Arwa Mahdawi: an incredible comeback for Trump
The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who was in Iowa on Monday night as a surrogate for the Biden-Harris campaign, may have summed up the night the best. “Tonight’s contest,” Pritzker said, “is simply a question of whether you like your Maga Trump agenda wrapped in the original packaging, or with high heels or lifts in their boots”.
There were no meaningful differences between the three frontrunners (Trump, Ron “rumoured to wear leg-lengthening lifts” DeSantis, and Nikki Haley). And, in the end, Iowa, as was much predicted, went for the original packaging – by a landslide.
So does this mean Trump is a shoo-in for the Republican nominee? Not necessarily. There have been numerous instances where the winner of the Iowa caucus isn’t the eventual nominee – including 2016, when Ted Cruz won. Still, Trump’s victory on Monday night makes it increasingly likely that 2024 is going to be a Biden-Trump rematch. And this, let us not forget, is despite the fact that Trump is facing 91 felony counts in four separate cases covering everything from conspiring to overturn the 2020 election to falsifying records in connection to hush money paid to an adult film star. Oh, and let’s not forget that last year a New York jury found Trump guilty of sexually abusing the advice columnist E Jean Carroll. However, it seems none of that is a deal-breaker for the Republican voters in Iowa.
All in all? Monday night marked an incredible comeback for the disgraced former president and an enormous step backwards for the country.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
Lloyd Green: ‘Nikki Haley is too out of touch to win’
Donald Trump romped to victory in the Iowa caucus. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis vie for a distant second. Haley may best Trump in next week’s New Hampshire primary, but she won’t derail him. Her candidacy is a magnet for disaffected Republicans and high-end independents, constituencies too small to matter in this year’s nominating process but who may determine the outcome of the general election.
She is the wine-track candidate in a Joe Six-pack Republican party, out of step with the party’s working-class and white evangelical base. Her backers emphatically oppose a national six-week abortion ban, which Iowa Republicans embrace. In a similar vein, a majority of Haley voters believe Joe Biden legitimately won in 2020, placing them at odds with the rest of caucusgoers.
As ever, class and culture count. Haley nearly matched Trump with college graduates. By contrast, she only eked out the support of one in eight voters without a four-year degree. Jesus and Nascar get you the “W” in Trump-centric Iowa. Pearls and garden parties, not so much.
Looking ahead, a Trump loss in New Hampshire would be a mere speed bump. In 2000, George W Bush won Iowa, slipped in New Hampshire, then rallied in South Carolina. He never looked back. This year, Haley trails Trump by nearly 30 points in South Carolina, her home.
Meanwhile, the 45th president’s legal woes remain the soundtrack of 2024’s political calendar. In the coming hours, his latest defamation trial will kick off in Manhattan. His sexual assault of E Jean Carroll haunts decades later.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Trump will remain unstoppable’
Of course Donald Trump won big today. He’s running for the candidacy of a Republican party that he’s all but created.
Some in the Trump 2016 campaign such as Steve Bannon wanted to realign American politics in a new way: to win so decisively among (particularly white) working-class voters to permanently change the electoral map. For the moment, at least, they failed in their ambitions. Rhetoric and disregard for institutional order aside, on the policy front Trump governed more like a business Republican and less like populist firebrand. But it’s clear that he did permanently change the Republican party.
Trump’s style – his personal attacks on opponents, railings against establishment media, attacks on the “deep state” and the election system itself – all built on existing trends within the Republican party, but he took them to new extremes and made personal loyalty to his brand a litmus test in the party.
He’s done to his party something very unusual in American politics. Instead of hobbling together a loose coalition like Joe Biden, Trump made the Republicans a coherent, largely unified entity, bound together by a worldview and a leader.
Iowa’s results make it plainly clear that Trump will remain unstoppable in Republican primaries unless he’s kept off ballots by the courts. Outside of the judicial system there is no elite media or RNC cabal nearly strong enough to defeat him.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities
Ben Davis: ‘This is a race in name only’
The Iowa caucuses show what we all knew: this year’s Republican primary is a race in name only. Trump’s landslide victory felt inevitable and was even bigger than most expected. He was able to win without participating in debates or even running much of a primary-focused campaign, preferring to act as if he was already the nominee.
Most Americans are barely aware there’s even a primary race going on. Caucus turnout has plummeted since 2016. It is hard to imagine a scenario in which Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. He’s already led a coup attempt, been indicted with dozens of counts of various felonies and even compared his views on immigrants to Hitler’s. It hasn’t hurt his standing with Republicans at all.
While the Iowa caucuses, with their social pressure, heavily white and evangelical electorate, and brutal negative temperatures, are particularly friendly to Trump, there’s very little chance he has to break a sweat to win the nomination. Under the hood, the caucus results show the Republican base is still divided and changing.
In heavily college-educated areas, Trump’s vote share plummeted. While this matters little in the Republican primary, it’s a sign that Trump could still struggle to win even Republican-leaning voters in the general election in highly educated areas. These are voters who, unlike millions of others, still haven’t been alienated enough to stop caucusing in the Republican primary, and even still, they reject Trump. It remains to be seen if the unpopular Biden can do enough to win these voters back over.
This primary race that never took off serves as yet another rebuke of the wealthy elites in the Republican party, who have used the party as a vehicle to promote market-friendly policy above all else. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Ron DeSantis campaign, and the results were a spectacular failure. It’s not their party anymore. The Republican party is now a vehicle primarily for the politics of cultural grievance and petty reaction.
Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign
Geoffrey Kabaservice: ‘It’s impossible to out-Trump Trump’
Anyone surprised by Donald Trump’s blowout victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses shouldn’t have been. The other candidates’ failure to criticize him in any meaningful way amounted to a pre-emptive surrender to his brand of populism, and the election results showed that it’s impossible to out-Trump Trump. In fact, dislodging Trump was always going to be enormously difficult because he has remade not only the Republican party but Republican voters themselves.
Trump lost the Iowa caucuses in 2016 – finishing behind Ted Cruz and barely ahead of Marco Rubio – because enough voters still believed in other versions of the Republican party, whether represented by the muscular internationalism and sunny optimism of a Ronald Reagan or the pious evangelicalism and fiscal austerity of a Mike Pence. Now Trump has persuaded a critical mass of those same voters to reject the beliefs they once held, on issues ranging from free trade to international alliances to constitutional democracy. Many would deny they ever believed otherwise.
In hindsight, Ron DeSantis might have been a more formidable contender if he’d made a stronger claim to represent conservative competence in government; Nikki Haley for her part might have more forcefully argued against Maga isolationism. But they only could have displaced Trump by demanding that Republicans reject him along with much of what he stands for – by arguing for example that his election denialism and role in the January 6 insurrection made him unfit for office.
But that would have risked splitting the party, and Trump is the only figure in the Republican party who has been willing to take that risk – perhaps because he understands that absolute control over a thing derives from a willingness to utterly destroy it, to paraphrase Frank Herbert’s Dune. Perhaps Trump also understands the other candidates better than they understand themselves. As he is reported to have said of other would-be challengers and holdouts in the Republican party: “They always bend the knee.”
Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington DC as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party
