Just six weeks now until the first electoral event of next year’s United States presidential election: the Iowa caucuses, to be held on 15 January. Last time around, in 2020, there was no Republican contest, but the Democrat caucuses were a fiasco of delayed and disputed results. Having learned their lesson, the Democrats this time are conducting a postal ballot – and for the moment, anyway, there is no real contest on the Democrat side, with Joe Biden seeking re-nomination and facing only token opposition.
The Republicans, however, are holding the traditional caucuses, with former president Donald Trump as the front-runner. National polls show him with support of something like 60% among Republican voters; in Iowa it’s somewhat less, maybe a touch under 50%, and in New Hampshire, which votes a week later in the first primary, it’s also in the high 40s, maybe a couple of points behind his Iowa level.
Those are big numbers, so the chance of him being beaten might seem remote. But primary voters often only focus on the contest in the final weeks: Iowa has a history of upsets and volatile polling. Trump’s legal worries continue to mount up, and with them the chance of him going to jail in the not so distant future. And the Republican field has been narrowing, with Mike Pence and then Tim Scott dropping out. For practical purposes there are now only two challengers left, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.
So the Republican Party seems close to doing what it so conspicuously failed to do in 2016: settle on a single contender to concentrate the non-Trump vote. Eight years ago it’s probable that that would have been successful. With the huge exposure and prestige of the presidency behind him, Trump will now be harder to overtake, but it would be a brave pundit who said the task was impossible.
Hence the possibility that the contest between DeSantis and Haley will end up being more than the contest for second place that it currently looks like. And it’s an interesting contest (the focus on it also helped by the fact that Trump has been boycotting the debates): DeSantis started with a big lead, which Haley has gradually whittled down. He’s still ahead of her nationally, but Iowa is closer and in New Hampshire Haley has hit the front.
The betting odds, which tend to reflect trends in the polls rather than their momentary state, now have Haley well ahead, with Maxim Lott and John Stossel’s aggregator giving her a 13.0% chance at the nomination. That’s a long way behind Trump’s 78.7%, but it’s also a long way ahead of DeSantis’s 4.5%.
Haley is now starting to bring in some serious support from Republican donors. The one that made headlines last week was the endorsement of Americans for Prosperity Action, the network bankrolled by billionaire Charles Koch. Koch has never been a Trump supporter, but this is the first time that his organisation has endorsed a presidential candidate in the primaries. As it not unfairly put it in a memo, “we are entering a time period that demands choices.”
Not all the anti-Trump money is flowing to Haley yet, but if she can see off DeSantis there is plenty more out there. The Club for Growth, a lobby for pro-business economic policy that has historically been one of the party’s biggest donors, has been running attack ads against Trump. For now, DeSantis is its preferred candidate, but if he ceases to be viable, there’s not much doubt that it will switch to Haley – as will anyone else whose priority is to stop Trump.
Money isn’t everything. Readers may remember the poor return that Michael Bloomberg received for the half a billion dollars of his own money that he spent in the Democrat primaries four years ago. But it gives Haley a big cushion against having to drop out early for lack of funds, as well as a boost in organisational capacity. It’s now up to her how well she can use it.
The World is Not Enough 