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      Haley’s Missed Opportunity: Iowa Slows Her Roll Into New Hampshire

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      A third-place finish didn’t deliver the boost Nikki Haley wanted as she tries to turn the race into a one-on-one with Donald Trump.Nikki Haley had hoped to vault into New Hampshire ahead of next Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary with a head of steam from a second-place finish in Iowa and a powerful case to make that the 2024 nomination fight was a two-candidate race between her and Donald J. Trump.Instead, as Ms. Haley hobbles into New Hampshire, the pressure is on to show she can compete with Mr. Trump.Her disappointing third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses on Monday showed that for all the hype, her momentum ultimately stalled in the face of a Republican electorate still in the thrall of the former president. That included not only Mr. Trump’s working-class base but also the bastions of college-educated Republicans in and around Des Moines that she was supposed to dominate.In her speech after the caucuses, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, sharpened her attack on Mr. Trump, questioning his age and his ability to unite a fractured country. She lumped Mr. Trump with Mr. Biden as backward-looking barriers to an American revival.“The question before Americans is now very clear: Do you want more of the same or do you want a new generation of conservative leadership?” she asked, drawing loud applause and chants of “Nikki, Nikki.” “Our campaign is the last best hope of stopping the Trump-Biden nightmare.”Still, Ms. Haley’s final tally in Iowa most likely breathed some new life into the campaign of her rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and indicated that, for all the excitement around her campaign in the closing weeks, her pitch may have limited appeal with Republicans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in US Politics

      Trump wins big in Iowa as Haley and DeSantis fall short – podcast

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      It took just 30 minutes for the Associated Press to project Donald Trump the big winner in Iowa. Trump’s victory was expected, but as the night went on, all eyes were on the real contest – the race for second place. Ron DeSantis came out on top in Iowa, but is projected to fall far behind Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary.
      So what happens now? As the majority of Iowans put their faith in Trump, should we just assume he will be the Republican nominee? Can Haley and DeSantis take any positives away from such a poor showing behind the former president? Jonathan Freedland speaks to Joan E Greve, who spoke to him from a Haley caucus event, about all the potential avenues for the remaining candidates

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      in US Politics

      Trump won Iowa handily. The idea that he won’t be the nominee is absurd | Moira Donegan

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      The journalists came in and issued their ritual dispatches from the bucolic midwest, describing the state in terms heavy on sentiment and light on respect. The candidates poured their money and time into the state, with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and one-time favorite for the nomination, betting all his hopes on the state. They persisted through an ominous blizzard and through the punishing cold of a plains winter to make it to the high school gyms and recreation centers where the caucuses took place. And they did all this, made all this effort and expense, in order to change absolutely nothing about the race.Trump won the Iowa caucuses handily; the major networks called for him almost as soon as the doors opened. There was never any question that he wouldn’t, except perhaps in the mind of the most delusional DeSantis aides. Nikki Haley was in a tight race for second against DeSantis, as each pretends that they are in fact really running for president – and not, as anyone can see, for the positions of vice-president and attorney general, respectively. Perhaps because Trump’s fait accompli has no plot and can’t drive ratings, or perhaps because they are in denial, the networks have spent the better part of the past year pretending that there is a legitimate primary contest in the Republican party. There isn’t.In retrospect, the notion that the 2024 Republican nominee would ever have been anyone other than Donald Trump was always a bit absurd. In 2022 and 2023, when large donors, exhausted by Trump, began pouring obscene amounts of money into the DeSantis campaign, the move had a kind of desperate logic. DeSantis had won re-election in Florida by a commanding 19 points; he had used the state to launch himself as an avatar of the racial and gender grievance that had animated many voters’ loyalty to Donald Trump. But DeSantis was supposed to be “Trump without the baggage”. He was a hyper-competent policy wonk who was supposed to be more effective, more focused and less susceptible to flattery, scandal or the distractions of short-term self-interest.But what DeSantis offered voters was Trump’s bevy of resentments without any of Trump’s humor or charisma. On the trail, DeSantis is reptilian and creepy. He has a