The most likely outcome of tonight’s vote will be the end — effectively or otherwise — of Ron DeSantis’s campaign for president within the week.
Good morning! I fear that’s the last pleasant sentiment I’ll be able to offer you in this column, for alas today is Caucus Day ’24 for Iowa Republicans, where Donald Trump is set to win at the polls tonight by a larger margin than in any contested Iowa race in generational memory. To wit: In 2016, Ted Cruz won by 3.3 percent; in 2012 Rick Santorum won by 0.03 percent. Mike Huckabee took a race that was basically conceded to him by the other major candidates in 2008 by 9 percent. This year, in the final Ann Selzer/NBC poll of the Iowa GOP presidential-nomination race, Donald Trump leads by 28 points over his nearest competitor. Either he is going to win commandingly tonight, or else nobody knows anything about the Republican electorate anymore. If you were hoping Iowa voters would throw a monkey wrench in Trump’s plans for return — if you were hoping for anything even resembling a serious race this year, in fact — then welcome to hell.
And now, just in time to hammer the point home, hell has gone and frozen over as well. If you live in the American Midwest (in fact, if you live anywhere except Florida) then you might have noticed that right now it’s somewhat cold outside. In Iowa, the wind chills are expected to take the temperature down to -45 degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts, well beyond the point where roads turn into ice sheets and cars fail to start, and frostbite sets in within ten minutes of outdoor exposure — truly life-threatening cold. (In Chicago, we’re expecting -35 degrees with wind chill ourselves, or what we call “MAGA Country” weather.) The impact this freakishly cold snap will have on turnout cannot be overemphasized; unfortunately, it also cannot be modeled in any reliable way, either.
The enthusiasm numbers given by voters for their chosen candidates in the Selzer/NBC poll are extremely instructive in this regard: Donald Trump not only has the largest share of the vote at 48 percent, an extremely healthy 88 percent of his voters are enthusiastic about their support. Meanwhile, there are clear signs that Ann Selzer (long Iowa’s best pollster) doubts the actual top-line results of her poll with regard to the next highest contender, Nikki Haley, and it’s because of those same voter-enthusiasm numbers; only 39 percent of her purported voters express actual enthusiasm in their support, a shockingly anemic number. Her pool of supporters — both in Iowa as well as New Hampshire — seems to be composed mostly of Never-Trumpers, ex-Republicans with marginal remaining attachment to the party, or outright Democrats, which is not a recipe for grassroots enthusiasm.
Now add in a historic polar vortex, and ask yourself how many of those waveringly ambivalent voters will bother to turn out and wait through endless caucus-goer speechifying in order to cast a largely meaningless vote instead of staying warm and watching the NFL playoffs. In the Selzer poll, Ron DeSantis (who trails with only 16 percent of the vote and whose Iowa-centered presidential campaign has been subject to endless criticism) has the firm support of 62 percent of his caucus-goers, by contrast. Whether this matters in the long run is a different question entirely.
This time around, it is rather easy to make a prediction about the outcome of tonight’s caucus: Donald Trump will win commandingly; and if he doesn’t, then we all need to go back to the drawing board in terms of our assumptions about the Republican electorate. Beyond that, it should not surprise anyone to see DeSantis beating his final polling numbers and edging out Haley in Iowa, for the reasons laid out above. Regardless of who does take second however, unless that showing is as close to Trump’s as Trump’s was to Ted Cruz back in 2016, then nothing about the nature of this race has changed. The most likely outcome of tonight’s vote will be the end — effectively or otherwise — of Ron DeSantis’s campaign for president within the week.