INDEPENDENT
Not since the victory of then-Texas Governor George W Bush in the 2000 Republican primary has the Iowa caucuses picked the eventual GOP nominee.
Ironically, as the first-in-the-nation contest looks set to do so again nearly a quarter-century later, former President Donald Trump’s expected overwhelming victory on Monday 15 January may reveal the diminished influence of the caucuses, which the Democrats have now dropped altogether in favour of mail-in ballots for the 2024 contest.
Since the 1970s, the entire point of the caucuses has been that in a small state such as Iowa, an unknown presidential candidate can work hard and shake as many hands as humanly possible, perform well above expectations, and subsequently ride the wave of attention and momentum all the way to the nomination.
The example most cited is the 1976 win for Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia who would go on to beat incumbent President Gerald Ford.
Mr Carter did the grunt work, starting to spend time in the state before anyone else, and building his support by doing person-to-person politicking.
Mr Trump has hosted massive rallies, speaking to hundreds and sometimes thousands of people at once. If fewer than 400 attended, it was considered a small event. The ex-president looks likely to win Monday’s contest handily having done very little, if any, of the small-scale campaigning that used to be required to win. Iowa is no longer universally seen as the stepping stone it once was.
Betting it all on the Hawkeye State
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has bet almost his entire campaign on doing well in Iowa, a gamble that appears unlikely to pay off.
By comparison, Mr Trump trashed Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds – who assumed the executive office because Mr Trump made the state’s long-serving governor Terry Branstad his ambassador to China – for her eventual support for Mr DeSantis. He avoided the normal politicking, only briefly breezing through the state fair one day without the normal type of glad-handing or munching on a deep-fried delicacy on a stick that many presidential candidates do.
As of Friday, Mr DeSantis is behind both Mr Trump and Ms Haley in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. The former president remains far ahead at 52.3 per cent, while his former UN ambassador stands at 17.1 per cent and the Florida governor comes in at 15.7 per cent.
The obvious retort to the idea that Iowa’s time has come and gone is that 2024 is anything but a typical election year, with essentially two incumbents running against each other, and that we could be back to Iowa being at the epicentre of American politics as soon as 2028, when, regardless of if Mr Trump or President Joe Biden wins in November, there will be primaries on both sides of the aisle. Unless of course, as some of Mr Trump’s former staffers have warned, US democracy is a thing of the past at that point.
Iowa GOP State Senator Jeffrey Reichman, who’s backing Mr DeSantis, tells The Independent that “it’s a different situation” for Mr Trump in terms of campaigning.
The former president “has some security concerns, that don’t allow him to do” regular Iowa-style events.
“I don’t think any other candidate besides the former president … could do that – that’s not a formula that has ever made a candidate successful and wouldn’t ever make a candidate successful in Iowa,” Mr Reichman said regarding Mr Trump’s preference for large rallies.