plaintive, whining affect that makes his hatreds for racial and gender minorities become obviously pathetic, rather than commanding. He has an almost uncanny ability to say the wrong thing. In Iowa, he burned tens of millions of dollars in donor cash, like a dumped prom queen going through tissues. He needed a big win in Iowa, or what would have counted for a big win: a strong, definitive and close second place. He didn’t get it. It was a failure he paid dearly for. Over the past few weeks, DeSantis has been frantically travelling and pressing the flesh: he committed to doing in-person events in each and every one of Iowa’s 99 counties, and evidently has managed to be charmless and off-putting in every corner of the state.Haley, meanwhile, has consolidated much of the “Never Trump” vote, or what’s left of it, all while studiously refusing to criticize Trump much at all. The former president’s advisers have reportedly suggested he seek a woman for VP, to try to counter the political liability of Dobbs. Haley’s campaign for president, such as it is, has been little more than a long audition for this role, one embarked upon with an eager solicitousness that seems almost canine.Trump has long been understood as a morbid symptom of America’s failed institutions. He is what happens when a country takes on the pretext of being a pluralistic democracy without meaningfully politically empowering its historically subordinated populations; he is what happens when republican forms of government coexist with dramatic inequality of wealth; he is what happens when people understand corruption to guide their politicians more than principle, and when the clearly expressed desires of the electorate no longer seem to have any meaningful impact on the policy positions of decision-makers. All of these factors are behind his rise, and all of these factors drove him to victory in Iowa on Monday night with the same determination that they drove him to the nomination in 2016.But what it less clearly understood is why the media and political apparatus that surrounds Trump has been so slow to accommodate the reality he has imposed. The donors flocked to DeSantis in a very expensive kind of denial; the networks covered the challenges as if they were serious; newspapers told us, yet again, that Trump’s appeal must be understood by liberals, as if we have not been made so exhaustively, repetitively aware of Trump and the exact nature of his appeal for the better part of a decade now. As they proclaimed his victory, the news anchors muttered “it’s Donald Trump’s party now”. Just like they’ve done every night since 2016.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Tuesday briefing: What Trump’s triumph tells us about the state of the presidential race

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      Good morning. Last night, the race for the US presidency formally started – and Donald Trump has won the first round by a landslide. With 99% of votes counted, Trump has 51% of Republican support in the Iowa caucus – a victory of unprecedented dominance for any race not involving a sitting president.Ron DeSantis got 21% of votes, a very distant second place that he tried to present as a success – while Nikki Haley finished a disappointing third with 19% but claimed she now had the momentum to challenge Trump. In truth, though, the result is so decisive that it’s all but impossible to see anyone but Trump taking the nomination from here.Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s David Smith at the Trump victory party in Des Moines, explains what the results in Iowa mean for each of the three leading Republican campaigns. Here are the headlines.Five big stories
      Conservatives | Rishi Sunak is facing a Conservative meltdown over the Rwanda deportation bill after two deputy chairs said they would support rebel amendments aimed at blocking international human rights laws. Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith have defied the prime minister by backing rightwing challenges to the bill, which will be debated by parliament on Tuesday.
      Middle East crisis | The Houthi militia group has continued to attack commercial shipping, hitting an American-owned container ship with a ballistic missile in defiance of US and UK strikes on Yemen. While the strike caused no major damage, it will add to fears that the militia group retains the ability to threaten commercial shipping.
      Rail strikes | Train drivers have called a further week of rolling strikes across England from late January in their long-running dispute with operators over pay. Members of the Aslef union will strike for 24 hours at each train-operating company on the national railway on different days between Tuesday 30 January and Monday 5 February.
      Security | Hizb ut-Tahrir will be banned from organising in the UK following claims that the group is antisemitic, the home secretary has said. The Islamist group is already banned in several countries including Germany and Indonesia.
      Emmys | Beef, The Bear and the final season of Succession reigned supreme at the delayed 2023 Emmy awards. Jesse Armstrong’s hit HBO drama picked up six awards, including for actors Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen and the night’s biggest award for best drama series. See the red carpet fashion and a full list of winners.
