The Trump juggernaut rolled into Iowa on Monday and won what the media is calling a "historic" victory. He garnered 51% of the vote while his closest rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis only won 21% and Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, 19%. It was a tremendous victory for the former president, demonstrating his massive strength going into the 2024 election. Or was it?
First of all, this was no surprise. Donald Trump has been destined to win this caucus and frankly, every nominating contest from the moment he announced he was running. Unlike in 2016, he reportedly had a very professional campaign in the state and was polling over 50% throughout the race. It is very probable that he will be the de facto nominee within the next month and will have it all wrapped up by Super Tuesday.
However, taking a closer look at those Iowa numbers shows some of the pitfalls awaiting him in the general election.
If there's one state in the nation you can call MAGA country, it's Iowa. It's something like 95% white, older than most states, extremely rural and the Republican Party there is as conservative as it gets. And yet, 40% of the voters who came out voted for someone else. Yes, sure, a good many of them voted for Trump-plus and Trump- X (DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy), but nearly 20% of them voted for the daughter of immigrants positioned as the "moderate " in the race. Recall, Trump beat Joe Biden statewide by 53% in 2020. He won the Republicans by an even smaller majority on Monday. That is not a good sign.
Trump may have won over 50% of the vote in a field that included a handful of others but as far as the Republican Party is concerned, he's the incumbent (some think he's secretly running everything even now) and he barely got a majority. Despite all the crowing about history being made, that's not what Trump wanted.
For a campaign that's supposed to be Trump's thrilling return from exile, it doesn't appear to have particularly motivated the faithful. Yes, it was very cold on Monday night for the caucuses, below zero. But this is Iowa. They are used to extreme cold in January. And Dear Leader Donald Trump told them to go out and vote even if they were on death's door and passed away afterwards. "It will be worth it!" he quipped. Even though there is supposed to be a ton of excitement among his MAGA followers, the turnout was abysmal.
Only 110,000 people turned out, which comes out to about 15% of registered Republicans. This means that he only won 7% of GOP voters in the state of Iowa, a MAGA stronghold. Considering that this is the beginning of his supposed big comeback, that's pretty underwhelming.
The Des Moines Register poll which was released last weekend showed some other rather surprising numbers about the Republican electorate in Iowa. It found that if Trump is the nominee 11% said they would vote for Joe Biden while another 14% said they would vote for a third party candidate or someone else. That adds up to 25% of the party saying they will vote for someone else in the general election. That seems worth pondering. And we hear constantly about how all these criminal and civil proceedings just make his base love him more, but even more concerning for the Trump campaign should be the fact that according to the entrance polls, 32% of caucus participants believe that if Trump is convicted he will be unfit for the presidency.
If that's the case in conservative Iowa, what do you suppose the numbers would be in some of the swing states?
There is no doubt that Trump dominates the Republican Party. In fact, MAGA is the Republican Party and vice versa. GOP luminaries, like Marco Rubio, who once called Trump a con man, endorsed Trump just before the caucuses, no doubt after looking at the final polls and determining that they wanted to be on the winning side early enough to curry favor with the boss. All the top GOP House members have rushed to join the party. He is their undisputed leader. But there is reason to question whether, beyond his hardcore base and the craven politicians who seek his favor, the party he leads is the same party that voted for him in 2016 and 2020.
All this does raise the question: Why are the national polls so close?
In the last few months, the polls have shown Trump and Biden neck and neck within the margin of error. You would think that if there was really a substantial faction of Republicans and GOP-leaning Independents who aren't going to vote for Trump it would be showing up. But remember, the data we've been discussing was all from Iowa, a state that has been inundated with campaign ads and personal appearances by the Republican candidates for the past year. Unlike the rest of the country, they've been forced to pay attention to this race. They are the canaries in the coal mine.
As evidence of how important this is, CNN reported that "the majority of undecided voters simply do not seem to believe – at least not yet – that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee." If you're reading this you probably find that to be absurd. He's the front-runner! But most of America has tuned out the Trump show since he left office. When they realize that he's going to be the nominee and the show is unavoidable again, they are going to see what at least a quarter of Iowa Republicans and all of Iowa's Democrats have been seeing these past few months and it's not pretty. Let's just say, that show has not aged well.
The polling in New Hampshire, which is set to vote next week, suggests that voters there are not prepared to nominate Trump by acclamation either. In fact, there's even a slight chance that Nikki Haley might edge him out. It certainly doesn't look as if he's going to get over 50%. These people have been tuned in just as long as those Iowans and a good number of them are not enthusiastic about the big Trump comeback. Soon the rest of the country will be tuned in as well.
Sure, Trump won Iowa and he's highly likely to win New Hampshire and all the rest of the states as well. The Republican Party establishment will back him to the hilt and he'll have plenty of money to wage his campaign. But there are some very big cracks in his coalition and they are becoming more and more pronounced. Remember, if the election is close, as it may very well be, it would only take a small number of GOP and Independent defections in the right states to put the country out of this misery at long last.
