The first contest of the 2024 presidential race is barely a day away, as a snow-covered Iowa prepares for the state’s Republican caucuses on Monday night. Since Donald Trump is expected to win the caucuses by a wide margin, the only real contest will be for second place, between the remaining contenders Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. Below are live updates on the latest developments in the final hours of campaigning.
The event held Sunday at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, was Trump’s only in-person event in the week before the caucus after three other rallies were canceled because of inclement weather. It was a smaller crowd than Trump usually attracts for a rally but that was understandable, considering the frigid subzero weather provided a significant disincentive for attendees to wait in line for hours before the event.
As the former president made the case that the coming Iowa caucus was all but a formality, he used the appearance as an opportunity to roll out an endorsement from Doug Burgum — the second former 2024 Republican candidate to endorse him after long-shot businessman Perry Johnson dropped out in October — as well as Wisconsin congressman Derrick Van Orden, These follow a wave of endorsements that Trump has received in recent days from federal elected officials, who seem to have all made the calculation that his nomination is a fait accompli. Also on Sunday, Senator Marco Rubio, another erstwhile Trump rival, announced his support via Twitter.
Politico’s Meridith McGraw talks to one of the tourists who have come to Iowa to take it all in:
[London resident Marco] Bisazza is a self-described liberal and “political tourist” who is fascinated by the American political system and Trump’s following. This is his third time coming to the Iowa caucuses just for fun, although it will be his first time seeing the Republican process up close. He and his friends wanted to go see each of the candidates — they went to a Vivek Ramaswamy event before the blizzard — and had planned to visit an evangelical church while they are in town, too.
The caucuses are something “that doesn’t exist in Europe, so that’s interesting to observe. But I want to understand the mentality of people, so going to a Trump rally is more about talking to the Trump voters than listening to what he has to say.”
Ben Jacobs reports from Iowa about Ron DeSantis’s sputtering finish in the state:
On the Saturday before the Iowa caucus, Ron DeSantis stopped in the small city of Atlantic for a meet and greet with roughly two dozen voters and two dozen reporters. It had been scheduled to coincide with a rally for Donald Trump in town a few hours later so that reporters could see DeSantis and then dash back to see Trump with time to spare. That was before the weather intervened. It wasn’t cold in Iowa. It was Siberian. The mercury dropped well below zero and the windchill meant that leaving any skin exposed to the elements for more than a few minutes presented a legitimate health risk. Trump, who was flying in from Florida, canceled his rally. DeSantis, who had spent months doggedly stumping the state, did not.
The event was held in the backroom of a restaurant on the town’s snow-swept main drag. Because the restaurant was closed, attendees were fed McDonald’s cheeseburgers that the campaign had picked up in two bags of thirty from one of the few establishments open in town.
However, even when his campaign event was literally the only thing happening in Atlantic, DeSantis wasn’t able to draw everyone in the town. Two LDS missionaries who lived upstairs from the restaurant came down to see what the hubbub was about. They liked DeSantis but didn’t stick around to see him — although they did grab campaign baseball hats as souvenirs.
Read the rest here.
Ed Kilgore offers some takeaways from the state of the polls, as of early Sunday, including how Trump is trouncing everyone, and Haley looks like she has the inside track on second place, though without much supporter-passion:
Haley seems to have momentum in Iowa; she has slowly chipped away at DeSantis’s standing since this autumn, and in the RealClearPolitics averages she now leads him by 18.2 percent to 15.6 percent. But by all accounts the Florida governor’s earlier heavy investments in an Iowa field operation should give him an advantage if turnout is less than robust. And as Selzer’s gold-standard (and perhaps even voter-influencing) Iowa Poll indicates, Haley support is an inch deep and lacking in the kind of enthusiasm that could matter as voters decide whether to go out in subzero temperatures … Another finding about Haley in the Selzer poll could help explain the low enthusiasm levels: a lot of them may actually be Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents[.]
Larry Hogan, the moderate Republican former governor of Maryland, announced he was backing Nikki Haley on Sunday morning. Per Axios:
“I’m convinced that the momentum is with Nikki Haley, that she has the potential of moving into second place — although it be at a distant second place — which gives her momentum heading into New Hampshire where she’s only seven points down, and I think that’s a real possibility,” he said. …
“My friend Chris Christie dropped out of the race in New Hampshire. I appreciate his effort, but I believe that Nikki Haley is the strongest chance for us to put forth our best possible candidate for November,” he added.
Yes, Trump is still way ahead, and his supporters the most enthusiastic.
Some highlights from the poll, via NBC News:
Boosted by his standing with evangelical Christians, first-time caucusgoers and registered Republicans, former President Donald Trump holds a nearly 30-point lead in the final NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll before Monday’s GOP caucuses. …
The poll shows former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley narrowly edging past Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for second place, although the gap is within the poll’s margin of error.
