Former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) will hold competing campaign rallies this weekend in Iowa to shore up support before next year’s Iowa caucuses.
For Trump, the Saturday rallies first in Ankeny, Iowa, in the early afternoon and then in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, midafternoon will be another attempt to wrangle his overwhelming band of supporters to pledge to caucus for him on Jan. 15 in hopes that a strong showing during the caucuses will force his 2024 rivals to drop out. For DeSantis, his rally at the Thunderdome in Newton, Iowa, roughly 98 miles from Cedar Rapids, marks his last visit to all 99 counties in the Hawkeye State, a feat known as a “full Grassley” in honor of longtime Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
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The competing events represent two vastly different approaches to campaigning in Iowa among the two men. DeSantis has opted for the traditional route of small gatherings in rural areas where he has championed conservative credentials, including a six-week abortion he signed into law in April and touting the big-name endorsements he has received recently.
Trump has chosen to campaign in larger or growing Iowa cities at a lesser pace than DeSantis, where he has rallied loyal supporters around populism and a politics of grievances.
The former president has also snubbed several Iowa cattle calls held by influential Iowa leaders this year, choosing instead to hold rival events elsewhere. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two candidates is the unprecedented nature of Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting DeSantis, which has aided the governor’s ground operation with millions of dollars invested in media advertisements, door-knocking, and caucus pledges while the former president has wagered his campaign has done just enough work to knock out DeSantis.
The Florida governor has gone all in on winning the Iowa caucuses, amid infighting from his affiliated super PACs, as the best attempt to block Trump’s inevitably of winning the GOP nomination. But given Trump’s sizable polling and fundraising advantage over all of the GOP field, DeSantis will need to pull out all the stops to win, including touting coveted endorsements from Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA), who will attend the rally on Saturday, and influential evangelical Bob Vander Plaats.
“I think in the process DeSantis has done a fairly commendable job to try to save his case,” Mack Shelley, a political scientist at Iowa State University, told the Washington Examiner. “But I don’t think even the governor weighing in on DeSantis aside is really going to change the fundamental outcome dynamics.”
An Iowa State University-Civiqs poll released earlier this month showed 54% of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers backing Trump as their first choice, with 18% backing DeSantis and 12% backing former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley. When asked about Reynolds’s endorsement of DeSantis, 63% said the endorsement made no difference, 22% said it made them less likely to support DeSantis, and 13% said it made them more likely to support him. This comes as Haley has surged in the campaign since the first three GOP primary debates and has begun to rival DeSantis for the role of the Trump-alternative candidate in the race.
DeSantis’s campaign is undeterred and claimed that the governor’s ground campaign, including the 99 county visits, would help propel him over Trump.
“Governor Kim Reynolds and Bob Vander Plaats bring muscular political organizations to the team that will take Ron DeSantis’s historic ground game to the next level. This organizational heft and DeSantis’s unmatched work ethic will pay off on Caucus Night,” said Carly Atchison, a DeSantis campaign spokeswoman. “To win an Iowa caucus, you need a strong mixture of paid media, candidate presence, and ground game, and no one is executing in all three areas better than Ron DeSantis as we hit the closing stretch.”
The Florida governor has currently visited 98 out of the 99 counties along with 41 endorsements from Iowa legislators. DeSantis was the first candidate to reserve airtime in Iowa through the Jan. 15 caucuses with a $2 million ad purchase in October. Yet he faces Trump’s own dominance in the race in addition to Haley reserving $10 million for advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two first nominating contests as well as biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s $12 million ad buy in Iowa and New Hampshire.
In contrast, Trump has eschewed traditional campaign events in Iowa and opted to hold select rallies in the Hawkeye State, where he has consistently attacked DeSantis and Haley with derogatory nicknames. Trump has also attacked Reynolds’s endorsement of DeSantis, calling her “the most unpopular governor in the entire United States of America” after previously slamming her neutral stance in the race and said Vander Plaats was known for “scamming Candidates than he is for Victory.”
Tim Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa, told the Washington Examiner the dueling rallies are one of the few events before the holiday season and the caucuses left for DeSantis and Trump to make their case to Iowa voters. “Touting the full Grassley is good in the sense that it appeals to Republicans in the rank and file in the sense that he’s out there doing the work,” Hagle said about DeSantis. “And it’s one thing to have big rallies where people can come from sometimes miles away … and show up at these things. But it’s another if you go to some small rural county in northwest or southwest Iowa or something like that that doesn’t usually get much attention.”
People will remember the visits but “Whether that turns into any kind of a victory, it’s hard to say,” he added.
Trump, however, doesn’t need to make such an effort given his poll numbers, experts said. Shelley, the ISU professor, claimed that Trump’s diehard fan base could likely help him dominate in the caucuses.
“He has just extremely large proportions of voter days that are loyal to him, I think largely on a personal basis,” Shelley said. “In large part because Trump got there first among the more or less hardcore conservatives that are running for the nomination. He got first into the hands of caucus attendees that because they’re after me, they’re also after you.”
Shelley was referencing the 91 indictments Trump faces over four criminal cases, which have only helped to increase Trump’s poll numbers and fundraising numbers.
Rachel Paine Caufield, a political scientist at Drake University, said she suspects DeSantis will contrast his approach to campaigning in Iowa with Trump during his Saturday rally.
“Trump has always had an unconventional relationship to the Iowa campaign trail, so this is a great way for DeSantis to call out Trump without attacking his supporters or deviating on major policy initiatives that are important to the Republican base,” Caufield said.
Yet Trump’s campaign events are sure to take attention from the governor’s attempts to persuade Iowans to back him during the caucuses. “It’s certainly a way for the Trump campaign to draw attention away from the DeSantis ‘victory lap’ of completing the 99 county tour,” Caufield continued. “Trump rallies are typically pretty big, so it also allows him to highlight the size difference as a metric for support and downplay DeSantis’s campaign presence.”
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Both Hagle and Shelley alluded to the three-ticket standard in the Iowa caucuses in which the three top-finishing candidates generally have the best chance of viability moving on to the New Hampshire primary. But if Trump comes out with a win in the 40%-50% range in Iowa, it could give him the final momentum he needs to win the New Hampshire primary and other early nominating states and become the GOP 2024 nominee.
All of which puts more pressure on DeSantis to perform well on Jan. 15 for his campaign to remain a legitimate alternative to Trump. “DeSantis really needs to finish, if not win, really close second to have any momentum,” Hagle said. “And given that he’s focused more on Iowa, if he doesn’t come out of Iowa with some momentum, it’s going to hurt him in New Hampshire.”
