With just five weeks to go before the first contest of the 2024 presidential primary season, Trump expanded his Iowa lead over his Republican rivals by eight percentage points since Selzer’s previous survey in October and topped 50 percent support for the first time. He also enjoys steadfast enthusiasm from his backers, while support for his closest GOP rivals is getting more lukewarm.
Though former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley has been enjoying weeks of positive buzz in the national media — while Trump is being pounded as a dictator-in-waiting — she’s stuck at 16 percent in the poll. Where she was tied with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before, he has now nosed to a statistically insignificant three points ahead of her.
And here’s something Selzer finds particularly intriguing: Among those who say they will be attending their first caucus on Jan. 15 — in other words, not your most engaged partisans — Trump enjoys a staggering 63 percent support, up from 49 percent in October. Those maiden caucus-goers are worth watching; they were crucial to Barack Obama’s triumph over Hillary Clinton in Iowa’s 2008 Democratic contest.
Though the field is narrowing as candidates drop out, no one who is left has managed to consolidate the anti-Trump vote; instead, like an offshore hurricane, the former president is building into a Category 5 storm. Never in the history of the poll, which has been surveying the runup to the caucuses since 1984, has a contender in a competitive GOP contest registered these kind of numbers so close to the vote.
Let’s stipulate that even the best polls are snapshots of the race, not predictors of where it will end. The state’s caucuses put a premium on passion and organization, so dark horses — such as Rick Santorum in 2012 — can break ahead in the final stretch.
It is also worth noting the bigger picture: Iowa’s GOP caucus-goers don’t have a sterling record of picking the ultimate nominee, much less who reaches the White House.
Still, if Trump comes out of Iowa on Jan. 15 with anything close to the numbers of Selzer’s poll, he will blast into the next contest in New Hampshire with momentum that could make him all but unstoppable for the GOP nomination.
The former president has eschewed the supposedly inviolable Iowa playbook of face-to-face campaigning that DeSantis has followed by visiting all of the state’s 99 counties. DeSantis has also won the endorsements of hugely popular Gov. Kim Reynolds and evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. Meanwhile, Haley has upped her game in Iowa and while she doesn’t have much of an apparent ground operation, she is getting additional muscle from the powerful network led by billionaire Charles Koch.
So why is Trump enjoying such a surge? Selzer says his campaign has little visible day-to-day presence; she has yet to see even a yard sign for Trump. “But whatever it is they are doing, it is working,” she adds.
Trump’s narrow loss in Iowa’s 2016 caucuses is something of a fixation for him. So shoddy was his operation that his daughter Ivanka called him from a big caucus site to tell him no one was designated to make the customary pitch to caucus-goers for him. While Trump predictably claimed that winner Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had cheated, one adviser told me it is “seared in [Trump’s] head that lack of serious organizational effort is what cost him Iowa.” (That year was also a rare miss for Selzer, whose final poll had Trump winning.)
This time, Trump’s campaign has tapped captains — sometimes multiple — for every one of the roughly 1,700 caucus locations, and each will be outfitted with a gold cap. It has also produced a slick 18-page how-to manual so that Trump caucus-goers, especially first-timers, will know what to do when they get there.
But the real key, a source with access to the campaign’s internal information claims, is a list of 200,000 Iowans who over the past eight years have attended a Trump rally, donated to him, signed up online or caucused for him. Pounding these people with digital ads, mail, texts and social media is where the campaign is doing much of its work, particularly with supporters who might not otherwise be inclined to spend a frigid weeknight at a caucus.
Trump is also benefiting from the fact that Haley and DeSantis have begun attacking each other. His own ads focus on President Biden and feature a montage of Reynolds saying nice things about him (before she endorsed DeSantis).
The possibility of a sudden blizzard notwithstanding, Iowa insiders are saying turnout at next month’s caucuses could top 200,000, a record well above the previous one of roughly 180,000 in 2016. As things look right now, Donald Trump is likely to have a very good night.
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