Donald Trump, the GOP field, and a return to ‘normalcy’ in Iowa
Byron York
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DES MOINES, Iowa — Starting in 2015, Donald Trump changed the scale of Republican primary politics. In Iowa, the first-voting state, Trump drew crowds that were not just bigger than anyone had seen before, but they also attracted lots of people who had never participated in the caucuses process. As Trump progressed, things got even bigger.
It was an enormous change from old-fashioned Iowa caucuses politicking. The Trump campaign was louder, more contentious, more animated, and far more entertaining than anything before Trump. Trump’s way of attacking opponents — “Low-energy Jeb” — was new to many voters’ ears. The Trump campaign changed some Iowans’ expectations of the way politics works.
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Now, another Iowa caucuses campaign is underway, and Trump is again in the race. A recent Emerson College poll found him with a huge lead, 62% to 20%, over the nearest competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). Earlier polls have shown the lead to be significantly smaller but still daunting. Truth be told, there just haven’t been many public polls at this early stage of the race, and no one really knows.
Which leads to this mystery: How many Iowans have already made up their minds to support Trump? How many might support him now but are open to supporting other candidates? And how many believe it is time to move on to someone else? Talks with several people deeply involved in Iowa politics have produced the following guesses: The first group, the hard Trump base, is about 30% to 35% of Iowa Republicans. The second group, the still-Trump-supporting-but-open-to-others group, is about the same size. And the final group, the let’s-move-on group, is the rest of them.
That is why some of those Iowa politicos express great uncertainty about the state of the race right now but, at the same time, believe Trump can be beaten. It all depends on how those groups sort themselves out in the eight months leading up to the 2024 caucuses.
What is clear is that many Iowa Republicans, in conversations at the political events that have started up across the state, say they want a return to what they call “normalcy” in the caucuses process. What they mean is they’re not sure they want Trump to be their party’s 2024 nominee.
They voted for Trump twice. They’re grateful for his accomplishments as president. They think he was unfairly targeted by various investigators, Democrats, and the media. They also say that if the 2024 general election for president came down to Trump versus Joe Biden, they’d vote for Trump again, no question. Still, they’re not sure they want it to come to that.
Their misgivings about Trump are all about temperament. They all say they love Trump’s policies. They want the 2024 nominee to pursue the same or similar policies. But they feel Trump’s combativeness, while it took him to the top in American politics, can also work against him and against the Republican Party, and they believe that is what will happen if Trump is again the GOP nominee for president.
When Trump was still in the White House, some of these people expressed these concerns by saying they worried about his tweets. That was their way of saying his temperament troubled them. Some of the most devoted Trump supporters mocked that concern, saying they’d rather have Trump with “mean tweets” than a less effective president with a more congenial personality.
After Trump’s presidency, some of the same people began expressing doubt about returning to what they called “the drama” of Trump’s time in office. “Drama” became code for all the things about Trump’s temperament and behavior they didn’t like.
Now, in Iowa, some say they want a return to “normalcy” in the campaign and caucuses. It’s the same concern about Trump, just expressed in a slightly different way. It’s also a way of expressing a desire to return the caucuses to an earlier way of working — they like smaller events, they like personally engaging with the candidates, and they don’t like the contenders being too rough on each other.
The candidates in Iowa — the serious ones at the moment are DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, and Vivek Ramaswamy — know this and are trying to find a way to appeal to some voters’ desire for normalcy without offending other voters’ high regard for Trump’s accomplishments. It’s a very, very hard thing to do. How do you say that Trump was a great president, that you support his policies, but it’s time to move on? Especially with Trump himself standing there saying, “Whaddya mean move on? I’m right here.”
Most of the candidates have tried to solve this dilemma by pretending Trump does not exist. They have decided not to refer to the former president at all in their speeches and presentations to the voters.
