The running of the runners-up: In Iowa caucuses, the suspense involves second place
Americans begin the mon‐ ths-long process of select‐ ing their president with vir‐ tually no doubt about who will win the first Republi‐ can nominating contest on Monday in Iowa.
Barring a catastrophic er‐ ror in polling, Donald Trump will begin his political come‐ back with a resounding win that cements his front-runner status as the next Republican presidential nominee.
The only unknown in‐ volves the identity and strength of the secondplace finisher: likely former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Their goal is to leave Iowa appearing like a viable alter‐ native to the former presi‐ dent as the race shifts to New Hampshire, South Carolina and Super Tuesday.
It's easy to mock this run‐ ning of the runners-up as fu‐ tile, a scuffle for silver, as one jokester did by crashing an event where he handed De‐ Santis a mock participation trophy.
The counterargument is that momentum here could vault Haley, in particular, to victory in New Hampshire, where polls are tightening, and then it becomes a new race, as many of the states on Super Tuesday allow non-Re‐ publicans to vote.
Trump has the support of about half of Republicans in most early-state polls — a daunting advantage, for sure, while leaving a sizable cohort desperate for options.
"Too much drama. Just too much drama [from Trump]," said Kevin Wax, who came with relatives to volunteer for DeSantis, flying up from Ten‐ nessee, where his family runs a multi-generational travel business.
"I'm tired of the drama and just would like to get on with my life."
His wife, Rhonda, said she appreciated Trump's U.S. Supreme Court picks, but noted of her support for De‐ Santis: "I want someone in the White House that I can be proud of."
Brutal weather comes election X factor
Their own experience un‐ derscores how unusual these caucuses have been, as brutal cold and snow forced the can‐ cellation of late-campaign events.
The Wax family vehicle got stuck in a snowbank and a police officer had to help push it out, cancelling their plans to go door-knocking and forcing them to make phone calls instead. be‐
The weather itself is be‐ coming a campaign factor. The conditions here are mis‐ erable even by Canadians' winter-hardened standards, with a wind chill as low as –37 C and scores of vehicles lying in ditches after spinning off snowy windswept highways.
It requires some commit‐ ment to a candidate to knock on doors in those conditions, drive to a phone bank or sim‐ ply to venture out to a caucus event.
WATCH | Winter weather forces Republican hopefuls to scale back campaign plans:
This has prompted a burst of meteorological punditry about whether this weather hurts or helps Trump. His supporters are the most pas‐ sionate, according to polls, but they're also dispropor‐ tionately in rural areas, requir‐ ing extra travel to caucus sites.
Trump acknowledged he sees Haley as a rising chal‐ lenger, which is no surprise given the number of disparag‐ ing emails about her his cam‐ paign has been pumping out lately.
In an echo of Trump's racist and birther smears of Barack Obama and Ted Cruz, he even falsely suggested she's ineligible to run for pres‐ ident because she was born before her Indian parents be‐ came U.S. citizens.
At a Saturday town hall, Trump said Haley may have leaped past DeSantis: "She may be replacing him."
The Haley bounce: Is it a mirage?
There's some evidence of a
Haley bounce in what's refer‐ red to as the gold standard in Iowa polling: the final weekend survey published by the Des Moines Register.
It showed Trump at 48 per cent and Haley leapfrogging DeSantis into second place, with 20 per cent compared with his 16 per cent.
That's the good news for Haley.
The bad news? Signs her boomlet might be a mirage. Her support, in that poll, is by far the softest of the three main candidates — the least enthusiastic; most likely to change; and most reliant on non-Republicans getting in‐ volved.
Pollster Ann Seltzer refer‐ red to these numbers as prac‐ tically "jaw-dropping," very troubling for someone trying to win a Republican nomina‐ tion.
A staggering half of Haley's support comes from Indepen‐ dents and Democrats. Among actual Republicans, who will cast most primary votes, her so-called negatives have surged — with Republi‐ cans most likely to express negative feelings about her, among all the candidates.
