Don’t tell Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) he is an underdog as the Iowa caucuses approach. He rang in the new year rallying Republicans in the state to put him on a glide path to the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
“I think we have an opportunity to just make a statement that in this country — it’s we the people that ultimately decide these things,” he said in West Des Moines on New Year’s Eve. “Because I think you have a lot of media, they don’t think you even matter.”
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DeSantis is betting that the voters in Iowa matter a lot. As his national standing has faded, he has increasingly counted on Iowa to rejuvenate his presidential prospects when caucusgoers convene on Jan. 15.
Former President Donald Trump ended 2023 at 63% nationally, according to Economist-YouGov, and an eyepopping 66% in Morning Consult. DeSantis’s numbers were 14% and 11%, respectively. In the latter poll, DeSantis tied former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley for a distant second place.
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The RealClearPolitics polling average now has Trump at 62.7% nationally with DeSantis at 10.9%, a tick behind Haley. The former president now has a commanding 51.7-point lead as actual voting gets closer.
But, as DeSantis is the first to remind us, no actual voting has happened as of this writing. There is also no national primary, though those numbers could be a warning sign to the rest of the Republican field about what awaits them when the race turns to multiple states and media markets simultaneously on Super Tuesday.
For now, however, the GOP field can focus on one state at a time. There the candidates can compete with Trump on something like even terms and may alter the dynamic that presently has him looking like a shoo-in to win the Republican presidential nomination for the third straight election.
In Iowa, DeSantis is running a traditional campaign. He has visited all 99 counties. He has the endorsement of Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA), who, like DeSantis, was reelected as governor by a nearly 20-point margin in 2022. The organized Christian Right has lined up behind DeSantis, after helping George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz win the last several competitive caucuses.
“His wife, the first lady of Florida, is door-knocking in Iowa,” Family Leader CEO Bob Vander Plaats told the Washington Examiner. “They have put everything basically at the center of the table to win in Iowa.”
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Camping out in Iowa and courting its social conservatives has worked for candidates in the past. Cruz was able to beat Trump doing this as recently as 2016. Huckabee and Santorum did the same with national poll numbers worse than DeSantis’s. Santorum was in the single digits in most Iowa polls as late as November 2011, and in a few outlying surveys that December, before his upset of Mitt Romney.
The track record of this delivering a candidate the nomination is much spottier. Bush in 2000 had a coalition of establishment Republicans and evangelicals. Bob Dole had mostly the former in 1996.
Iowa winners in competitive Republican races haven’t won the nomination since. And while this has often been because Iowa has tended to elevate relatively underfunded conservative insurgents whose appeal was limited to evangelical voters — Pat Robertson over Jack Kemp in 1988, Pat Buchanan over Phil Gramm in 1996, Huckabee over Romney and Fred Thompson in 2008, and Santorum over Rick Perry in 2012 — this hasn’t always been true. Cruz, for example, had the money and organization for a national campaign.
“Other than Trump and myself, no other Republican won more than a single state,” the Texas senator told the Washington Examiner last year when looking back at the 2016 primaries. “[John] Kasich won Ohio, [Marco] Rubio won Minnesota. Trump and I won every other state.”
But Huckabee and Santorum were boosted nationally by their Iowa wins, and Santorum wasn’t even initially given credit for a first-place showing. Buchanan parlayed his close second-place finish in Iowa to a win in New Hampshire. A DeSantis win would also be a major blow to the idea that we know much of anything about the 2024 race.
Trump led by 4.7 points in the last RealClearPolitics polling average for Iowa in 2016, including a 5-point advantage in the final Des Moines Register poll, viewed as the gold standard in the state. Cruz ended up winning by 3.3 points. Romney led by 1.3 points in the average and 2 points, according to the Des Moines Register, in 2012. Santorum eked it out by 0.1. Huckabee was up 3 before winning by 9.2 in 2008.
DeSantis would have to overcome a 32.7-point Trump lead in the RealClearPolitics average. Trump’s smallest Iowa lead since December has been 23 points. That’s a lot to expect of a good get-out-the-vote operation, even in a caucus.
If past Iowa polling didn’t always predict the winner, it at least reflected the volatility of public opinion in the state. Cruz and Ben Carson as well as Trump led relatively late in the 2016 cycle. Romney, Perry, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Ron Paul each took turns atop the pack near the voting in 2012.
A DeSantis win in Iowa, however narrow, would lead to increased skepticism of the public polling across the board. He needs Iowa to do for him what South Carolina did for President Joe Biden in 2020. His supporters remain confident that this is possible.
“I know it’s repetitive, but Iowans break late. They take it in, they take it in, they take it in. Now Christmas is over, Thanksgiving’s over, New Year’s is over, we now can focus on the caucus,” Vander Plaats said. “And it’s not that they haven’t paid attention — they have — but now it’s going to be, ‘Now, I’m going to make up my mind.’ And of the people I talked to, they’re very complimentary of the former president and what he accomplished in his term as president, but at the same time, they’re saying they believe we need to turn the page and go to a next-generation leader. And usually that’s Ron DeSantis. So I still believe Ron DeSantis could have a really, really good night.”
Vander Plaats has seen Iowa comebacks before.
“I did an event on New Year’s Eve with Gov. DeSantis, which was hosted by the super PAC, and it reminded me a lot of the 2008 cycle with Mike Huckabee because I was surprised by how many people were there and energized by the governor’s campaign and the number of people who have come to Iowa from different states to help him in Iowa,” he said. “To us nerds, the super PAC drama is interesting. To the Iowa caucusgoer, they couldn’t really care less because they’re in it for Gov. DeSantis, not for [Republican strategist] Jeff Roe or anybody else.”