At Sen. Joni Ernst’s “Roast & Ride” event in Des Moines on Saturday, eight candidates spoke — the ones listed above plus Asa Hutchinson, Larry Elder, and Perry Johnson. (Perry Johnson? Some voters didn’t know who he is. For the record, he’s a successful and somewhat eccentric businessman who likes to talk about politics.) The Roast & Ride, which attracted 1,000 attendees, was what political types refer to as a “cattle call” in which each candidate got 10 minutes to make his or her pitch. Trump himself declined to join the group, mindful of the stature gap between a former president of the United States and all the candidates who want his old job.
None of the candidates uttered the name “Trump.” Not even once. To say it was strange was an understatement. Pence, who served as Trump’s vice president, referred to “the prosperity and security of just a few years ago” and cited the achievements of “the first three years of an administration that Iowa supported every step of the way.” Well, whose administration would that be? Pence did not say. Rather, he ticked off the accomplishments — the “administration” rebuilt the military, revived the economy, unleashed American energy, and appointed more than 300 conservative judges to the federal courts, including three Supreme Court justices.
“I couldn’t have been more proud to have been part of the administration that appointed three justices that sent Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history where it belongs,” Pence said. Which administration? Pence did not say.
Haley, who held a big job in the Trump administration, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was similarly vague. Referring to Trump’s move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, she said, “When we moved the embassy…” She referred to advising “the president.” But she never said who that president was. For his part, DeSantis did not mention the former president either, even though he has begun to answer Trump’s attacks in exchanges with reporters.
The scene bordered on surreal. After the event, I asked Ernst whether she thought it was odd that candidates would talk about a Republican president’s accomplishments, would associate themselves with those accomplishments, would take some credit for those accomplishments, but would never mention the name of that Republican president. “Oh, I don’t think it’s odd,” Ernst answered. “Because obviously, they are vying for the position to be the candidate that comes up in the general election in 2024. So I don’t think it is odd at all because they don’t want to give [Trump] the promotional opportunity here when he wasn’t here to present the case himself. They are making the case for themselves.”
Yes, some of the candidates referred to Trump obliquely. DeSantis has made it a staple of his stump speech to declare that “leadership is not entertainment.” That’s a clear reference to Trump and has, as they say, the added advantage of being true. Haley was just as clear when she said, “We’ve got to leave the baggage and the negativity behind.” But no one would come out and say: “Donald Trump is not the right man for the Republican Party in 2024.” If they had, they might have been booed out of the room. So they stayed silent and steered clear of trouble.
The candidate who is perhaps most openly basing his campaign on an appeal to normalcy is Tim Scott. The night before the Roast & Ride, Scott appeared in Council Bluffs, in the back room of a bar called Barleys. The event was as old-fashioned Iowa caucuses as they get. Scott’s staff had set up chairs for about 50 people, with pews on the side that could hold maybe 40 more. When those filled up, another 50 or so stood in the back. It was, in pre-Trump Iowa terms, a good crowd, especially for far-western Iowa this early in the caucuses season.
Scott is convinced that his life story — black man in South Carolina with unpromising beginning rises to U.S. senator — combined with a solid conservative voting record will appeal to Republican voters, in Iowa and beyond. At the moment, having announced his candidacy just a couple of weeks ago, Scott is in the biographical stage of his campaign. He needs to tell voters who he is, and voters need to learn more about him.
In conversation with 15 or so voters at Barleys, everyone matched the Republican profile at the beginning of this article — they voted for Trump twice, like his accomplishments, and want to see the general trend of his policies continue. But many of them, unbidden, expressed some level of irritation with Trump. They didn’t like Trump’s attacks on DeSantis. Why do it so early? They were also annoyed by Trump’s attack on his former White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany. Why does he do that? Of course, things get competitive, and the elbows get sharper, when the debates arrive and the Iowa caucuses near. But we’re not there yet, and Trump is in full combat mode. They didn’t feel comfortable with it.
No one said they were committed to Scott. It’s the beginning of June 2023, after all, and few Iowans will tell you exactly what they plan to do in the February 2024 caucuses. Instead, most described themselves as doing research — learning about the candidates so they can make the best decision next year. They take politics very seriously, which was reflected in their questions about Ukraine, government spending, the national debt, the future of Medicare, illegal immigration, and other weighty topics.