A manager at a hotel in western Iowa shrugs Haley off as an old-style neoconserva‐ tive, too keen on wars abroad and too moderate on policy at home.
"I know three people inter‐ ested in Haley, and they're all Democrats. What does that tell you?" said Julie Thomp‐ son.
She's been inspired to vol‐
unteer for the first time ever by her favourite candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy; she calls him brilliant and sees him re‐ flecting her priorities of small government, border secu‐ rity and avoiding foreign con‐ flicts.
Thompson also likes De‐ Santis and would vote for Trump.
Running as a pro-Ukraine, more moderate alternative makes Haley something of an outlier in a party where par‐ doning Jan. 6 convicts is now far more popular than sup‐ porting Ukraine.
Haley is also being pum‐ melled by negative ads re‐ minding voters here of her re‐ cent gaffes; she said New Hampshire voters will "cor‐ rect" Iowans' choice.
It may have been intended as a lighthearted joke, but it's now a soundbite filling the airwaves and drawing boos from crowds in other candi‐ dates' stump speeches.
That anybody-but-Haley sentiment is palpable in con‐ versations with many Repub‐ licans. They include a con‐ struction worker who drove from Florida into a life-threat‐ ening snowstorm to volun‐ teer for DeSantis.
Jonathan Morales de‐ scribed his governor and Trump as fighters — "battle‐ ships," he called them — will‐ ing to fight for policies de‐ tested by so-called elites, like a Mexico border wall.
The reason he favours De‐ Santis, he said, is he'd be smarter at navigating a hos‐ tile bureaucracy and get more done than Trump.
As for Haley, he said: "She's just clearly the prime example of an establishment Republi‐ can. And that's it. And it's a disqualifying factor."
Death-defying from Florida
Morales drove 26 hours drive from Tampa, unaware of the storm he was about to en‐ counter. He said he only real‐ ized it when he stopped to get gas in Missouri and it felt like the wind was blowing the door off his car.
He called a friend back home in Florida who had checked the weather con‐ ditions and joked: "He was like 'Dude, it was nice knowing you.'"
With little experience dri‐ ving on snow, Morales plod‐ ded along at 40 km/h, in the dark, counting about two dozen vehicles in the ditch, before he reached his hotel hours later.
"I've never felt that grate‐ ful," he said, calling it a lifechanging scare.
Morales now plans to speak on DeSantis's behalf at one of the hundreds of cau‐ cus events around the state on Monday night.
Will this be a last hurrah for the DeSantis campaign?
That may depend on whether he finishes second on Mon‐ day night.
Does Trump crack 50%? Well-known elections analyst Amy Walter said she's watching several things on Monday night.
One is who finishes sec‐ ond. Another is whether Haley makes inroads outside her base, with more conserva‐ tive, evangelical voters of the sort she'll need to win as the campaign moves on from more secular New Hampshire to southern states, including her own South Carolina.
And here's the final metric she's watching: Does Trump surpass 50 per cent? With margins like that, there would no mathematical chance of a rival surpassing him.
"That theory [about Trump being beatable] goes out the window," Walter wrote in an election preview for her Cook Political Report.
Given how timid they've been in criticizing him, pun‐ dits have questioned why these candidates are even running against Trump, aside from hoping he drops out, perhaps sidelined by a crimi‐ nal conviction.
In the closing days, how‐ ever, one can hear two consis‐ tent arguments against Trump at rivals' campaign stops. They involve personal‐ ity and policy failures.
A congressman joked at a DeSantis rally on Saturday that Trump was more ob‐ sessed with his crowd size af‐ ter the inauguration than with replacing Obamacare.
DeSantis himself argued that Trump was outmanoeu‐ vred by Democrats who pre‐ vented budget cuts and a border wall and said, "I'm sick of Democrats winning."
If it's any consolation: On Monday night, he won't be beaten by a Democrat.