DES MOINES, Iowa — Eight years after former President Donald Trump conceded Iowa to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the one-time commander in chief is seeking a redo in the 2024 Republican primary’s opening contest.
Trump, then a real estate mogul turned reality TV star, was a political rookie, relying more on his name recognition than a ground game as he sought the GOP presidential nomination and Iowa’s 40 delegates. Now the Trump campaign is underscoring the experience it has gained from that election and the 2020 cycle, emphasizing a more professional organization that is powered by data and volunteers.
In an interview, Trump senior adviser Jason Miller contended that Trump’s supporters are more energized than those of his opponents, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, while simultaneously downplaying the former president’s polling advantage in Iowa before Monday’s caucuses.
“Going into this first contest, this is where the rubber meets the road,” Miller told the Washington Examiner. “The way that I see President Trump right now, being locked in on getting this win, very much feels to me like the final couple of weeks of a general election, like how he was in the final couple of weeks of 2016, for example, when he was locked in and singularly focused on winning [that] race. And it’s very much been a top-down message from the president that we’re going run like we’re 1 point behind, even if we’re more 30 points ahead.”
“There are just under 1,700 precincts around the state,” he said. “We have a caucus captain for every precinct. In almost every location, we have more than one person. We have backups on backups on backups, well over 2,000 actual caucus captains that are committed to bringing 10 people.”
For University of Iowa professor Timothy Hagle, Trump was out-organized by Cruz in 2016, though the professor acknowledged Trump’s clever outreach to the state’s evangelical community, a key constituency for Republicans, by announcing his Federalist Society-endorsed Supreme Court justice nominee list.
“Trump didn’t run a traditional caucus campaign, and maybe his team felt they could treat it more like a primary and just expect people to show up on caucus night for him,” Hagle said. “Many certainly did, but for caucuses, it usually takes a bit more.”
“This time, although Trump still hasn’t run a traditional caucus campaign in terms of his events and appearances, and there’s little reason he should as a former president with a solid base supporting him, he’s doing more in terms of his ground game. His campaign has been holding caucus trainings, and they’ve been working harder to identify precinct captains. In addition, as much as his supporters liked him in 2016, as a former president and one who his base believes is being politically persecuted by Democrats (indictments, kicking him off ballots, etc.), his supporters are even more enthusiastic about supporting him,” the professor said.
Hours before Iowa Republicans gather across their state to caucus, Trump has an average polling edge over DeSantis and Haley of more than 30 percentage points.
“It’s worth noting that no one has ever gotten larger than [a] 12-and-a-half point win, which [Senate Majority Leader] Bob Dole got back in [1988],” Miller said. “No one on the Republican side in a competitive contest has ever crossed over 50% of their total vote score in a caucus. There are certain records that are out there, but a win’s a win.”
Meanwhile, DeSantis, whose campaign needs a strong second place in Iowa, has promoted his own ground game despite outsourcing most of his grassroots organizing efforts to his outside group, super PAC Never Back Down.
David Polyansky, DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, described every one of Iowa’s 99 counties as “critical” after the governor traveled to all of them.
“Donald Trump has always had more success on the rivers,” Polyansky said of Iowa’s Missouri and Mississippi River-defined borders. “In terms of the Des Moines-Cedar Rapids markets, that’s more up in play as well. But at the end of the day, it’s who turns out and who turns out their people. And for us, that’s why we’ve invested so heavily in organization all along because we knew it would be cold, not this cold, but we knew we would have to motivate people to get out on a cold winter’s night. And that’s what we build, and that’s what we’re excited about.”
Hagle is withholding judgment regarding the campaigns’s ground games until after the caucuses — poised to be the coldest contest in Iowa’s history, with a high in Des Moines of 0 degrees.
Mary Doyle, one of Trump’s precinct caucus captains, dismissed concerns about the weather, simply saying Iowans are “used to it.”
“On Christmas when it was like, I don’t know, 60 or something, or 50, whatever it was, it was like, ‘Wow, this is crazy,’” the Des Moines data analyst, 69, said. “When it’s zero, it’s like, ‘Well, it’s Iowa.’ Obviously, I think there will be people that it may prevent from getting out, older people that don’t tolerate, you know, if there’s snow on the ground. We are taking measures to help them get to the caucus. We have volunteers that will pick them up and take them if they don’t have a ride.”
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Although Haley has her own outside groups, including Koch Industries-funded Americans for Prosperity, her campaign has been playing the expectations game more than pointing to its ground game.
“The narrative for Monday is very simple,” said former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, a Haley supporter. “Ron DeSantis, a year ago, said he was going to win Iowa. If he doesn’t win Iowa, that’s a narrative. And Donald Trump says he’s going to win by 50 points, so if neither one of those things happen, it shows the impotency of those campaigns, and that only adds to this narrative of Ambassador Haley.”