With a little over a week left in the much-awaited, GOP Iowa Caucuses, there’s little time for the candidates to appeal to the voters of the state-and make a case to be the next President of the United States.
The remaining candidates in the race-Trump, DeSantis, Haley, Ramaswamy, Christie, and Hutchison, have a turbulence of polling in the state, and nationally. The Iowa Caucuses are essentially, a ‘first in the nation’ polling method practiced every election year, where caucus-goers gather in precincts (schools, churches etc.) to ‘discuss and agree upon a candidate. Unlike primary voting and presidential elections, caucuses are reliant upon a crowd of voters to gather, and openly sit in arrays, according to their preferred candidate. And since Iowans are the first to have their pick in party nominations, it is said that Iowa holds the power to pre-determine presidential elections, early-on, in January of election cycles.
In the last Iowa caucuses, the Democrats caucused and waited for hours-if not days-on end for the final result. It was a huge disaster, and many candidates cited the mishandling of results and voters, as a criticism point. There was also a massive disconnect of paper trails, which took extensive hours of screening by the Democratic Party to come to a final result. It’s worth noting that Mayor Pete Butiigeg won that caucus, and did not go on to win the nomination. Regardless, it gave him much momentum, heading into New Hampshire and South Carolina. And typically, those with less delegates in Iowa, tend to drop out of the race shortly after.
Massachusetts and Illinois are now filing petitions to get Trump’s name off the ballot in 2024 and expect to pressure state and local officials to take these petitions to court.
This year-however-there is a different story for the Republican Party. While technical issues faced last year are not expected to become prologue, the polls tell a much pre-determined story. Currently, at a state level, Trump is polling at 50%, while DeSantis and Haley are a close second and third-at 18% and 15% respectively-according to a FTE poll. The DeSantis campaign’s uncanny resemblance to Trump’s 2016 campaign makes him have that edge over Nikki Haley in the state, but that edge is only a one-state feature. In South Carolina-her home state as Governor-she is polling much higher at 23%, and a 10-point lead over Gov. DeSantis. Regardless, she is expected to not be in much of a momentous place at the end of the January 15th Caucus in Iowa. She hopes to gain her delegates from states-whose top officials have endorsed her-such as in New Hampshire, where Incumbent Governor Chris Sununu is vying to tie her to the change needed in America today.
Now, DeSantis and Haley are very ambitious. Whether they plan to actually win the nomination, or just gain enough momentum to be Trump’s running mate is a discussion all in itself, but the mere idea that they would go far as to disassociate from him seems a mist.
Haley, in a recent townhall with CNN’s Erin Burnett, said “Chaos follows him. And we can’t have a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it”.
As pessimistic as that may sound, Gov. Haley is not preventing that from happening. Dodging simple debates on history and slavery, is exactly how she’s going to get Donald Trump re-elected again.
Now, recently Haley, made sort of an unfortunate comment about the Civil War, and attributed it to Government power, instead of talking about slavery. She has tried to backtrack those comments, but no net change was seen in her support in both Iowa and South Carolina. Voters are decided-and are waiting to let out the 8 years of opportunity they’ve craved, into the ballot box.
Now, the elephant in the room-who anyone ever talks about is Donald Trump. He’s arguably the highest ranking candidate in the GOP yet, and hopes to come out triumphant in August, at the National Convention. However, many legal troubles follow him. Just recently, two states have barred him from the primary process; Maine and Colorado, both of which his legal team hope to take to court to overturn the decisions in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Now, Colorado and Maine weren’t the only states to cite the 14th Amendment’s insurrectionist ban. Massachusetts and Illinois are now filing petitions to get Trump’s name off the ballot in 2024 and expect to pressure state and local officials to take these petitions to court, over concern that a second Trump term would prove disastrous for Democracy and the U.S. as we know it.
Now, how does all of this play into a National Presidential Election, with the high probability that Joe Biden faces Donald Trump in the General Election? Joe Biden has seen a minority of his independent voters from 2020, move away from him, and start to come to terms with more moderate, but Republican candidates in the GOP. His approval ratings have been declining greatly in the past few months, and now stands at 38%. It’s worth noting many presidents, in the past, have also seen similar poll numbers, while in office. Donald Trump was also in the exact same polling range as President Biden is-in the first term. However, bouncing back and campaigning past issues of his old age, and his unproven ties to his son’s foreign dealings will be a challenge going into the Winter, and overcoming a large block of criticism by the already stalemate of a Congress.
The writer is a columnist and a linguistic activist.