Voters yesterday ventured into sub-zero temperatures to commence the US Republican presidential nomination race with the Iowa caucuses, the first major test of whether front-runner former US president Donald Trump can beat out rivals former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
With a commanding lead in the polls, the former president is expected to win the midwestern state’s first-in-the-nation vote handily as he bids to be the Republican standard-bearer against US President Joe Biden in November, but Iowans had to contend with the coldest conditions in the modern era of presidential election campaigns, with blizzards and a potential wind chill in some areas of minus-42°C — potentially throttling turnout.
Trump, Haley and DeSantis were all forced to cancel appearances in the home stretch of campaigning.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Dress warmly tomorrow,” Trump said on Sunday at a campaign event in Indianola, just south of the state capital, Des Moines, coming on the heels of him having to scrap three weekend rallies. “Brave the weather, go out and save America.”
“Together we’re going to make history — but you have to show up,” he later said in a video on his Truth social media site.
Despite his apparent strength, the former president has been indicted four times since he was last a candidate and is preparing for the potential collapse of his business empire in New York as a result of a civil fraud trial.
“If DeSantis’s massive ground effort, coupled with a recent Haley surge, can drag Trump under 50 percent by several points, that will be the first meaningful sign that Trump can be defeated,” said political analyst Alex Avetoom, who worked on Republican John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “However, this paradigm-shifting reality — that Trump could be defeated — happens if, and only if, the rest of the field consolidates behind one anti-Trump candidate.”
For all the talk of miracle bounces, the Iowa race is hardly competitive: a NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll had Trump at 48 percent among likely caucus-goers, with Haley surging into second place, but still only at 20 percent.
“I’m voting for Trump again,” 37-year-old trucker Jeff Nikolas said, adding that “he may be bullheaded, but he can actually get stuff done.”
The poll was more bad news for DeSantis, who scored just 16 percent and has seen his claim to be heir apparent to the post-Trump Republican Party eclipsed by Haley, but DeSantis on Sunday said that his “very motivated” backers would turn out in sufficient number in the vote, open only to registered Republicans.
In 2016, only 186,000 Iowans took part in the caucus, he told ABC, and “now, with this weather, it could be significantly less,” making turnout paramount.
DeSantis urged his supporters to “bring in friends and family, man, that’s going to pack a punch.”
“It’s good to be an underdog when folks want to count you out,” he said.
Haley is looking to outperform expectations to cement her claim to be Trump’s top challenger going into her preferred state of New Hampshire the following week.
“Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows” Trump, she told a last-minute campaign stop in the town of Adel.
“You don’t fix Democrat chaos with Republican chaos,” she said.
In a state that likes to meet its candidates face-to-face, DeSantis has been at pains to highlight his own ground game, which has taken him to all 99 counties, but the Iraq veteran and conservative hard-liner would be under heavy pressure to drop out if he finishes third.
The Republican primary also features a number of low-polling presidential candidates, including biotechnology entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
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