Recap: Iowa storm upends campaigning; DeSantis to head to South Carolina right after caucuses

FORT MADISON, Iowa — Apoorva Ramaswamy had a simple ask for two supporters of her husband’s presidential campaign: “What do people say” about why they’re not supporting Vivek Ramaswamy, and “what answers can I help you provide?”

“Well, the only one I have and I couldn’t even remember who said it to me, but they mentioned his dark skin and they think he’s Muslim,” a supporter named Theresa Fowler told her at a restaurant meet-and-greet yesterday. “I kind of set them straight on that. I don’t know if they believe me or think I was covering for him, I don’t know.”

Apoorva Ramaswamy listened intently before responding, “Not much we can do about that one.”

The former president has canceled three of his four scheduled in-person rallies this weekend due to weather concerns.

Trump will now campaign mainly through "tele-rallies" where potential caucus goers have the chance to hear from the former president on their cellphones at designated times for an abbreviated speech. He still plans on holding an in-person rally in Indianola.

Surrogates like state Rep. Bobby Kauffman, Donald Trump Jr and Kimberly Guilfoyle will also be campaigning for the former president in the final days before Monday's caucuses.

The candidates are barnstorming Iowa in a last-ditch effort to campaign before the critical caucuses Monday.

Former advisers to Jeb Bush are furious over a new ad from Never Back Down, a pro-Ron DeSantis’ super PAC, comparing the former Florida governor to Nikki Haley, a slight considering Bush’s 2016 presidential bid did not go well.

The group cobbled together clips comparing things Bush said during his 2016 race to things Haley has said recently. In a post on X, the DeSantis-backed super PAC said, “Nikki Haley is the Jeb Bush of 2024.” The tweet was later deleted.

A former Bush adviser told NBC News: “In about a week DeSantis and his entire team are going to find themselves on the a-- end of history even if they are lucky to get a second place win [in Iowa], and no amount of emergency survival groveling is going to rebuild the bridges they’ve burned.”

Another veteran Florida GOP operative noted that Bush has endorsed and generally praised DeSantis, both helping him publicly and introducing him to “his network” early in his political career.

“What the f--- is NBD thinking here?” the person said. “Jeb endorsed Ron long ago, and there are Jeb supporters on their way to Iowa on their own dime right now.”

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, became the latest Republican lawmaker to throw his support behind Trump's bid for another term, announcing in a post on X tonight that he is endorsing the former president.

"Whether you like Trump or not, Americans face a binary choice," Lee wrote. "Biden refuses to enforce our border, prosecutes his opponents, & embraces policies that make life unaffordable for hardworking Americans. I’ll take the mean tweets. I choose Trump."

It was Trump’s 21st Senate endorsement this election cycle.

Trump endorsed Lee during his Senate re-election bid in 2022.

Republican parties in three battleground states are navigating turbulence that has many in the GOP concerned that the discord and dysfunction will jeopardize their candidates up and down the ballot in critical races this fall.

In Michigan, Nevada and Florida — three states that will feature competitive presidential and Senate contests — state parties have been gripped with leadership strife in recent weeks. In Florida, the GOP chairman was ousted after facing a rape accusation. In Nevada, the top two state party officials have been indicted for their alleged role as “fake electors” for Trump after he lost the 2020 election there.

Nowhere has the chaos been more pronounced than in Michigan, though, where rivalrous factions can’t agree on who’s in charge.

Read the full story here.

The prohibitive favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination looks to be on the verge of victory in Iowa and leads by wide margins in national polls and in other key states — except for one: New Hampshire, where one challenger has been gaining steam in recent polls, raising the possibility the Granite State may turn a coronation into a genuine competition.

If it sounds like a description of the current GOP proceedings, well, it is. But it was also the set-up more than two decades ago for a Republican primary season that could offer a useful lens through which to view the current race.

There are, obviously, glaring differences in tone and substance between George W. Bush and Trump. But the trajectory of Bush’s candidacy in the lead-up to the 2000 primary season is practically identical to Trump’s this time around.

Read the full story here.

DeSantis plans to fly to South Carolina, not New Hampshire, immediately after Monday night’s caucuses in Iowa, campaign spokesperson Bryan Griffin confirmed to NBC News.

Griffin stressed that DeSantis is not skipping New Hampshire entirely — the Florida governor will campaign in the Granite State ahead of the Jan. 23 primary, including participating in a CNN town hall there Tuesday night. But DeSantis' first campaign event after Iowa will take place in Greenville, South Carolina.

