Why Nikki Haley Is Gaining in Iowa

T he latest survey of Iowa’s GOP primary voters conducted by Selzer & Co. for the Des Moines Register and NBC News contributes to the evidence that the 2024 race for the Republican presidential nomination is Donald Trump’s to lose. But the outstanding question remains: Can he lose it even if he tries? The degree to which Republican voters have shrugged off the former president’s criminal liabilities, his ideological inconsistencies, and even his bizarre refusal to prioritize the basic mechanics of winning elections — little things like, you know, voting — suggest that the answer is no. And yet, Selzer’s poll does not leave its careful readers with the impression that Trump has already put the race in Iowa away.

With the support of 43 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers, Trump leads the field. The former president’s support is relatively unchanged from August, when the same pollster found him winning 42 percent of the vote. What’s more, 63 percent of GOP voters who picked Trump as their first choice say they are locked in and won’t be changing their minds. But among all likely participants in the Republican caucus, just 41 percent describe themselves as similarly unpersuadable. So, less than one-third of the Republican caucus electorate in Iowa is Trump or bust. Meanwhile, 54 percent of likely GOP primary voters in Iowa are telling pollsters they’re still willing to be convinced.

But convinced by whom? This survey confirms the conventional wisdom, which indicates that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are locked in a contest for second place. Both DeSantis and Haley earned the support of 16 percent of respondents, but DeSantis shed three points since August while Haley has gained ten. Support for both candidates is softer than Trump’s. Seventy-four percent of Haley’s voters say they could still be persuaded to back another candidate, and 70 percent said the same for DeSantis. But while DeSantis has more room to improve his support among Iowa’s Trumpier voters in theory, the poll provides an explanation for why his campaign has stalled.

At 27 percent, more Iowans chose DeSantis as their second-choice candidate than any other in the field. Fully two-thirds of the Republican electorate in the Hawkeye State say they’d be willing to caucus for DeSantis, a total matched only by Trump. Indeed, DeSantis’s favorability rating among Iowa Republicans has only grown since August — up to 69 percent today from 66 percent this summer. So, if DeSantis is more well-liked than Trump and is seen by more Iowa voters as the former president’s primary competitor, why is the Florida governor’s share of the vote in decline? The answer is that Haley has taken up a challenge DeSantis rejected: consolidating the anti-Trump vote within the GOP.

Only Haley’s support increased at a measurable rate since August, and it’s hard to see where her support came from save Mike Pence (who declined from 6 percent in August to 2 percent today, and whose support was distributed among the candidates Pence voters named as their second choice). Only Vivek Ramaswamy’s position declined precipitously in this period, and his voters were unlikely to gravitate to Haley’s camp. The answer, then, is likely that Haley’s message appealed to voters who were previously undecided and on the sidelines.

At 22 percent, Haley now has more support among Iowa’s independent caucus goers than any other candidate except Trump, who is the first choice among one-third of Iowa’s self-described independents. Just 10 percent of his demographic said the same of DeSantis. Haley outperforms both DeSantis and Trump among suburban voters. (“32% say Haley is their first pick for president. DeSantis is at 29%, and Trump is at 24%,” the Des Moines Register notes.) And Haley is beating DeSantis among college-degree holders, men over the age of 65, and women aged 44 and younger. More Haley voters say they are “extremely” or “very enthusiastic” to caucus for her than say the same of DeSantis.

“It’s not just one particular group where she’s really dug in,” said J. Ann Selzer of Haley’s performance in her survey. “She’s digging in across demographics.” But Haley has a low ceiling in the Hawkeye State. While 34 percent of her supporters named DeSantis as their second choice, 41 percent of DeSantis voters said they’d back Trump if the Florida governor bowed out. And at 59 percent, Haley’s favorability rating among Iowa Republicans remains strong, but she is still overshadowed by both Trump and DeSantis.

So, we’re left with a conundrum. Outside Trump, DeSantis is clearly the candidate with the most appeal to the Republican Party’s MAGA-flavored populist voters. But DeSantis’s efforts to persuade the party’s most pro-Trump contingent to abandon the front-runner aren’t succeeding. What’s more, those efforts have come at the cost of creating a space for another candidate to strike a real contrast with the former president, thereby appealing to voters looking for exactly that kind of contrast. But while Haley’s efforts to consolidate the Reaganite wing of the GOP to rally around her campaign are bearing fruit, that coalition is a remnant that is likely too small to ultimately dethrone Trump.

The one thing that can be said of Haley’s strategy that cannot be said of DeSantis’s at present is that it absolutely has a future beyond Iowa. The demographics gravitating toward Haley’s growing coalition — independents, degree-holders, suburbanites, younger women, etc. — are the same demographics that make up a winning coalition in a general election. And it’s not just Iowa. The dearth of reputable polling in New Hampshire in October notwithstanding, Haley had already surged into second place in the Granite State, where these demographics often make or break campaigns. Similar conditions prevail in South Carolina. There, Haley is consolidating the Trump-skeptical vote while about half the Palmetto State electorate has lined up behind the former president.

Haley’s rise validates the notion that Trump’s competitors should have embarked on their campaigns from the outset with an eye toward appealing to the voters most amenable to their anti-Trump messages. With the support of a majority of the GOP’s Trump critics, the candidates might have built out their coalition from a position of relative strength. But neither DeSantis nor Haley took this approach at first. Rather, they retailed themselves as Trump without the baggage to voters who didn’t care about Trump’s baggage in the first place.

Haley adapted when this strategy failed to generate traction, but her conventionally conservative messaging strategy risks putting an impenetrable ceiling on her support among Republicans. Still, if her fundraising holds out, the data give no indication yet that her campaign will stall after Iowa, when the long and hard-fought quest for pledged delegates begins. In contrast, DeSantis has placed a big bet on the idea that Iowa’s vote will vault him into contention — a theory predicated on the notion that he could beat Trump at his own game. Once he had assembled a minority coalition of MAGA-adjacent voters, DeSantis would present himself to Trump-skeptical Republicans as their only hope of defeating Trump.

If Selzer’s poll is right, DeSantis may well be the only Republican candidate who can defeat Trump. But while DeSantis insists Trump-skeptical Republicans rally around him as the default alternative to Trump, Haley is actually asking for their votes. In that regard, her campaign’s success isn’t surprising.