      In depth: In freezing weather, Trump wins by an avalancheWith Joe Biden secure as the Democratic nominee, this year’s primary calendar is only about one thing: who will be his Republican challenger. The answer to that question already looks pretty obvious, and the Iowa caucus did nothing to dispel it. But after months of the phoney campaign, the first real results do have important things to tell us about the state of the race – and whether those in the Republican party who don’t want Trump can unite behind an alternative.One minor piece of housekeeping before the main event: Trump tribute act Vivek Ramaswamy finished fourth with 8% of the vote and dropped out. “Nobody knew who we were, nobody knew what we were up to,” he said. A fitting political obituary.A ‘perfect night’ for Donald TrumpIn the run-up to Iowa, Trump’s campaign argued that any victory by 13 points or more would be a historic success: the biggest previous victory was Bob Dole’s 12.8-point margin in 1988. That was a very low bar to set given polls placed him 30 points ahead of the pack, and he cleared it by a distance last night.“I don’t think there was much question beforehand, but it looks even more certain now,” said David Smith. “He won 98 out of 99 counties, and he only lost to Haley by one vote in the other. He won the middle class suburbs where he might traditionally struggle against someone more moderate. It was a perfect night for Trump – it’s all over bar the shouting.”David was at Trump’s election watch party in a cavernous conference centre. “He won so quickly that hardly anyone was there when it was announced,” he said. “So you didn’t get the customary big cheer.” When his supporters did get in, they celebrated with popcorn and beer alongside Maga hardliners like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene – as well as Nigel Farage.Iowa’s Republican voters are among the most socially conservative in the US, but Trump’s margin is so vast that there’s no obvious route for either of his main opponents to make up the difference elsewhere. “You can make the case that this is a home fixture for him in some ways, and it will be a bit tougher next week in New Hampshire – but it swings back towards him very quickly after that,” David said.His win came despite his refusal to participate in debates with Republican rivals and a less intense campaign in Iowa than Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley ran. Although he has a more professional ground operation than he did in 2016, Trump has spent much less time in the state this time around. (He made just 18 visits in 2023, against dozens for his main rivals.) “He broke the rules of retail politics in Iowa,” David said. “But strategically it was very successful. Staying away from the debates helped enforce the impression of inevitability.” Starting this week, the Trump on Trial newsletter will bring daily analysis and weekly previews of the developments in the legal cases against the Republican presidential candidate. Sign up here.DeSantis beats the polls – but still gets trouncedOn Sunday, DeSantis (above) asked his supporters: “Are you ready to make some history on Monday night?” Finishing a distant second to Trump is hardly an epochal event – but it just about does enough to keep his campaign alive, and DeSantis will now claim to have momentum heading into the New Hampshire primary next week. He told supporters: “They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us … [but] we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa.”In recent polls, the Florida governor has been behind Nikki Haley by several percentage points. But the always-unpredictable Iowa caucus process, in which voters listen to pitches from the candidates’ representatives before casting their ballots, was further complicated by freezing temperatures that depressed turnout – expected to finish at about 110,000 voters, against 187,000 in 2016 and the lowest in almost a quarter of a century.That appears to have benefited DeSantis, who has a well-funded get-out-the-vote operation in Iowa. “He lives to fight another day,” said David. “He worked very hard in the state, and he may have been helped by the extraordinarily cold weather. Polls for the Iowa caucus are often wrong – a lot of people I spoke to tonight before the first results came in expected him to finish second.”Even so, the DeSantis campaign remains in dire straits. “In the end it is pretty soul-crushing for him,” David said. “He went to all 99 counties, and lost within half an hour.” In 2022, he appeared to hold a promising position as “Trump without the baggage” – a candidate who could carry the former president’s ultra-conservative agenda on immigration, gun rights and culture war issues without the same accompanying chaos in the White House.But refusing to criticise Trump for months in the hope that his adversary would ultimately implode on his own has made him appear weak to voters who value strength above all – and basically pointless: “The people who want Trump don’t need a mini-me Trump,” former Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock pointed out in August. Finishing ahead of Haley does little to dispel that fundamental dynamic.Haley falls short and leaves the field dividedThe former governor of South Carolina (above) has sought to present herself as the