This will be DeSantis’ fourth visit to Greenville since launching his White House bid, and his 20th campaign event in the state, which he last visited on Dec. 1.

The AP was first to report DeSantis' plans.

Allies of RFK Jr. are taking a major step toward putting him on the presidential ballot in several key battleground states, hiring multiple signature-gathering vendors to begin the massive undertaking of circulating petitions to submit on the independent candidate’s behalf.

American Values 2024, the super PAC supporting Kennedy, formally contracted three firms to collect voter signatures in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, according to Tony Lyons, a co-founder of the group. 

Workers hired by the firms are set to begin collecting signatures in Georgia on Jan. 20, with the efforts in Arizona and Michigan slated to commence soon after. Lyons says it will finance and lead the signature-gathering charge for Kennedy in 10 of the states with the largest threshold of voter petitions required. 

Read the full story here.

DES MOINES, Iowa — Republicans here were expecting a flurry of political activity in the closing days before Monday’s caucuses. Instead, they got a “life-threatening” blizzard that, along with bone-chilling temperatures, imperils voter turnout.

“Twenty below is cold,” said Will Rogers, a former chairman of the Polk County GOP who plans to caucus for Haley. “It will keep people home on caucus night.”

Rogers said he believes stay-inside temperatures will help Trump, who has a highly committed voter base and has led by dozens of points in every major recent poll of the state.

Indeed, in nearly a dozen interviews with party officials, campaign operatives and surrogates for candidates, a consensus emerged that Trump is most likely to benefit if snow, ice, wind and cold combine to depress turnout across the state. A December NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers showed Trump voters were most prone to be enthusiastic about, and locked in on, their candidate.

Former Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., was dismayed by the Republican field program in Georgia during her failed bid for re-election in 2020.

So she founded a new platform — one she believes can be the “gig economy app” for canvassing.

“At the end of [my campaign], I said, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do this,’” she told NBC News in an interview. “And so in the aftermath of it taking stock, I saw that there were huge gaps in the market for serving campaigns. There were a lot of people that wanted to make money. The incentives weren’t aligned necessarily with winning.”

The platform is called “FieldRight” and is part of a new array of campaign tech tools she launched under the “RallyRight” banner. The company said its platforms were used by campaigns during the 2023 elections, but that it’s now ready for a national rollout.

URBANDALE, Iowa — DeSantis told reporters today that a “Praetorian Guard” of conservative media is protecting Trump from facing criticism in the Republican primary.

“He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media — Fox News, the websites, all this stuff. They just don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers and they don’t want to have their ratings go down, and that’s just the reality. That’s just the truth,” DeSantis said.

He added that this was an “observation” and “isn’t a complaint.”  

DeSantis made the comments after visiting his campaign’s Iowa headquarters to thank volunteers with just three days until the caucuses. A snowstorm forced DeSantis to cancel several of his campaign stops today.

Haley held a telephone town hall with Iowans who were set to attend an event in Fort Dodge that she canceled because of blizzard conditions.

Haley acknowledged that it was "asking a lot" of her supporters to come out and caucus for her in freezing temperatures on Monday, but said that Iowa would "set the tone" for the rest of the race.

"I know it’s asking a lot of you to go out and caucus. But I also know we have a country to save. And I will be out there in the cold," Haley said.

"All eyes are on Iowa because you set the tone for where our country goes from here. And that’s what the rest of the states listen to. I trust you. I know we’re going to get this right," she added.

Haley will hold two more tele-town halls in place of in-person events today.

Vivek Ramaswamy is urging Iowans to “open their eyes” and consider him in the Jan. 15 caucuses because “the system has made clear” that Trump won’t be president again.

“If you think they’re going to let Donald J. Trump get anywhere near that White House again, I’m going to ask you to open your eyes. The system has made clear, they’re going to stop at nothing, and I mean, nothing to keep this man away,” Ramaswamy told a room of likely caucusgoers in Fort Dodge on Friday.

Ramaswamy has been strongly leaning on the conspiratorial narrative that the left is going to “trot out their next puppet,” casting former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, his sparring partner in past debates, in that role.

During his debate counterprogramming Wednesday night, he said a GOP race down to just Trump and Haley would be “a nightmare scenario” and vowed to stay in the race until the end.

