The outcome of the Iowa Caucuses seem to have delivered no surprises, right on down to — if it holds up — DeSantis slightly outperforming his numbers in the Selzer/NBC poll to edge out Haley narrowly for second place.
That of course means that the overall assessment hasn’t changed: Trump has effectively put the race for the nomination away with such a commanding margin in a state he lost in 2016. In the end, the vast majority of voters in this contest made up their minds long ago, and the majority of them were determined to stick with the former president. The 2024 primary post-indictment feels like it has been one in name only.
So @jgeraghty, while I, too would have preferred a more substantive debate with more scrutiny of the actual frontrunner, as I noted earlier, entrance polls showed that 80% of voters had already made up their minds before the last few days. Among those who made them up in the past few days, Trump actually came in third. But he had already had so many committed supporters that it didn’t matter. Ultimately, it’s the same story as the past eight years — most Republican voters love Trump.
Roughly 40 percent of the vote has been counted in the 2024 Iowa caucuses, and the candidates’ margins are likely to evolve. But as of this writing, Trump has won roughly 53 percent of the vote. Combined, his two most formidable opponents, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, have won about 39 percent of the vote. That tracks neatly with the early entrance polls, which found that 53 percent of caucus-goers described themselves as part of the “MAGA movement” while 41 percent rejected the label.
Oh, and hey, maybe going relentlessly negative for two solid hours during the last debate before the caucus wasn’t the right move? Maybe by last Wednesday, the goose was cooked, the cake was baked, and there just weren’t that many remaining undecided caucus-goers to influence. But maybe Haley needed to create a “TrumpLies” site as well, and maybe DeSantis needed to take more swings at the frontrunner.
I assume that the voters who are choosing Donald Trump again have their reasons. They believe he’s the strongest candidate, perhaps because he’s the largest personality. They want him because they liked the way he drove the opposition nuts. They want him for reasons of revenge, because they feel that they were robbed of having “the full Trump” the first time, because of Russiagate. And some want him because he’s more than a Republican: he’s against the left, and in some crucial ways, he’s also against the right.
But, this primary season and the upcoming 2024 election is turning into a textureless mush. It’s the exact opposite of 2015-2016. Back then, cable television, pressured by Jeff Zucker, was Trump television, carrying his rallies. And in 2015-2016, Trump was an issues candidate, driving massive debates about immigration, about foreign policy, and the American economic model. He ran as a rebuke to the post-Cold War bipartisan consensus. His rise tracked the rise of a similar politics in European nations, rejecting a similar consensus. The shock of the Brexit result foreshadowed the shock of the Trump-Clinton result.
But in 2024, Trump’s rallies are not driving news coverage or national debate. And it’s not just a strategy of media blackout, it’s also the fact that he’s not really running as an issues candidate. Long chunks of his rallies are spent on digressions about the 2020 election or the various criminal prosecutions aimed at him.
That is, I cannot think of a time when politics was as denuded of issue-substance as it is now. Neither party is even pretending to offer a suite of policies aimed at solving our pressing problems. Instead, the election is turning into a raw contest of two aged men: Trump vs Biden, which somehow represents the rawest of all political contests: us vs them.
West Des Moines, Iowa—Somber mood inside the DeSantis caucus night party after the race was called so quickly for Trump.
I’d be livid were I in the DeSantis or Haley camps. Maybe the premature tabulation changed not one vote, but perception is reality; the non-Trump campaigns can be forgiven for thinking the national media leaned (inadvertently or otherwise) on the scale in the Hawkeye State.
Dems already fundraising off of Trump’s Iowa victory. Email just sent from Gavin Newsom begins:
“A short while ago, Donald Trump won the Iowa Caucus. He is now one step closer to becoming the Republican nominee and having a chance to return to the White House.
Terrifying.
That is why I am asking you to make a $3 donation DIRECTLY to the Democratic National Committee today. If that’s all you need to hear, use this link to donate:”
@rlowry I agree that the early calls didn’t affect much, but also, don’t see why the media couldn’t have just held out another 30 minutes to avoid the standard of calling a race when people were still voting.
It’s hard to see how the early calls affected anything. The result is going to be roughly what the polls predicted. And it’d be one thing if this thing were being decided by 1 point, instead of 30.