The social conservative leader is referring to the infighting and leadership shuffles at the DeSantis-supporting super PAC Never Back Down. The organization is supposed to be a big part of DeSantis’s ground game in the caucuses.
What effect this palace intrigue will really have on DeSantis’s campaign is unclear. It could be a sign that the disarray and dysfunction the Florida governor promised Republicans they could avoid if they picked him over Trump remains in full effect. It could also simply reflect operatives’ disquiet about DeSantis’s poll numbers, like locker room grumbling about the coaches to sports reporters after a few losses. Winning fixes everything.
The DeSantis camp has long believed that the public polling understates its support. It thinks it has a better caucus field operation than its opponents. The Des Moines Register and NBC News also showed he is competitive with Trump in a metric known as “candidate footprint,” the share of Iowans willing to entertain a vote for a particular candidate.
“First of all, he’s been a governor of a large state,” Vander Plaats said. “He has had great success being the governor of a large state, one of the best-run states in the entire country, if not the best. He’s won in a toss-up state by a landslide in the midterm election. He’s come to Iowa. He’s been to all 99 counties.”
That, DeSantis backers hope, will be the difference-maker.
“We have every county organized,” the governor told a local news station. “We have over a thousand precinct captains that are going to be at each precinct on caucus night. They obviously could be speaking on our behalf, recruiting other people to come, and so we’ve worked really hard to sign up tens of thousands of people to commit to the caucus.”
Trump, as is his wont, has run a less conventional campaign. He drops into Iowa periodically, accompanied by celebrities such as Roseanne Barr. It may not be Biden’s “basement” strategy from the 2020 race, but DeSantis’s allies see parallels. “DeSantis is everywhere, and he has promised that he will have a likewise energetic approach as president,” a spokesperson told reporters last year.
It’s possible that Trump’s near-universal name recognition and first term in the White House obviate the need for ubiquity on the campaign trail. Riskier has been his feuding with Reynolds and snubbing of social conservatives, though Trump has successfully navigated such dust-ups in the past.
Haley is also an obstacle to DeSantis, though her goals in Iowa are complicated. She is not favored to win the caucuses and does not want to set expectations that she should finish first. New Hampshire, followed by her home state of South Carolina, is more critical to her fortunes.
Unlike John McCain in 2000 and 2008, however, Haley isn’t entirely bypassing Iowa. She is nipping at DeSantis’s heels in the polls. Leapfrogging DeSantis for second place or even posting a strong enough third-place finish could give her a boost going into New Hampshire.
DeSantis is therefore running a two-pronged campaign against both these rivals, though Trump by all accounts remains the man to beat. “Donald Trump is running on his issues,” DeSantis said in Council Bluffs. “Nikki Haley’s running on her donors’ issues. I’m running on your issues.”
Trump has so far succeeded in convincing a large swath of the Republican primary electorate that his issues are theirs. That has made it difficult to take clean shots at Trump without also alienating GOP voters. But if you don’t distinguish yourself from the front-runner, who in this particular case has already been president for four years, how do you make the case for your own candidacy?
In the early days of the race, DeSantis appeared to have arrived at a unique and effective solution to this dilemma. After winning reelection by a landslide during a midterm election in which many of Trump’s handpicked candidates underperformed or lost outright, DeSantis looked like he was a better Trump figure than the ex-president himself.
So many wins Republicans will get tired of winning? Check: DeSantis got a slew of conservative bills passed in Florida and then easily won a second term. Hiring only the best people? Check: The governor’s office bore little resemblance to the circular firing squad that was the Trump White House. Terrific economy? Check: Florida’s economy was healthy, and DeSantis could argue that he did more than Trump to protect it from COVID-19 lockdowns.
DeSantis was going to be like Trump, except he would do a better job at keeping his campaign promises, govern in a more disciplined manner, and be eligible to run for a second consecutive term under the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution.
Then came the Trump indictments, which many Republicans saw as a more current example of the “weaponization” of government against the party than Dr. Anthony Fauci’s pandemic edicts. Both these prosecutions and DeSantis’s candidacy breathed new life into Trump’s listless campaign.
DeSantis was then attacked by all sides. Trump sought to prevent the Florida governor from replacing him as the front-runner and nominee, the Republicans trailing DeSantis sought to overtake him as the main alternative to Trump, Biden and the Democrats attacked DeSantis as a general election foe. The combined barrage drove up DeSantis’s negatives.
Trump painted DeSantis as a pale imitation, a Trojan horse who would if nominated be ridden into November by Jeb Bush and former House Speaker Paul Ryan. To other Republicans, DeSantis was too much like Trump and at 45 even more likely to make permanent the GOP’s populist shift. This created the lane for Haley to occupy.
The Florida governor’s campaign trail manner also came under scrutiny. “I think DeSantis needs to be a little warmer in his personality and connect more with people,” veteran conservative columnist and A Watchman in the Night author Cal Thomas told the Washington Examiner. “He did a fabulous job in that last election, blew everybody away.”
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DeSantis may need to blow everybody away yet again to fulfill his potential as a candidate. Trump is hoping to finish him off in Iowa, an outcome Haley would also try to turn to her advantage.
“The only poll that matters is the one on Election Day” may be a cliche, but DeSantis is counting on it being true. “All the stuff that they’ve talked about, all that goes up in smoke once you guys come out on the 15th and catapult us to victory,” he told supporters. “You have the power to do that.”
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. Washington Examiner White House reporter Naomi Lim contributed to this report.