school without the permission of their parents.
Haley has rallies planned in the Des Moines and Cedar Rapids areas on Monday and today. Meanwhile, Scott is speaking at an event at Drake University on Wednesday, part of what aides call a national listening tour aimed at informing his plans, before addressing the annual Polk County Republican fundraiser in suburban Des Moines that evening.
Though several would-be candidates including Trump were in Iowa last year campaigning for midterm candidates, these first impressions at the outset of the GOP presidential primary are important. That’s especially true as many in the GOP wait to see whether Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proceeds with a White House bid.
But as the field of candidates grows in the coming months, Trump still retains a core of Republican support that could be hard to overcome.
In October, 57 percent of Iowa Republicans said they hoped Trump decided to run in 2024, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, while 33 percent said they hoped he would not and 10 percent said they were not sure.