Yet while Haley’s first-choice support has ticked up, just 9% of her supporters say they’re extremely enthusiastic about her candidacy — substantially lower than the enthusiasm for Trump and even DeSantis. …
Haley’s 20% first-choice support in the poll is up 4 points from December’s poll, and she overperforms among independents (with 33% of them picking her as their first choice) and those with college degrees (27%). Strikingly, half of Haley’s supporters identify as either independents (39%) or Democrats (11%) — significantly different from the poll’s overall makeup, which stands at 69% Republicans, 23% independents and 5% Democrats among likely GOP caucusgoers. And DeSantis’ 16% first-choice support is down 3 points from December, when he was in a distant second place to Trump.
After cancelling his earlier events, he arrived in Iowa on Saturday evening in time to livestream his own TV-style town hall from a hotel.
What Ramaswamy tweeted less than 20 minutes before Trump posted that:
A prankster from the Good Liars tried to give Ron DeSantis a participation trophy at a town hall event on Saturday where potential caucusgoers were significantly outnumbered by members of the media:
The Washington Post’s Dan Balz looks ahead:
The fact that the battle for second is as much the focus of attention as anything else speaks volumes about the state of the Republican Party in the Trump era. That’s another reason this isn’t a normal pre-caucus weekend. Maybe there will be a surprise. Some candidates have surged near the end of Iowa campaigns — Rick Santorum in 2012 is the classic case — but it would take a historic rise for Haley or DeSantis to threaten Trump’s lead.
Still, Iowa will offer the first voter-based results of Republican sentiment after many months of polls and punditry. Several metrics will define Monday’s results, beginning with the performance by the front-runner. Trump, who has campaigned far less in Iowa than his rivals, hopes to break the record for the biggest margin of victory by a Republican in the caucuses by besting Bob Dole’s 12-point win over Pat Robertson in 1988.
Beyond that, Trump could become the first Republican to win an outright majority of the vote in a multicandidate caucus.
The final pre-caucus edition of the famous “gold standard” Des Moines Register poll from J. Ann Selzer will be released at 8 p.m. Saturday night. The stakes are a little higher this time, but not because of the GOP race: the final 2020 edition of the poll never came out before that year’s Democratic caucuses thanks to a catastrophic snafu. Noted Politico on Saturday morning:
The poll isn’t just notable for its historical accuracy — it can also fuel the momentum of a late-surging candidate or pile on a flagging one. Selzer’s poll showed former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) gaining steam in the final days before the 2012 caucuses, and he ultimately overtook Mitt Romney and won.
That’s a key part of the poll’s influence: Caucuses aren’t primaries. Momentum and organization have always been the keys to victory — or at least outperforming expectations. …
It’s also another test for Selzer and the polling profession at large. Pollsters have struggled to measure Trump’s support, and this year’s primaries could offer clues about whether they’ve figured out how to reach his backers.
Ben Jacobs reports from Iowa:
Almost immediately after Trump lost reelection, [Nikki Haley] began a shadow campaign for the White House and started stumping in Iowa in 2021. The campaign has been defined by an almost methodical vagueness that has let her steadily persist while other hyped-up challengers to Trump have either given up, like Tim Scott, or stumbled like DeSantis. The result has made her the default candidate of Republican voters least favorable to Trump, who are more like Paul Ryan acolytes than Never Trumpers.
That wing of the party resides in places like Ankeny, a sprawling new development designed as a walkable community complete with an ersatz downtown — sports bar, video-game bar, bowling alley — for those who want nightlife without the big-city thrills of Des Moines. It could be any prosperous suburb in the country packed with college-educated, white-collar voters. But it’s in Iowa and is unlike much of the rest of the state, which is aging, rural, and blue collar — in other words, Trump country. In 2016, Marco Rubio was jokingly dubbed “the Mayor of Ankeny” for the amount of time he spent there, winning it handily in the caucuses, but he finished third place behind Trump, who finished second, and Ted Cruz, who finished first. Then as now, there are not enough places like Ankeny for an establishment Republican to win the state outright. Of course, since then, the party has trended further away from the polite suburbanites who politely clapped for Haley rather fervently waving their sign and toward the blue-collar voters who line up for hours to see Trump speak and remain standing long after he takes the podium.
There’s been speculation that the possibly record-cold temperatures in Iowa on Monday could affect turnout for the caucuses. On Friday, Intelligencer’s Ed Kilgore wrote about the concerns:
It’s important to remember that marginal voters — the kind of people most likely to skip voting if it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable — don’t generally attend caucuses, which require a significant weeknight time commitment, in any event. …
[W]hatever the weather, the candidates with the best caucus turnout organizations are likely to have a turnout advantage. In Iowa this year, that means Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. If any candidate is going to be hurt by a drop-off in participation by more casual voters, it’s probably Nikki Haley, though she may have enough momentum to edge DeSantis anyway.