most electable Republican candidate in a general election, pointing to a recent Wall Street Journal poll that showed her 17 points ahead of Biden when voters are asked to choose between the two. In November, an endorsement and $4m from Americans for Prosperity, an immensely powerful libertarian political campaign group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, gave crucial credibility to her attempt to cement herself as the alternative to Trump.But last night’s results are a devastating blow to that argument. She told supporters: “I can safely say tonight Iowa made this Republican primary a two-person race.” As David noted: “That’s a pretty unusual claim for the person who finished third.”Haley is likely to continue to New Hampshire, where she is second to Trump in recent polls by the relatively narrow margin of 11 points. The good news for Trump is that the narrow difference between her and DeSantis, together with her slightly better position in New Hampshire, means that neither is likely to drop out. “That’s the icing on the cake for Trump,” David said. “It blunts her momentum ahead of New Hampshire.”Although she entered politics as part of the proto-Maga Tea Party movement, Haley rejects Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and rivals have sought to portray her as too liberal to win the Republican nomination. While she largely echoes Trump on immigration, she has rejected policies like the separation of families at the border. She has focused on her foreign policy experience as Trump’s ambassador to the UN, and promised to find a compromise on abortion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the end, though, a candidate whose main appeal was electability appears likely to be fatally harmed by doing so badly in an actual vote. “If she had pulled off second, the landscape would look pretty different,” David said. “There would be a conversation about her as the challenger, and whether DeSantis is going to pull out. But instead, this looks like an illustration of fractured opposition. Neither Haley or DeSantis has ever really escaped the shadow of Trump to build their own political identities.”What else we’ve been reading
      David Smith spoke with Raymond Arsenault, the author of the first full-length biography of the late congressman and civil rights giant John Lewis (above, left). They discuss Lewis’s life, his guiding values of compassion, reconciliation and forgiveness that informed his politics and his storied career in Congress. Nimo
      After the Daily Telegraph published an opinion poll yesterday that suggested the Conservatives are heading for a 1997-style landslide defeat, Paul Goodman, the editor of ConservativeHome, has a perceptive piece on who’s behind it – and why it’s come out now. Archie
      By 2030, the global population will be older than it ever has been: one in six people will be over the age of 60. This touching and thoughtful photo essay by Ed Kashi, Ilvy Njiokiktjien, and Sara Terry documents the daily lives of 72-year-olds from around the world. Nimo
      Julian Baggini reflects on the rare consensus that has emerged around the Post Office scandal – and warns that very few injustices are likely to be so easily understood. “There has been something cathartic about this collective show of anger,” he writes. “But it is not always as easy as this to side with the angels.” Archie
      Dominic Sessa’s original plan in high school was to become a professional hockey player but a broken femur forced him to change course. His new plan was to act. Sessa spoke to Adrian Horton about the chance audition that led him to the opportunity of a lifetime. Nimo
      SportTennis | Andy Murray (above) admitted that there is a “definite possibility” that he has played his last Australian Open after the five-time finalist suffered his most sobering grand-slam defeat since returning from hip surgery. Murray lost 6-4, 6-2, 6-2 to Tomás Martín Etcheverry, the 30th seed, in the first round of the Australian Open. Follow live coverage of day three here.Football | Aitana Bonmatí said she was “proud” to be part of a generation of women “changing the game and the world” as the Spain World Cup star claimed the title of the Best Fifa women’s player for 2023 at a star-studded award ceremony in London. Lionel Messi won the men’s award for a third time, narrowly pipping Erling Haaland to the prize.Football | Nottingham Forest are facing a potential points deduction after being charged with breaching the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR), and Everton could lose more points after being charged with a further breach of the same rules. Will Unwin’s analysis explains the spending spree that put Forest in the dock.The front pages“Defiant Houthis attack cargo ship as conflict widens in Middle East” is the headline on our Guardian print lead this morning. “Name calling” – the Daily Mirror leads with the royals and the Queen’s apparent posthumous vent about Lilibet-gate. The i has “Migrants taken off first Rwanda flight still in asylum hotels 18 months later” while the Daily Telegraph reports “Tory deputy chairmen to rebel over Rwanda Bill”. The Daily Express and the Daily Mail seek to rally Rishi Sunak – respectively, their headlines are “PM: I’ll defy Euro judges who block Rwanda flights” and “PM: I will defy Euro