On to New Hampshire!

As you’ve no doubt heard, Donald Trump scored the more or less expected victory on Tuesday in the Iowa caucuses (see my preview here), with 51.0% of the vote. For what it’s worth (which isn’t much, since Iowa’s share of the total is tiny), that will give him 20 of the state’s 40 delegates. Ron DeSantis was next with 21.2% and nine delegates, followed by Nikki Haley with 19.1% and eight and Vivek Ramaswamy with 7.7% and three.*

For a supposed overwhelming front-runner, 51% is not a particularly impressive result. What makes it much better for Trump is the distribution of the other 49%. DeSantis’s second place keeps him in the running, so he and Haley will continue to split the anti-Trump vote and spend some of their energy attacking each other. And while Ramaswamy promptly withdrew, his vote was above expectations, and some of it will now flow to Trump, whom he endorsed.

If Trump’s vote had been unchanged but Haley had won, say, an extra seven or eight points, drawn equally from DeSantis and Ramaswamy, the picture would look very different.

The race now moves on to the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday (Wednesday in Australia). Haley is much better positioned there; she still trails Trump in the polls, but she is within striking distance and well clear of DeSantis. She is also helped by the fact that the following primary, on 24 February, is in South Carolina, her home state. Nonetheless, most pundits are dismissing her chances, and in the light of this week’s result proclaiming Trump the inevitable nominee.

It might seem strange that the media, who so often present elections as close or undecided when in fact they are nothing of the kind (such as waiting two or more days after Joe Biden had won the last election before informing their viewers of the fact), should now be apparently making the opposite error and prematurely calling the contest over. But in fact the two errors come from the same place: whatever is happening now has to be vitally important. On no account must viewers be told either that it’s too early to mean much, or that it’s no longer worth watching.

No doubt Trump’s renomination is the most likely outcome, but it’s far from inevitable; there’s a long way to go. Iowa is a single small and unrepresentative state, and the caucus turnout of just over 110,000 amounts to less than one-eighth of its Republican voters – presumably including the more obstinate and fanatical ones. Larger numbers in larger states may go the same way, but there is no guarantee.

It’s particularly important not to generalise from Trump’s standing among hardcore Republicans to his possible performance in November. One very interesting result out of Iowa was not from the caucuses themselves but from an opinion poll the day before, where Haley’s supporters were asked who they would vote for in the election if Trump was the nominee. Only 23% said they would support him; 27% said they would opt for a third-party candidate, and an astonishing 43% said they would vote for Biden.

Those numbers should be taken with a large grain of salt, but they do suggest that there is significant resistance to Trump within the Republican Party. It may not be enough to deny him the nomination, but it’s almost certainly enough to deny him the election.

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* Asa Hutchinson, the only other even vaguely serious candidate, won a derisory 0.2% of the vote and also withdrew. Ryan Binkley, a self-funding fundamentalist, had 0.7%.