Iowa has become existential for Ron DeSantis’s presidential hopes
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Despite the foreboding conventional wisdom, Donald Trump has not yet concluded the Republican presidential primary victorious. While the former president is indeed the dominant front-runner, with betting markets giving him a 3-in-4 chance of winning the nomination, that’s only roughly the same chance Hillary Clinton had against him in the general election in 2016 (in the actual statistical modeling, not the wishcasting of the infamous New York Times needle). And, as we all know, Clinton lost.
But while Ron DeSantis still has a statistically significant shot at an upset, it’s far from the two-man race that the Florida governor tried to portray at his campaign launch. In fact, not only has Nikki Haley usurped his second place position in the betting markets, but now the former ambassador to the United Nations has caught up to him in Iowa, according to the state’s gold standard polling by the Des Moines Register.
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Despite their legendary first-in-the-nation status, the Iowa caucuses are actually not, historically speaking, terribly decisive in the primaries for either party. In 2020, Pete Buttigieg won Iowa, but Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination. In 2016, Ted Cruz won Iowa, but Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. In 2012, Rick Santorum won Iowa (although a miscount cost him credit for it for three weeks), but Mitt Romney won the Republican nomination. In 2008, Mike Huckabee won Iowa, but John McCain won the Republican nomination. Barack Obama did manage to pull off a shocking win there over Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in 2008, and he did so by surpassing the two in the polling with just about three months to go before the caucuses.
All of this is to say that while Iowa is usually not an important bellwether for overall success, it has become absolutely existential for DeSantis, making Haley’s rise in the state all the more threatening.
According to the Des Moines Register poll, Trump leads with 43% support, and DeSantis and Haley are tied at 16% each. But whereas Haley rose 10 points from the Des Moines Register’s last batch of polling in August, DeSantis’s support fell by 3 points.
The recent departure of former Vice President Mike Pence from the race (as well as some longer shots such as former congressman Will Hurd, who threw his weight behind Haley upon exiting) portends an imminent winnowing of the field as donors, eager to avoid the 2016 clown car that resulted in the inevitability of Trump’s election, turn the heat up on candidates to make their case for viability or get out. Currently the only candidates to make the stage for the Miami debate next week are DeSantis, Haley, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Trump, with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) reportedly but not officially confirmed. It’s hard to believe that Scott or Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) will stay in the race for long.
Ramaswamy, a billionaire who has largely self-funded his quixotic campaign, doesn’t really have donors to whom he has to answer. Christie is running a vanity campaign, not one his donors believe has an actual chance of winning. It’s the contrast between Haley and DeSantis that is becoming dangerous for the latter.
Haley, who never spent her weight on Iowa, has an increasingly viable strategy. While she always seemed to be angling for a “3-2-1” path of momentum — a third place finish in Iowa, a second place finish in New Hampshire, and a first place finish in South Carolina, where she served as governor for two terms — her rise in Iowa undercuts the fundamental strategy of DeSantis to pitch himself as the electable alternative to Trump. Now, not only is DeSantis faring more poorly than Trump and Haley in head-to-head general election polling against Biden, but Haley has cut into the lead (in the not-Trump lane) of DeSantis’s most important state.
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If polling shows DeSantis will fare more poorly against Biden in a general than Trump (and Haley), and now polling shows DeSantis risks losing not just to Trump but also potentially to Haley in Iowa, where is DeSantis supposed to win? Even Biden required a dominant victory in South Carolina to overcome the early drought of losses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada before his Super Tuesday cleanup in 2020.
Again, anything can happen in this primary, and Trump has not won it yet. But his dominant challenger is increasingly looking like Haley, not DeSantis. And if DeSantis cannot win Iowa, it likely will be.