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Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are battling to secure second place in the Iowa Republican caucuses next week behind the frontrunner Donald Trump, as voters in the Midwestern state prepare to cast the first votes of the 2024 election season.
DeSantis, the Florida governor, and Haley, the former US ambassador to the UN, will debate on CNN from Des Moines, the Iowa capital, on Wednesday evening. Trump is set to appear at a separate town-hall meeting hosted by Fox at the same time.
The duel between DeSantis and Haley is taking centre stage because they are the remaining viable alternatives to Trump left the Republican side.
Several other contenders, including former vice-president Mike Pence and South Carolina senator Tim Scott, have dropped out — while others, including Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor, have such weak polling numbers they are not considered realistic challengers.
But even DeSantis and Haley are facing an uphill battle to defeat Trump in the Midwestern state. According to the Fivethirtyeight.com polling average, 51.3 per cent of Iowa Republicans support Trump, while DeSantis has the backing of 17.2 per cent of his party’s electorate and Haley has the support of 15.8 per cent. The polling average from realclearpolitics.com puts Haley slightly ahead of DeSantis in Iowa, but still 36 points behind Trump.
Ahead of the debate, DeSantis sharpened his attacks on Haley in a bid to defend his second place position in Iowa, where the Florida governor has campaigned extensively and staked a big part of his candidacy on a strong showing in the state.
DeSantis has accused Haley of not being sufficiently conservative and showing “conceit” towards Iowa voters, after she suggested that the vote in Iowa might have to be corrected by the voters in New Hampshire, where she has been rising in the polls and clearly in second place.
“Now that she’s come under scrutiny, I think she’s had a lot of problems,” DeSantis told Iowa reporters on Monday.
The Iowa caucuses, which will be held next Monday night, launch the presidential election season and set the tone for the race, but have a very mixed record in terms of predicting a winner. In 2016, the last contested Republican primary, Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, while Rick Santorum prevailed narrowly in 2012 and Mike Huckabee won in 2008; none of them won their party’s nomination.
If Trump were to win Iowa with a huge lead, it would help cement the sense of inevitability behind his candidacy for the nomination ahead of the next contest in New Hampshire, which will be held on January 23. There, Trump is facing his closest race: he leads Haley by a margin of 42.3 per cent to 29.1 per cent, according to Fivethirtyeight.com.
The Trump campaign clearly senses a threat from Haley and has ramped up his own attacks on his former UN ambassador, accusing her of being funded by “Democrats, Wall Street, and Globalists” and being weak on immigration. Haley has sought to punch back. “Look, just because President Trump says something it doesn’t make it true,” she said during a town-hall meeting with Iowa voters on Fox News on Monday. She later added: “President Trump was the right president at the right time, I agree with a lot of his policies. But rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him,” she said.
Trump is looking to lock up the nomination as quickly as possible, as much of his time and energy this year will have to be devoted to defending himself in court against the 91 criminal charges brought against him by federal and state prosecutors.
A potential conviction in any of the cases Trump is facing could upend the race and jeopardise his campaign, either before the Republican nominating convention in July, or before November’s general election against President Joe Biden.
After the New Hampshire primary, the Republican candidates will head to Nevada and South Carolina for the next two pivotal contests in February, before the “Super Tuesday” elections in early March where more than a dozen states will vote for their White House nominee.
Additional reporting by Oliver Roeder in New York
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