And Then There Were Two: DeSantis, Haley Left Standing on Debate Stage as Trump Dodges Final Pre-Iowa Contest

It’s the final countdown to the Iowa caucuses, and former president Donald Trump is set to hit the campaign trail — but he still won’t debate.

Only three candidates have qualified for a CNN debate that will take place in Iowa just five days before the caucus: Trump, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.

But Trump has once again declined to participate, setting up a debate that will instead center on the battle for second place between DeSantis and Haley.

The former president has instead elected to participate in a Fox News town hall in Iowa that will run at the same time as the debate.

“We understand Donald Trump is scared to get on the stage because he’d have to finally explain why he didn’t build the wall, added nearly $8 trillion to the debt, and turned the country over to Fauci,” DeSantis communications director Andrew Romeo said in a statement. “But even Gavin Newsom had the courage to stand on the stage to debate his own failed record against Ron DeSantis.”

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson didn’t make the cut, having failed to receive at least 10 percent in three different national or Iowa statewide polls — including one approved CNN poll of likely Iowa Republican caucus goers.

Trump, who has held few campaign events since launching his presidential bid back in November 2022, will hit the campaign trail this week for events in Sioux Center and Mason City on Friday.

On Thursday, DeSantis and Haley are set to participate in back-to-back live CNN town halls at Grand View University in Des Moines.

Haley will then hold several events in the state on Friday, including a “Run GenZ” event with New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu. DeSantis spent the holiday weekend in Iowa and was slated to hold additional events in the state on Wednesday.

Ramaswamy, for his part, is working to complete the “Full Grassley” for a second time.

While the DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down made headlines over the holidays for, well, backing down, the pro-Haley SFA Fund PAC has gone pedal to the metal in Iowa, having become the top spender in the state.

Never Back Down canceled all of its advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2024, instead opting to focus on field operations while another pro-DeSantis super PAC, Fight Right, Inc., is set to take over ad spending.

The pro-Haley SFA Fund spent a total of $25 million in Iowa in 2023, according to AdImpact, and has $3.3 million in ad spending planned for the final stretch.

But it’s DeSantis who has become the top target of negative independent expenditures. Presidential candidates had spent more than $38 million targeting DeSantis as of December 20, compared to 20.9 million against President Biden, $19.8 million against Trump, and $15.8 million against Haley. The Haley PAC alone has spent $10 million in false negative ads against DeSantis in Iowa since December 14.

Trump and the pro-Trump PAC MAGA Inc. have increasingly attacked Haley in recent weeks as she has picked up steam, signaling the campaign views her as at least something of a concern after having ignored her for much of the campaign.

Trump has seemingly dropped “birdbrain” as his insulting moniker for Haley, instead opting for “high-tax Haley.” The Trump PAC released its first anti-Haley ad of the campaign in recent weeks, targeting her alleged flip-flop on a promise she made as governor not to increase the gas tax in the Palmetto State. But fact-checkers have dismissed the attack as misleading.

Still, the PAC has spent $3.4 million on airing the ad in the last two weeks, along with another $370,000 in anti-Haley mailers and text messages.

The DeSantis campaign, for its part, has adopted a strategy of attacking Haley as nothing more than Trump’s prospective running mate.

And former Trump aide Steve Bannon said Monday he believes a major fight is brewing in Trump world over whether Haley should be Trump’s pick for VP. “If Nikki Haley is in this administration, in any capacity, it will fail. Well, she’s a viper. She’s a viper. And once she gets in there, she’ll try to run it as prime minister. She’ll try to be Dick Cheney. . . . To Trump [she] will be just like Dick Cheney to Bush. That’s what she’ll try to do.”

But for all the attacks against Haley, none have proven as headline-grabbing as her own self-inflicted gaffes. She was widely panned for her response to a voter’s question about the cause of the Civil War, in which she failed to mention slavery. She later dug a deeper hole for herself in trying to walk back her comments when she said, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery, that’s the easy part,” but went on to suggest that Democrats are “sending plants” to her town-hall campaign events.

And during a visit to Coralville, Iowa, Haley mistakenly confused Iowa Hawkeyes basketball star Caitlin Clark with CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins, saying “Caitlin Collins is phenomenal.”

For all the back and forth, if history is any guide, polling in Iowa is a strong predictor that Trump is all but certain to win the caucus. The Des Moines Register Iowa caucus poll has correctly predicted the caucus winner all but a handful of times since its launch in 1984.

And in a December NBC News/Des Moines Register poll, Trump notched support from 51 percent of likely Iowa caucus goers — the largest lead ever recorded in a competitive GOP primary five weeks out from the contest. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s nearest rival, garnered just 19 percent support.

Around NR

• Andrew C. McCarthy says Chris Christie’s “gall” is worse than Nikki Haley’s Civil War gaffe:

According to him, Haley said what she said “because she’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth[.]” It’s the same reason, he elaborated, why “she’s unwilling to tell the truth about Donald Trump. She says he was the right president for the right time.” This is moronic. Haley stumbled in New Hampshire, for God’s sake. No one there would have been offended if she had said slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War. . . . But beyond that, when it mattered in 2020, Christie patently believed that Trump was the right president for the right time. Flush up to Election Day, Christie was helping Trump prepare for the debates against Biden. He not only thought Trump was the right president for the right time; he didn’t want that time to end — he was trying really hard to get Trump another four years in office.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gathered the required signatures to qualify for placement on the presidential ballot in Utah as an independent candidate, the first state where he has done so, Kayla Bartsch reports:

Kennedy has campaigned across the U.S. with the hopes of gathering enough signatures across states to appear on state ballots as an independent candidate. As each state sets its own requirements, and the costs for collecting signatures and filing across states can be prohibitive for candidates without party backing, it is unlikely that Kennedy will qualify for candidacy in every state.

• Jim Geraghty reminds DeSantis supporters of the harsh realities facing the Florida governor’s presidential campaign:

To believe that DeSantis has a shot of winning Iowa, we need to believe that his support is at least 15 percentage points higher than his highest numbers in recent polling and that Donald Trump’s support is at least 15 percentage points lower than his lowest numbers in recent polling. (If you simply take DeSantis’s best number in a poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers since summer and Trump’s worst number, Trump wins by 17 percentage points.) Optimism also requires us to ignore just about everything that’s happened with the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down in recent weeks.

• Now that Colorado and Maine found Trump should be disqualified from their respective 2024 ballots over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his actions on January 6, 2021, Dan McLaughlin says pressure is mounting for the Supreme Court to weigh in and lays out the federal-law questions at issue:

The case for the Supreme Court to step in, and quickly, is mounting. Trump’s odds of winning the nomination are sufficiently high that the Court should settle in advance of the voting — ideally, in advance of all the primary voting, which begins on January 15 — whether or not he is ineligible for office, or at a minimum, what process would be required before declaring him ineligible.

• The Left can’t handle a Trump win, Rich Lowry writes:

Trump’s opponents are sincerely, and to some extent understandably, alarmed by his conduct after the 2020 election and how he’s branded his political comeback as a revenge tour.

For most of them, though, saving democracy doesn’t mean upholding the rules no matter what and letting the voters decide the election and the fate of the next president. No, it means blocking Donald Trump by any means necessary, regardless of the consequences for the rule of law, democratic politics, or faith in our system of government.

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