DeSantis is betting big on Iowa — but recent caucus winners have not emerged as the eventual GOP nominee.
The DeSantis campaign is shrugging off Nikki Haley’s major endorsement from New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, claiming it will be of little importance if the Florida governor has a strong showing in Iowa.
“What happens in New Hampshire will be significantly impacted by the outcome in Iowa, where the true Trump alternative will emerge,” DeSantis campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo said in response to the news. “And when Ron DeSantis comes out in that position he will be joined by over 60 New Hampshire state legislators who stand ready to take the fight to the establishment and their candidates of yesteryear to return power to grassroots conservatives.”
But a look at caucus results from recent years shows little correlation between the Iowa caucus winner and the New Hampshire primary winner — or the eventual nominee, for that matter.
For instance: In 2008, Mike Huckabee won in Iowa but came in third in New Hampshire. John McCain, the eventual nominee, won the primary in the Granite State. In 2012, Rick Santorum won Iowa but came in fourth in New Hampshire. Again, Mitt Romney, the eventual nominee, won New Hampshire.
And in 2016, Ted Cruz won Iowa and Trump won New Hampshire — and we all know how that ended.
This go-round, Iowa is set to be more of a “coronation” for Trump than a caucus, says Iowa-based Republican strategist Jimmy Centers.
Trump notched support from 51 percent of likely Iowa caucus goers in the latest NBC News/Des Moines Register poll, while DeSantis, his nearest rival, garnered just 19 percent support. The results give Trump the largest lead ever recorded in a competitive GOP primary five weeks out from the contest.
Support for Trump has risen eight points since October, while DeSantis has seen a three-point increase. Nikki Haley, for her part, came in at 16 percent in both polls.
But as Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer recently noted in comments to NBC, “Everything that could happen has happened in this contest.”
If Iowa’s job is to narrow the field, the question remains, Who will come in second to Trump’s all-but-guaranteed first-place finish and how much will that candidate lose by?
Still, Centers suggests we’ll have a much better sense of whether there will be a true Trump alternative after New Hampshire.
“The peril, of course, is that if you don’t meet or exceed expectations in Iowa. . . . All of the storylines then going into New Hampshire is going to be a campaign on the brink or, potentially even worse, a campaign that is on life support,” he said.
“For the top two potential alternatives to the former president, unless money completely runs dry, there’s not a ton of incentive to drop out just because the math still exists to get there,” he added.
Republican strategist Kevin Madden said a campaign that wants to go to the convention must demonstrate it can play across all of the states.
“A candidate would have to demonstrate that it has broad and deep support across all of the states because all of them tell you a different story about who the Republican Party is and what you need to win,” he said.
The ability to appeal to Evangelical voters in places like Iowa and South Carolina says a lot about a candidate’s national strength, whereas a strong showing in New Hampshire, where the primary is open to undeclared voters, can demonstrate an ability to win independents and thus demonstrate a candidate’s potential strength as a general election candidate.
Americans for Prosperity is working to increase Haley’s ground game in Iowa in the final weeks leading up to the caucus after having endorsed the former South Carolina governor two weeks ago. The Koch-backed group has sent out more than 100 people across the state to knock on doors for her and has committed $4 million in early state canvassing and digital ads.
“She’s had the momentum. Her message was being well-received,” Drew Klein, a senior adviser for AFP Action, said at a Haley event over the weekend. “This has been the missing piece.”
The Haley campaign is playing catch-up to the organizational strength of the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down in Iowa. The PAC says it has knocked on more than 750,000 doors and gotten 30,000 people to commit to caucus for him.
DeSantis has focused significant time and energy on Iowa, visiting all 99 of the state’s counties and holding at least 120 events there since May, according to NBC. Haley held 32 Iowa events in the same time frame, the outlet reported.
“The challenge [for Haley] is that Never Back Down has been on the ground organizing for Governor DeSantis for well over a year and Donald Trump’s apparatus has been operating here for eight years,” Centers said.
But Klein said AFP has been collecting data in Iowa since February, knocking on some 350,000 doors and making 700,000 calls to find voters who were open to supporting a non-Trump candidate.
Madden suggested the AFP endorsement is a “net positive” for Haley, but he said it is difficult to have to outsource on-the-ground organization.
Looking at Haley’s plateau in the NBC/Des Moines Register poll, the question for Centers becomes, “Did she peak too soon? And can AFP activate fast enough to catch up to Never Back Down?”
Around NR
• Madeleine Kearns has a note for the GOP presidential candidates: The right policy on transgenderism is obvious.
There are disagreements about the exact roles of state and federal government as well as about how different laws should be worded. But compared with abortion, the legal blueprint for Republican transgender policy is straightforward and popular. It’s unlikely that any of those on the stage are going to be the Republican nominee, let alone president, but compromise on this issue ought to be disqualifying.
• Noah Rothman does not mince words in recapping Vivek Ramaswamy’s latest GOP debate performance:
Vivek Ramaswamy has pushed all his chips in on a big bet. His presidential campaign, such as it is, is increasingly predicated on the assumption that GOP voters have become so mistrustful of institutions and establishments that they will swallow any paranoid conspiracy theory they encounter. With that assumption in mind during last night’s debate, Ramaswamy endorsed as many popular conspiracy theories as he could.
• Rothman finds the most recent debate ended in a draw:
Voters were presented with a Rorschach test. Each candidate hit their notes and met expectations, so voters who watched the debate probably saw exactly what they wanted to see — whatever that meant to them… All this is to say that tonight was a choose-your-own-adventure debate. There were no clear victors and no obvious losers. For the most part, everyone stayed in their lanes. The rest of the story will be left to the voters to tell.
• As pundits sound the alarm against putting a “dictator” Trump back in office, Michael Brendan Dougherty recaps examples of Trump’s relative powerlessness in office:
I have an idea of how to stop the Trump dictatorship: Elect him president. Then he will once again reveal his relative powerlessness. The problem with Trump is the exact opposite of dictatorship: chaos and disorder.
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