The case Scott makes to voters has two main parts. The first is that his biography proves that what leftists say about America is wrong. Don’t believe it when you hear the U.S. is a racist country, Scott says. He begins by making clear: He is a black man whose black family came from South Carolina and lived through racism and Jim Crow and the entire African American experience. But that is not how America is today, Scott continues. His grandfather, born in 1921, left school in third grade, began picking cotton, but lived to see his grandson win a seat in Congress.
“He lived long enough to see America evolve,” Scott said. The critics on the Left “refuse to accept the progress of America, that who we were then is not who we are now. They want us, as the American people, to believe that somehow we are an evil and declining nation. That is a lie. We are the land of opportunity, not the land of oppression.”
The second part of Scott’s appeal is his promise to return to optimism and hope in campaigning and governing. It’s an openly Reaganesque appeal, although one would have to be at least 50 years old to remember Ronald Reagan saying things like that. Scott’s message is: With me, you can get the same conservative policies that you got with Trump, only with a Reagan-like optimism and hope.
About midway through the Q&A, a woman, clearly part of the move-on faction, stood up and said to Scott, “I don’t think that we can stand four more years of Donald Trump.” It was like she threw a hot potato right at him. Scott at first joked — he likes to disarm situations before addressing questions — and then gave his answer. “People are starving for a message of hope and optimism,” he began, immediately earning applause. “What they won’t allow is for a hopeful, optimistic message to lack conservative principles or a backbone. I got both.” There was more applause. Then Scott continued: “I believe that the more I’m able to get my message out, the more I show up, the more I’m on your screens, the more I’m doing interviews, the more you get to know the message and you find that of everyone in the race, I have the most conservative voting record … I think you’ll find out that you can have the same conservative policies but with optimism that can persuade others to join the team.”
There it was: the “same conservative policies,” referring to what the voters liked about Trump, but without all the name-calling and fisticuffs. The next afternoon in Des Moines, I spoke to Scott for a few minutes behind the stage at the Roast & Ride. I mentioned the exchange, especially when he said he would offer the “same conservative policies,” and asked if he had any substantial policy differences with Trump.
Scott did not answer the question, but his response was illuminating anyway. First, he went to some length to suggest all the Republican candidates have the same positions and that that is a good thing. “What you would hope is that all Republican candidates would want lower taxes,” Scott said, “all Republican candidates would want a stronger, more powerful military, all Republican candidates would want to be the global leader without being the global police force. So I’m not sure that we would look for delineations in the policy positions of any of the Republican candidates. We hope they are all in a very similar position.”
Scott’s thinking is that if all the candidates hold the same positions, then the important thing, the distinguishing factor between them, will be the character of each candidate. That’s where the GOP race will be decided. “Why I am running for president is more important than the policy differences between any candidate,” Scott said. “The difference for me is that the truth of my life disproves the lies of the radical Left.”
Scott and his fellow candidates are making a bet. They know that 1) the candidates have mostly the same policy positions, 2) many of those policies are identified with Trump, and 3) many voters have misgivings about Trump’s temperament. So the bet is this: The candidate who beats Trump, if any candidate can beat Trump, will do it on the basis of temperament, not any policy disagreement.
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Scott is betting that voters want Trumpy policy with a more genial face. DeSantis is betting that voters want Trumpy policy with a more focused, but still Trumpy, aggressiveness. Pence is betting that voters want Trumpy policy in a candidate who is as different from Trump as two men can be. And Trump himself is saying: You can’t have Trumpy policy without Trump. Vote for me again. Who knows how it will all work out?
The short version of this long article is that it is still all about Trump. The Iowa voters who most strongly support Trump are all in for their man. The voters who are ready to move on are basing their reasoning on the continuing presence of Trump. The voters who want a return to “normalcy” are really talking about Trump. The candidates who won’t say the name Trump are thinking about Trump. For better or worse, that is the state of the Republican primary race in 2023.