Trump is coasting in Iowa, as DeSantis and Haley clash
Countdown to caucuses for GOP rivals
Negative mailers are overstuffing Iowa mailboxes. Attack ads are cluttering the airwaves. And door knockers are fanning out from Des Moines to Dubuque and everywhere in between.
The Iowa caucuses, the first contest in the Republican nominating calendar, are poised to play an especially consequential role in 2024. But with only seven weeks to go, Donald Trump’s top rivals are running out of time to catch him as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley thrash each other in the final sprint to the starting line.
Far ahead in national polls, Trump is aiming for an emphatic victory Jan. 15 in Iowa that could serve as an early knockout punch.
DeSantis, the Florida governor, is betting on Iowa to pierce Trump’s growing aura of inevitability — and to reassert himself as the main rival to short-circuit Trump’s third run for president. DeSantis, who won the backing of the state’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, has been barnstorming across all of Iowa’s 99 counties, bolstered by an army of door knockers paid for by his related super political action committee.
On Saturday, DeSantis will visit his final county with an event in Newton held at the Thunderdome, a venue whose name appropriately captures the increasing acrimony and intensity of the race in the state. Trump will be in Cedar Rapids that same day.
For much of the year, the DeSantis team had insisted the 2024 primary was a two-man race. But Haley, a former United Nations ambassador, has ridden the momentum of her debate performances to transform it into a twoman-plus-one-woman contest.
“The more people see of Nikki Haley, the more they like her,” said Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager. “The more they see Ron DeSantis, the less they like him.”
Now Haley, who wore a Tshirt emblazoned with the words “Underestimate me — that’ll be fun” to the Iowa State Fair, is seeking to snuff out DeSantis at the very start. If she can best DeSantis in Iowa, his strongest early state, her team believes Haley would be positioned to emerge as the singular Trump alternative when the calendar turns to two friendlier terrains — New Hampshire, where she has polled in second place, and her home state, South Carolina, where she served as governor.
Revealingly, Haley’s allied super PAC has spent $3.5 million on ads and other expenditures attacking DeSantis in the last two months in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to federal records, but not a dollar explicitly opposing Trump despite his dominant overall lead.
“Nikki Haley and her donors are greedily wasting millions of dollars targeting Ron DeSantis in Iowa,” said David Polyansky, deputy campaign manager for DeSantis, who called that spending a political gift to Trump because the likeliest second choice of DeSantis supporters is not Haley but the former president.
Trump’s team has gleefully greeted the battling. James Blair, national field director for Trump, said Haley and DeSantis were “trying to bludgeon themselves for the title of first loser.”
“The biggest win in Iowa ever is 12 points so anything above that is setting a record,” Blair added, arguing that even an upset in Iowa would only prove a blip given the former president’s superior organization across the rest of the states on the calendar.
Iowa always plays a critical role in narrowing a presidential primary field but this year it could determine whether there is much of a contest at all. The Trump campaign has told supporters that it has booked its first significant television ads to begin in Iowa on Dec. 1, and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, has pledged to also spend millions in the final weeks even as his standing has slid since the summer.
“Almost everybody is pushing the chips into 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 could allow him to break through in New Hampshire.
DeSantis’ support has mostly collapsed in New Hampshire, where one recent poll showed him in fifth place. The state’s voters are typically more moderate than Iowa’s and the lack of a serious Democratic primary means independents could flood the contest, which could help Haley or Christie.
On the trail, DeSantis has been saying in increasingly blunt terms that Trump would lose a rematch against President Biden. But the energy behind that argument has diminished both because Biden has slipped in the polls and because Haley has tended to fare even better than either Trump or DeSantis in such a hypothetical matchup. In some cases, DeSantis has fared worse than Trump, too.
There are two debates planned before the Iowa caucuses that could still jostle the dynamics. Only the first, on Dec. 6 in Alabama, has been announced; the second is planned for January in Iowa.