Et Tu, Iowa? DeSantis Loses Ground to Trump and Haley

Ron DeSantis has given an awful lot of love to Iowa Republicans. Back in the spring, he and his super-PAC, Never Back Down, made some pretty impressive early moves in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, setting up a big field operation, grabbing a ton of endorsements from state legislators, and attracting positive attention from big-time Iowa influencers like Governor Kim Reynolds and conservative Evangelical pooh-bah Bob Vander Plaats. DeSantis’s overall strategy of moving to Trump’s right, especially on culture-war issues, was clearly aimed at the most-likely-to-caucus Iowans, those self-identifying as “very conservative” and/or attending Evangelical churches.

More recently, as Donald Trump surged to a big national lead over the once-competitive Florida governor, DeSantis has shifted from battling Trump everywhere to focusing on Iowa in hopes of an early upset or at least a strong enough second-place showing to run off non-Trump competitors in the later contests. He committed to the so-called “full Grassley,” a time-consuming slog through all 99 Iowa counties. A mid-October assessment of the Iowa landscape by the Des Moines Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel noted that DeSantis was “quadrupling down on his all-in Iowa strategy by shifting a third of his campaign staff into the state over the coming weeks.” And he was paying the inevitable price for this Iowa-centric approach in other early states; he has been trailing Nikki Haley for a while in polls of New Hampshire and South Carolina, and his support has dropped to the low double digits nationally.

That’s why the new gold-standard Iowa Poll from Ann Selzer (co-sponsored by the Register, NBC News, and Mediacom) is really bad news for DeSantis. The last iteration of this poll in August probably triggered his all-in-on-Iowa strategy by showing him “only” 23 points behind Trump (42 percent to 19 percent) with a big lead over the rest of the field. Now, Trump leads DeSantis by 27 points (43 percent to 16 percent), and Haley is tied with him. You could imagine a couple of months ago that DeSantis was slowly creeping up on Trump in Iowa and consolidating the opposition to the 45th president. Now, the general impression that the Floridian does not wear well on voters has spread to the place where he’s spending much of his time and most of his money on attempting to wear well on voters. DeSantis ’24 isn’t quite dead, but you can see the buzzards wheeling around him in the Iowa skies.

More generally, the new Iowa poll shows Trump defying a lot of predictions that his initial lack of ministration to attention-hungry Iowans and his heretical stance opposing strict national or state abortion bans could take him down in Iowa: 63 percent of his Iowa supporters say their minds are made up, compared with 30 percent of DeSantis’s backers and 26 percent of Haley’s. And Trump and his campaign are now very focused on the state as the caucuses approach.

So if DeSantis’s campaign is circling the drain, does that mean Haley has inherited his slim chance of an Iowa upset? Probably not. The Iowa Poll shows Trump as the second choice of 41 percent of DeSantis supporters, as opposed to 27 percent preferring Haley. So if the Florida governor’s support collapses, Trump’s lead may simply grow.

The best news for Haley is that the rest of the field seems to be fading. Mike Pence has dropped out, and Tim Scott (at 7 percent), Vivek Ramaswamy, and Chris Christie (both at 4 percent) are going nowhere fast. But if Trump wins a decisive majority in Iowa, the end could be near for the entire nomination contest.