At this point, it isn’t that hot a take to suggest that Ron DeSantis’s campaign could be going better. At one point sitting only about 15 percentage points behind Donald Trump, according to the RealClearPolitics average, the Florida governor now trails the former president by almost 40. In Iowa, the first — and, some might argue, most important — state in the Republican primary elections, Trump is up by close to 30 percentage points.
Earlier this year, Rich Lowry wrote that if Trump wins Iowa, “the fight for the nomination might be all but over,” but if he doesn’t, “at the very least it’s going to be a long fight.” Last month, he wrote that Trump’s lead is “not nearly enough to say he has this thing put away” and that he’s still beatable in the Hawkeye State.
Which makes a Politico article published Friday all the stranger. A “top DeSantis campaign official” reportedly told the outlet that the campaign would be happy with a “strong second-place showing” in Iowa. Hewing to Rich’s assumption that a Trump win in the year’s first caucus would sew up the nomination for the former president, those in DeSantis’s orbit should be concerned about, not content with, the prospect of coming in second in Iowa.
All that being said, it’s possible that the state doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin reminded me in a conversation I had with him last week, the last time the winner of Iowa’s Republican caucus in a year with a serious primary battle ended up with the nomination was 2000, when George W. Bush won ten delegates to runner-up Steve Forbes’s eight. Something else Levin pointed out was that the rightward-most candidate — the one who more often than not wins the Iowa caucus — generally doesn’t win the nomination. That was the case with Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016 (it’s worth remembering that Trump more or less ran as a moderate in his first GOP primary go-round).
Regardless of whether an Iowa win would have the potential to shape the outcome of the race — I personally agree with Rich’s assessment that it’s the only thing that could stymie the Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder that is Donald Trump — the DeSantis campaign’s outlook toward the race raises more questions than it answers.