Through decades of political life before entering the White House, Biden rarely shied from leaning into his public persona as an affable everyman more comfortable in a Dairy Queen than the Situation Room.

Now a buttoned-up president who often appears behind a lectern in a suit and tie, Biden is heeding pleas from top advisers to return to his original form, according to multiple people familiar with the conversations.

Biden, these people said, is taking advice from confidants who’ve suggested he try a more casual approach in public to try to ease one of voters’ chief concerns about his 2024 candidacy: his age.

Read the full story here.

The Oregon Supreme Court said Friday that it's declining to hear, for now, a challenge by five Oregon voters to rule Trump ineligible for the primary and general election ballots in the state based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

The court signaled that it's waiting to hear what action the Supreme Court will take in a similar case from Colorado, noting that oral arguments are set for Feb. 8.

Oregon is one of over two dozen states where legal challenges have been filed challenging Trump’s eligibility based on the 14th Amendment.

The Trump campaign said in a statement that the decision "was the correct one."

"President Trump urges the swift dismissal of all remaining, bad-faith, election interference 14th Amendment ballot challenges as they are un-Constitutional attempts by allies of Crooked Joe Biden to disenfranchise millions of American voters and deny them their right to vote for the candidate of their choice," campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement.

The pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down has announced the Florida governor's remaining two events this afternoon will be canceled due to the weather. All four of the super PAC's scheduled events today have now been postponed. 

The only stop left for DeSantis today is a drop by at his campaign headquarters in Urbandale, coming up shortly. 

Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century announced Friday that it's going to devote $140 million in paid spending over the 2024 election cycle on ads and direct mail to target voters in battleground states.

The group said that the program, part of the organization’s effort to defeat Trump in November, will include television, digital, streaming and radio ads as well as direct mail in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and potentially North Carolina.

American Bridge said that the "program will focus on the key voting bloc that data says has decided American elections in recent cycles, especially post-Roe — women."

"These ads will feature the true stories of women voters and their families living in these key swing states and will use their voices to expose the truth about Trump’s agenda," the group said in its announcement.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., hosted a listening session at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, where he promoted a message of bipartisanship and providing a home for voters with centrist views.

The West Virginia senator weighed in on a potential run as a No Labels candidate, saying that he would have to see the outcome of the primary and that things could change by Super Tuesday. The centrist Democrat dodged a question about becoming an independent, saying, “I’m the most independent Democrat you’ve ever met in your life.” 

SFA Fund Inc., the super PAC supporting Haley, asks DeSantis, “Who’s your daddy?” in a new ad mocking his relationship with Trump.

The ad calls DeSantis a “suck-up” and includes repeated chants of “Who’s your daddy?” over pictures of DeSantis and Trump, as well as multiple clips of DeSantis’ 2018 ad from his gubernatorial bid, in which he was teaching his children about Trump. The super PAC has released a similar ad showcasing DeSantis using Trump’s mannerisms and rhetoric last month.

After focusing its harshest attacks on the Florida governor for months, SFA Fund Inc. released its most aggressively anti-Trump ad yesterday, going after the former president’s “temper tantrums” and “chaos.”

The Trump campaign announced this morning that it has canceled its event with Kari Lake because of the winter weather blanketing Iowa.

"For the safety of our guests, due to continued winter weather, Kari Lake’s Remarks to the Trump Supporters of Marion County in Pella, IA this evening has been cancelled," the campaign said.

Lake is running for Senate in Arizona and previously ran for governor of the state. 

ANKENY, Iowa — DeSantis suggested Iowans may have “more impact” than usual this caucus season, saying their support will “pack a punch” in the event of a low turnout Monday night. 

Pushing ahead with his morning schedule despite an intense snowstorm bearing down on Iowa, he told the crowd at the Northside Conservatives Club breakfast in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny, “I don’t think you’ll ever be able to cast the vote that has more impact, given the circumstances,” referring to next week’s forecast of sub-zero temperatures. 

The DeSantis-aligned super PAC Never Back Down has canceled its first two events with the Florida governor as a blizzard plows across the Hawkeye State, with the status of the final two stops still in question.

The Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, has endorsed Trump for president, saying in a tweet this morning: "Joe Biden has turned calm into chaos, competence into incompetence, stability into anarchy, and security into catastrophe."

