And so it begins

In the depths of a mid-western winter, Republican voters in Iowa will turn out to caucuses tomorrow (Monday evening in the United States) to cast the first votes in America’s presidential election. The process will end in not quite twelve months time, on 6 January 2025, when Congress will count the votes from the electoral college and declare the winner – a step that, as we discovered three years ago, is more than a pure formality.

Those Iowans, of course, are not voting for president but for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And even for that, the direct impact of their votes is small: Iowa is not a big state, and the caucuses will elect only forty delegates to a convention that will number almost 2,500. But because it goes first, Iowa has an impact on the politics of the nominating process out of all proportion to its size.

That impact tends to be negative rather than positive – that is, it usually winnows the field rather than anoints the winner. Of eight contested Republican caucuses in Iowa so far (starting in 1976), only three of the victors have gone on to win the nomination, and none has done so since George Bush Jr in 2000. But many once-serious candidates have dropped out or become unviable after poor performances in the state.

Eight years ago the eventual nominee, Donald Trump, came second in Iowa with 24.3%, 3.3 points behind Ted Cruz on 27.6%. Marco Rubio was a close third with 23.1%, and another eight serious candidates polled in the single digits. Four years earlier, Rick Santorum had beaten the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, by just 34 votes, 24.6% to 24.5%, with another three candidates reaching double figures.

This year there are two very obvious differences from 2016. One is that Trump will do much better than a quarter of the vote: polls consistently show him a clear winner with about twice that level of support. Unless there has been a gigantic failure of polling, the contest is about the size of his margin and the fate of the other runners.

But that leads immediately to the second difference: in 2016 there was a big field, with eleven candidates. In 2012 there had been six, the same as in 2000; in 2008 there were eight (although two of them were of debatable seriousness). This time, however, it has narrowed sooner, most recently with the withdrawal of Chris Christie. Now there are only four – or five if one generously counts former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who has consistently failed to register in the polls.

Trump’s three challengers are former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and crank entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Each has had their moment in the sun: DeSantis briefly matched Trump for favoritism at the beginning of last year, and Ramaswamy, while well behind Trump (whom he most closely resembles), led the other two in the betting market a few months ago. But since about October, Haley has looked like Trump’s most serious rival, an impression that has strengthened in the last few weeks.

Although he lost in Iowa, the crowded field in 2016 benefited Trump. He never had majority support among Republican voters, but he had a solid core of committed supporters, and his opponents divided the rest between them – not just in Iowa and New Hampshire, but well into the middle of the primary season. If he is to be beaten, the one essential task for his opponents is to coalesce around a single candidate.

So Haley’s aim is twofold. First, to beat DeSantis and Ramaswamy by a sufficient margin to either induce them to withdraw or reduce them to irrelevance. Second, to get close enough to Trump to make him look beatable, ideally keeping him well below the 50% mark. If she can follow that up with a win next week in New Hampshire, where the polls are much closer, she will start to look like a serious prospect.

But the odds are against her. Caucus-goers and primary voters are not representative of the general Republican population; they are much more the activists and partisans, and it is there that the cult of Trump has taken hold. Helped by uncritical media attention and a risk-averse party leadership, Trump has been able to present himself – in complete contrast to the facts – as an electoral winner.

Almost everything else is against him, but as long as he retains that core of support he remains a danger to his country and to the world. Tomorrow we’ll get more of an idea of just how great that danger is.