The former president overcame Ron DeSantis’s more explicitly Iowa-centric efforts. Will the caucuses be able to retain their unique form and significance?
Donald Trump’s commanding victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses raises an interesting question: Has Trump killed Iowa? No, not the state itself. Rather, the hyperlocalized character of its primary-beginning contest.
Ron DeSantis’s campaign strategy bet heavily on Iowa. He camped out in the state early, holding and attending many events, as well as spending heavily there. He visited all 99 of its counties. He secured endorsements from Iowa political figures, both elected officials such as Governor Kim Reynolds, and state conservative power-brokers such as Bob Vander Plaats, who backed the winning Republican candidate in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 contests. For all that, DeSantis lost by about 30 points to Trump, and only narrowly defeated Nikki Haley.
DeSantis, that is, employed the classic strategy for a Republican presidential candidate in Iowa, and it came up far short. Has Trump rendered that strategy moot? Trump’s campaign did take Iowa fairly seriously on a structural and grassroots level (recall that he lost the state in 2016), at least a partial concession to the necessity of the state’s political rigmarole. To the extent Trump was able to bypass the traditional routes to Iowa victory that DeSantis pursued, it may be a result of factors unique to him and to his personal appeal.
In this regard, the example of the 2022 Ohio Republican senate primary is worth considering. That contest, which involved much jockeying for Trump’s endorsement, reached a critical moment in mid April of that year, when it began to emerge that Trump was likely to endorse Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance. Many grassroots Republicans in the state did not trust Vance, who had moved to the state only a few years prior. They coalesced in an ultimately failed effort to persuade Trump not to endorse Vance. Vance ended up winning the primary on the strength of Trump’s endorsement, and then also the general election. Trump’s imprimatur overcome Vance’s weaknesses when measured by more conventional metrics of a candidate running for statewide office.
But this example does not answer whether these triumphs over customary modes of state-level campaigning — flesh-pressing, event-holding, endorsement-seeking — are being made obsolete, or whether Trump alone, with his simultaneously highly personalized yet highly nationalized appeal, is capable of overcoming them, while other attempts fail. But if it ever looked like we might soon be able to get some sense of what a post-Trump politics would look like, well . . .
So it seems we’ll have to wait and see before concluding that Trump has killed the Iowa caucuses as a distinct political phenomenon. But if there is to be a post-Trump, he may have provided a new strategy for those who aspire to follow his example, and it’s one that caters a bit less to Iowa’s idiosyncrasies.