Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump departs a caucus night party in Des Moines, Iowa, Monday, January 15, 2024.
Flouting the unmistakable admonitions from the Almighty that they should stay home (what with the temperatures feeling like 30 below with the wind chill), Iowa’s ostensibly pious Republicans turned out last night to brave the elements and flout America’s fundamental democratic values in the bargain. Just over 50 percent of the state’s Republican caucusers settled what was already settled to begin with: that Donald Trump will be running against Joe Biden come November.
Aging, embittered, and whiter than the driven snow—which was what they drove over to get there—the caucusgoers found in Trump a leader as aging, embittered, and white as themselves. According to the networks’ entrance polls, 45 percent of the rather sparse crowd of attendees were 65 and older, while just 25 percent were under 50. Fifty-one percent were born-agains or evangelicals, and 98 percent were white. Two-thirds (66 percent) believed Joe Biden had not legitimately won the 2020 presidential contest. Sixty percent favored a nationwide ban on abortions.
Trump’s party is largely rural and working-class, most especially in Iowa. The entrance poll broke down caucus attendees by levels of education (never attended college/had some college classes/got a two-year college certificate/got a B.A./received an advanced degree), and Trump’s vote share dwindled with every successive gradation up the educational scale (from 76 percent of those never attending college to 25 percent of those with advanced degrees, defying a somewhat risible New York Times article out Monday claiming that the college-educated were “warming” to Trump). In direct contrast, Nikki Haley’s support rose with each successive level (from 8 percent among the never-attendeds to 41 percent among the advanced degreed).
It was anything but a good night for Haley, who’d hoped to finish second and knock Ron DeSantis back to attacking Disney and flying immigrants to the frozen North. Instead, she came in slightly behind DeSantis. As independents and Democrats can vote in New Hampshire’s Republican primary one week from today, and as the first major primary after that is in Haley’s home state of South Carolina, DeSantis moves on from Iowa looking at no better than very distant third-place finishes over the next month. But Haley, no matter how well she’ll do in New Hampshire, will be just going through the motions, too.
Trump has a lock on the Republican Party, running perhaps most effectively on his pledge to deport immigrants, which he promised to do in record numbers during his victory speech last night. “Hundreds of known terrorists” had already streamed across the border, he said, characteristically undeterred by the absence of any substantiation for that claim.
That absence of documentation notwithstanding (indeed, the absence of Trump’s caring that there was no documentation notwithstanding), immigration may well be the most potent issue he will deploy against President Biden and the Democrats, particularly if the economy continues to improve. The division and confusion in the Democratic ranks about what to do about the unprecedented numbers of asylum seekers coming across the southern border has made it a nightmare for Biden to address and a symbol of what many perceive, however wrongly, as his ineffectuality. It pits an ideal that Democrats wish to uphold—that America has been and will be the land in which the endangered and beleaguered have historically found refuge—against the grim reality that it’s politically impossible to muster sufficient resources to handle so many of these immigrants and refugees. If, through some miracle, Haley were to become the nominee, she might forgo Trump’s reference to those unknown known terrorists, but she’d still assail Biden for losing control of the border, and he’d still be hard-pressed to counter it.
It may be that only a conviction in his trial for instigating the January 6th insurrection can keep Trump out of the White House, and it has to be a convincing conviction at that. In the entrance poll, 30 percent of the caucusgoers said they wouldn’t consider Trump fit to be president if he were found guilty, though that number would likely diminish when party leaders close ranks behind him even if he’s convicted, as they surely will for fear of antagonizing the party base if they don’t. Absent some sort of infusion to the Biden campaign, or the more improbable ascent of some other Democrat to be the party’s nominee, it’s chiefly such hopes as a Trump conviction by which we putter along.