In a statement released by Trump's campaign, Matt Schlapp, CPAC's chairman, said, "‘Now is the time to unite and support the candidate who best can accomplish what is needed to put America back on track. CPAC enthusiastically endorses Donald J. Trump for president of the United States."

Days before the Iowa caucuses, National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson said that he expects Trump to be the party's presidential nominee — and that it will pose opportunities and challenges for GOP goals of expanding the House majority.

“I assume he will be the nominee,” Hudson told reporters yesterday. “I think he will turn out voters that don’t turn out otherwise. I think the presidential year turnout model is better for us, which didn’t always used to be the case. But I think the nature of our voters — they’ve become more working class, they are less likely to turn out. I think the presidential year is going to bring more of those folks out. But I think Trump will also draw out voters to help us with turnout.”

But it’s not all positive. Hudson, without criticizing the ex-president, noted that Trump may not be campaigning in states that have battleground districts, and that he may lose some of them.

“In a lot of our battleground places he’s not campaigning, and he may not win those districts,” Hudson said. “And so that’s why we’ve positioned ourselves with candidates who can win, no matter what’s happening at the top of the ticket, because they are compelling candidates that can attract voters.”

The South Carolina Democratic Party announced this morning that Biden will headline its “First in the Nation Celebration” dinner in Columbia on Jan. 27, one of several stops he is expected to make in the Palmetto State a week before the first sanctioned Democratic primary.

Of note, the party says that two other candidates on the Feb. 3 ballot, Rep. Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, were invited to attend the event as well. If either did, it would be a rare — perhaps the only time the sitting president would appear at a political event with his two main Democratic challengers for re-nomination.

One-time GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., made his non-endorsement of Haley this morning on social media, citing “her record and campaign” and promoting a website to the same effect, nevernikki.net.

While this appears to be the cycle’s first non-endorsement, it is not exactly surprising given Paul’s politics and Haley’s own resume, for example, on issues like the role of the U.S. on the world stage, among many others.

"@NikkiHaley supports Biden and McConnell and the forever-war crowd on funding for the war in Ukraine," Paul wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a series of posts outlining his reason for opposing her nomination.

"@NikkiHaley believes in nearly unlimited foreign aid — we have sent over $100 BILLION we don’t have to Ukraine already and she wants more," he wrote.

As of now, Ramaswamy says he plans to continue with his campaign events across Iowa today despite the snowstorm and blizzard warnings. 

"We’ll continue to every last one for as long as we can *physically* make it," he said.

Haley and DeSantis both altered campaign events today across snowy Iowa. Haley switching to tele-town halls and the DeSantis PAC Never Back Down canceling two stops set for this afternoon. 

 

All the focus on the race for second place in Iowa between DeSantis and Haley has overlooked what could be the biggest storyline Monday — besides the subzero temperatures. 

If the polls are correct, Trump is on track to smash the Republican record for largest victory margin in a contested Iowa caucus.

The current record is held by Bob Dole, who defeated Pat Robertson by 13 points in the 1988 caucuses. 

The Republican presidential candidates are once again battling winter storm conditions in Iowa three days out from the caucuses.

Haley will host tele-town halls in place of the three in-person events her campaign had scheduled for today. DeSantis canceled two events in the state, but still plans to hold three others. Ramaswamy and Hutchinson are also slated to campaign in Iowa, while Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake is set to hold an event for the Trump campaign.

Elsewhere, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is making two stops in New Hampshire today. And Robert F. Kennedy is holding a rally in North Carolina.

Biden is also traveling to the battleground state of Pennsylvania today for a White House event.

CLIVE, Iowa — DeSantis said last night that the 2024 election will become consumed by Trump's legal battles if he becomes the Republican nominee.

“Donald Trump, if he’s the nominee, the whole election is going to be about legal issues, criminal trials, maybe criminal convictions by then, Jan. 6, all of that,” the Florida governor said. 

While toeing the line between differentiating himself from Trump without alienating the MAGA base, DeSantis added that just because Trump has been mistreated doesn’t mean he deserves to be elected president again.

“You can appreciate what Donald Trump did. You cannot like the people who are doing this to him, the DOJ and these prosecutors in New York and all this, 100%. It’s unfair. But it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for the country to nominate him to be our candidate in 2024,” he said.

DeSantis also criticized Haley, telling the crowd, “If you put your foot in your mouth every other day, if you’re scared to take questions from the media or voters and all these other things, you are not going to be able to handle what’s coming for you in a general election.”