IOWA, ONE WEEK OUT. The first votes to be cast in the strangest presidential nomination in anyone’s memory will be cast one week from tonight in the Iowa caucuses. The polls say former President Donald Trump will run away with it, and they’re probably right. In the current RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump has a 32.7-point lead over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and a 35.2-point lead over Nikki Haley. No one else really matters. Trump has a 45.4-point lead over Vivek Ramaswamy and a 47.6-point lead over Chris Christie. And remember Asa Hutchinson? He’s still in the race, 50.6 percentage points behind Trump.
One caution: The polls are old. The most recent polls in the RealClearPolitics average are all pre-holiday surveys, making them now three weeks old. If there has been any shift among, say DeSantis and Haley, in the last three weeks, we don’t know it yet. Look for a bunch of new polls, including the high-profile Des Moines Register poll, to come out between now and Jan. 14.
But you have to ask: Are today’s polls gonna be wrong by 35 points? Could there be a 35-point event to change the race? It doesn’t seem likely. There have been some spectacular polling failures in the past, but if the final polls from Iowa show Trump’s lead remaining stable, as it has been for quite a while, it would be world-stopping news if someone else won the Iowa caucuses.
Trump really wants to win Iowa. He lost the caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in 2016, which is something he mentions to this day in conversations with Iowa Republicans. As later years showed, he does not take well to losing.
To make sure he wins this time, Trump has created an entirely different campaign organization from 2016. Truth be told, in 2016, there wasn’t much organization at all. Trump drew big crowds but did not put together a sophisticated turnout operation that would get those supporters to the caucuses. This time, Trump has put together what neutral observers say is a really good organization, down to the precinct level. He has gotten tens of thousands of Iowans to commit to caucusing for him and has recruited many more to help them get to the caucuses locations.
When asked to rank the strength of the candidates’ ground games, those neutral observers say DeSantis’s is probably the best, with Trump not too far behind. Haley, they say, is not at DeSantis’s and Trump’s level when it comes to ground operations.
But the big contrast is between Trump’s 2016 get-out-the-vote organization and his effort in 2024. There’s no comparison. Put his current level of organization together with a 32.7-point lead and Trump seems strong beyond challenge.
If that is true, then the game really will be what it has always seemed: a contest for second place. There are two elements. One, will either DeSantis or Haley rise close enough to Trump for the media to declare it an upset and an unexpected horse race? And two, will DeSantis defeat Haley by a clear margin in Iowa before going on to the next state, New Hampshire, where Haley has surpassed DeSantis?
Unless some unexpected reversal occurs, it appears that Trump’s two big bets are going to pay off in Iowa. One, he skipped all the Republican debates and did not seem to suffer any damage with GOP voters. And two, he has run a largely arm’s-length campaign in Iowa — no all-99-counties marathon for him — and maintained a big lead.
But there’s still a week to go. Let’s look at the new polls and get an updated sense of where things stand. But the situation is likely to remain fundamentally unchanged: an enormously lopsided contest unlike none anyone has ever seen.
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