judges on Rwanda flights”. The Times reports “Sunak will speed Rwanda appeals in sop to rebels”. The Metro says “Child sex scandal report … 96 Rochdale groomers still free”. Top story in the Financial Times is “Better governance and IT would save £20bn a year, says spending watchdog”.Today in FocusWill South Africa’s genocide case against Israel succeed?South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza at hearings in the international court of justice. Chris McGreal reports on what happens nextCartoon of the day | Ben JenningsThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badDuring the pandemic, Henry Jephson, head of research at the Bristol Fungarium, came across a lion’s mane, a rare type of mushroom which is under threat in the UK. Jephson’s sighting of the enormous shaggy specimen was the first in eight years in south-west England, so he was shocked to see that the landowner had felled its host tree, smashing the mushroom in the process. The experience accelerated a shift in the focus of his work to conservation of native fungi alongside Natural England and the Royal Horticultural Society. Jephson now helps run a mushroom farm, which has pivoted from growing commercial mushrooms to conserving natural, wild mushrooms and creating health supplements from them.Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
      Quick crossword
      Cryptic crossword
      Wordiply More

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      Trump’s Iowa win marks a comeback for him and a step backwards for the country

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      Arwa Mahdawi: an incredible comeback for TrumpThe Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who was in Iowa on Monday night as a surrogate for the Biden-Harris campaign, may have summed up the night the best. “Tonight’s contest,” Pritzker said, “is simply a question of whether you like your Maga Trump agenda wrapped in the original packaging, or with high heels or lifts in their boots”.There were no meaningful differences between the three frontrunners (Trump, Ron “rumoured to wear leg-lengthening lifts” DeSantis, and Nikki Haley). And, in the end, Iowa, as was much predicted, went for the original packaging – by a landslide.So does this mean Trump is a shoo-in for the Republican nominee? Not necessarily. There have been numerous instances where the winner of the Iowa caucus isn’t the eventual nominee – including 2016, when Ted Cruz won. Still, Trump’s victory on Monday night makes it increasingly likely that 2024 is going to be a Biden-Trump rematch. And this, let us not forget, is despite the fact that Trump is facing 91 felony counts in four separate cases covering everything from conspiring to overturn the 2020 election to falsifying records in connection to hush money paid to an adult film star. Oh, and let’s not forget that last year a New York jury found Trump guilty of sexually abusing the advice columnist E Jean Carroll. However, it seems none of that is a deal-breaker for the Republican voters in Iowa.All in all? Monday night marked an incredible comeback for the disgraced former president and an enormous step backwards for the country.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
      Lloyd Green: ‘Nikki Haley is too out of touch to win’Donald Trump romped to victory in the Iowa caucus. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis vie for a distant second. Haley may best Trump in next week’s New Hampshire primary, but she won’t derail him. Her candidacy is a magnet for disaffected Republicans and high-end independents, constituencies too small to matter in this year’s nominating process but who may determine the outcome of the general election.She is the wine-track candidate in a Joe Six-pack Republican party, out of step with the party’s working-class and white evangelical base. Her backers emphatically oppose a national six-week abortion ban, which Iowa Republicans embrace. In a similar vein, a majority of Haley voters believe Joe Biden legitimately won in 2020, placing them at odds with the rest of caucusgoers.As ever, class and culture count. Haley nearly matched Trump with college graduates. By contrast, she only eked out the support of one in eight voters without a four-year degree. Jesus and Nascar get you the “W” in Trump-centric Iowa. Pearls and garden parties, not so much.Looking ahead, a Trump loss in New Hampshire would be a mere speed bump. In 2000, George W Bush won Iowa, slipped in New Hampshire, then rallied in South Carolina. He never looked back. This year, Haley trails Trump by nearly 30 points in South Carolina, her home.Meanwhile, the 45th president’s legal woes remain the soundtrack of 2024’s political calendar. In the coming hours, his latest defamation trial will kick off in Manhattan. His sexual assault of E Jean Carroll haunts decades later.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
      Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Trump will remain unstoppable’Of course Donald Trump won big today. He’s running for the candidacy of a Republican party that he’s all but created.Some in the Trump 2016 campaign such as Steve Bannon wanted to realign American politics in a new way: to win so decisively among (particularly white) working-class voters to permanently change the electoral map. For the moment, at least, they failed in their ambitions. Rhetoric and disregard for institutional order aside, on the policy front Trump governed more like a business Republican and less like populist firebrand. But it’s clear that he did permanently change the Republican party.Trump’s style – his personal attacks on opponents, railings against establishment media, attacks on the “deep state” and the election system itself – all built on existing trends within the Republican party, but he took them to new extremes and made personal loyalty to his brand a litmus test in the party.He’s done to his party something very unusual in American politics. Instead of hobbling together a loose coalition like Joe Biden, Trump made the Republicans a coherent, largely unified entity, bound together by a worldview and a leader.Iowa’s results make it plainly clear that Trump will remain unstoppable in Republican primaries unless he’s kept off ballots by the courts. Outside of the judicial system there is no elite media or RNC cabal nearly strong enough to defeat him.
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities
      Ben Davis: ‘This is a race in name only’The Iowa caucuses show what we all knew: this year’s Republican primary is a race in name only. Trump’s landslide victory felt inevitable and was even bigger than most expected. He was able to win without participating in debates or even running much of a primary-focused campaign, preferring to act as if he was already the nominee.Most Americans are barely aware there’s even a primary race going on. Caucus turnout plummeted since 2016. It is hard to imagine a scenario where Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. He’s already led a coup attempt, been indicted with dozens of counts of various felonies and even compared his own views on immigrants to Hitler’s. It hasn’t hurt his standing with Republicans at all.While the Iowa caucuses, with their social pressure, heavily white and evangelical electorate, and brutal negative temperatures, are particularly friendly to Trump, there’s very little chance he has to break a sweat to win the nomination. Under the hood, the caucus results show the Republican base is still divided and changing.In heavily college-educated areas, Trump’s vote share plummeted. While this matters little in the Republican primary, it’s a sign that Trump could still struggle to win even Republican-leaning voters in the general election in highly educated areas. These are voters who, unlike millions of others, still haven’t been alienated enough to stop caucusing in the Republican primary, and even still, they reject Trump. It remains to be seen if the unpopular Biden can do enough to win these voters back over.This primary race that never took off serves as yet another rebuke of the wealthy elites in the Republican party, who have used the party as a vehicle to promote market-friendly policy above all else. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Ron DeSantis campaign, and the results were a spectacular failure. It’s not their party anymore. The Republican party is now a vehicle primarily for the politics of cultural grievance and petty reaction.
      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign
      Geoffrey Kabaservice: ‘It’s impossible to out-Trump Trump’Anyone surprised by Donald Trump’s blowout victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses shouldn’t have been. The other candidates’ failure to criticize him in any meaningful way amounted to a pre-emptive surrender to his brand of populism, and the election results showed that it’s impossible to out-Trump Trump. In fact, dislodging Trump was always going to be enormously difficult because he has remade not only the Republican party but Republican voters themselves.Trump lost the Iowa caucuses in 2016 – finishing behind Ted Cruz and barely ahead of Marco Rubio – because enough voters still believed in other versions of the Republican party, whether represented by the muscular internationalism and sunny optimism of a Ronald Reagan or the pious evangelicalism and fiscal austerity of a Mike Pence. Now Trump has persuaded a critical mass of those same voters to reject the beliefs they once held, on issues ranging from free trade to international alliances to constitutional democracy. Many would deny they ever believed otherwise.In hindsight, Ron DeSantis might have been a more formidable contender if he’d made a stronger claim to represent conservative competence in government; Nikki Haley for her part might have more forcefully argued against Maga isolationism. But they only could have displaced Trump by demanding that Republicans reject him along with much of what he stands for – by arguing for example that his election denialism and role in the January 6 insurrection made him unfit for office.But that would have risked splitting the party, and Trump is the only figure in the Republican party who has been willing to take that risk – perhaps because he understands that absolute control over a thing derives from a willingness to utterly destroy it, to paraphrase Frank Herbert’s Dune. Perhaps Trump also understands the other candidates better than they understand themselves. As he is reported to have said of other would-be challengers and holdouts in the Republican party: “They always bend the knee.”
      Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington DC as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party More

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      The Needle Returns for the Iowa Caucus. Here’s How It Works.

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      In addition to estimating the final result, our live election model will also look at who is likeliest to take second place.Once Iowa caucus results start coming in after 8 p.m. Eastern tonight, The Times will start publishing a live estimate of the final result, better known as the Needle.How to watch the Needle tonightWith Donald J. Trump leading in polls by a wide margin and with much of the focus on the race for second place, our results pages will feature graphics designed to help you understand how multiple candidates are faring rather than just having a single needle displaying who is most likely to win the race.This hypothetical chart below shows how our live estimates of the Iowa caucuses will work. Our best estimate for each candidate’s final vote share will be shown along with a range of estimates for where things might end up.  More

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      The Joy of Defeat in the Iowa Caucuses

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      Coming in second can be a win in early-state contests. One thing is certain in tonight’s Iowa caucuses: The loser will make a triumphant victory speech.That’s how it works in early-state presidential politics. It’s the rare contest where coming in second is … a win? The runner-up, whether it’s Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis, will claim the Republican mantle of the chief alternative to Donald Trump heading into New Hampshire’s primary.The dynamic has created some hilarious and slightly mind-bending moments in the annals of presidential politics. Eight years ago, a triumphant Marco Rubio declared: “This is the moment they said would never happen.” He was in third place.There’s a long history of candidates turning second place into a rhetorical victory. In 1992, Bill Clinton placed second in New Hampshire and declared himself “the comeback kid.” Trump is the exception here. In 2016 when he placed second in Iowa, he claimed fraud and asked for the results to be thrown out.To learn about the joys of being a runner-up, I called Jessie Diggins, a cross-country skier from Minnesota who knows all about the gap between first and second. She won the first U.S. cross-country skiing gold medal in U.S. history at the 2018 Olympics and then took a silver and a bronze in 2022 — and did it in brutal weather similar to the subzero temperatures that have descended upon Iowa.This is what a real first-place celebration looks like.Lars Baron/Getty Images“The difference between a gold and silver is it will change your life — or it won’t,” she told me from a ski camp in the Italian Alps, where she said she had learned to make tortellini while taking a break from the World Cup circuit.When Diggins won gold in South Korea, NBC’s announcer nearly hyperventilated on the air. “Here comes Diggins! Here comes Diggins!” he screamed as she moved into first place just ahead of the finish line, followed by “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! — Gold!” When Diggins won two more medals four years later, the hype was relatively muted.Like the Olympics, Iowa’s caucuses aren’t only about winning and losing. It will also matter how close the candidates finish to Trump. Nike may disagree — “Second place is the first loser,” the shoe company said at the 1996 Summer Games — but in Iowa second place is often the second winner.If Haley winds up a relatively close second, expect to hear about how it’s the greatest night in her political life. DeSantis would brand himself a modern-day comeback kid with a second-place finish.(Prepare to geek out: The Times’s election night forecast will include a needle for the race for second place tonight.)When second is really firstDiggins knows about heroic second-place finishes.Thirty hours before she won a silver medal at the 2022 Olympics in China, she came down with a case of food poisoning, sapping her energy. She said she was prouder of that finish while competing in suboptimal conditions than the gold from four years earlier.Then last November, during a race near the Arctic Circle in Finland, she lost a glove and was bleeding profusely from her face and still finished second in a 20-kilometer race when it was about zero degrees Fahrenheit — a little bit warmer than the expected minus 5 in Des Moines tonight.“There’s this really interesting relationship between first place and second place because there’s how everyone else treats you, and then there’s how you feel about it,” she said. “If you allow other people to evaluate you, you will never be happy because you will never make everyone happy. And I think that’s probably more true in politics than anywhere else.”Then there’s the weather — the first topic of conversation for just about everybody here in Des Moines.Both DeSantis and Haley have turned Iowa’s weather into a piece of their stump speech. “It’s not going to be pleasant,” DeSantis said of the caucus conditions.For her Olympic races, Diggins said she was wearing “as many layers as I thought I could still move in.” The key to succeeding in brutal conditions, she said, is not letting the cold get to her head, even if every other part of her body is freezing — lessons that carry over to running a presidential campaign.“It’s a really just a pain tolerance,” she said. “How much suffering are you willing to put up with and are you willing to go there?”Campaigns are struggling to estimate how the winter weather will affect voter turnout.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesThe coldest caucusHow cold is it? The Diocese of Des Moines gave Catholics dispensation to skip yesterday’s Sunday Mass. The National Weather Service described conditions as “arctic.”It will be warmer tonight than it has been over the weekend, but that’s not saying much. Des Moines could see temperatures of 10 below zero, with wind-chill as low as 30 below, according to the National Weather Service. Nevertheless, Republican presidential campaigns are asking Iowans to schlep to more than 1,600 caucus sites across the state tonight to cast ballots in the first presidential contest of 2024.“We’re going to be out there in the snow,” Nikki Haley said Sunday, my colleague Jazmine Ulloa reported.I can say from some experience that being outside when it is 5 below zero is no fun, and 15 below is even worse. At those temperatures, car tires deflate. Gas stations are no help: The air and gas pumps freeze too. It is a risk to be outside.What that means for caucus turnout is anyone’s guess.As my colleague Jonathan Swan reported, the Trump and DeSantis campaigns had been preparing for a record turnout of more than 200,000 caucusgoers, eclipsing the previous high of 187,000 in 2016. But now it’s anyone’s guess.David Kochel, a veteran Iowa Republican strategist, predicted about 150,000 Iowans would show up on Monday, a figure in line with historical norms, but still just about 25 percent of the registered Republicans in the state. He cited Trump’s lead and the weather as the biggest factors.In cities and suburbs where Haley’s supporters are more prevalent, the roads are plowed and there’s less blowing snow. Trump’s supporters in rural Iowa are said to be more motivated, but blowing snow is still whipping across the network of two-lane highways. The DeSantis campaign says his supporters are the most committed caucusgoers of all.All the Iowans we’ve talked to have told reporters they can handle the brutal weather. We’ll all find out tonight, given their shoddy track record, if they can finally carry out glitch-free caucuses.Reporter updates◆◆Donald Trump is making it very clear where his focus is this morning, arguing in a post on Truth Social that Nikki Haley is out of step with the Republican Party, and that she can’t win a general election because she can’t coalesce his MAGA movement behind her.He added what might be the nicest thing he’s said about Ron DeSantis in months: that the Florida governor “at least, is MAGA-Lite.” — Michael Gold◆◆Ron DeSantis continues to insist that he will stay in the race, no matter how he performs in tonight’s caucuses. “We’re going on with this,” he said in an interview with NBC News. “We’ve been built for the long haul.” For months, DeSantis promised to win Iowa, but he and his team have scaled back those expectations as he has remained well behind Donald Trump in polls. —Nicholas NehamasFollow live coverage and results here.More politics news and analysisHope? Nope: Fear and anxiety are on the ballot in Iowa.Oh captain: Meet the little-known biggest players in Iowa tonight.Untold story: Ron DeSantis rarely talks about his compelling biography.Trading places: Our DeSantis and Haley reporters swapped candidates for a day.Smoothie stop-by: Retail politics is complicated when you’re the commander in chief.By the numbers: Seven digits tell the tale of the Republican primary.No pandering: How Trump sidestepped the traditions of Iowa politics.When will we know? Iowa’s history does not inspire confidence for a timely result tonight. More