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      DeSantis Launches Most Forceful Trump Attacks, Just Days Before Iowa Caucuses

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is finally taking the fight to the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.After months of being pressed by voters to go harder, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump of not being “pro-life” during a nationally broadcast CNN town hall in Des Moines Thursday night. He pointed out that Mr. Trump had deported fewer undocumented immigrants than Barack Obama did in his presidency. And Mr. DeSantis suggested that Iowans, who will conduct the first voting in the Republican Party’s presidential nominating contest on Jan. 15, would do well to contrast his behavior with that of Mr. Trump.“You’re not going to have to worry about my conduct,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience. “I’ll conduct myself in a way you can be proud of. I’ll conduct myself in a way you can tell your kids: ‘That’s somebody you should emulate.’”Immediately after Mr. DeSantis’s hourlong town hall finished, another began for former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, also broadcast on CNN. For her, the evening seemed to go less smoothly. She was consistently placed on her back foot, defending herself over a string of recent gaffes and even receiving boos because of a joke she made a day earlier about the Iowa caucuses. At one point, she used an oft-derided cliché when talking about race, saying that she had “Black friends growing up.”The dueling town halls signaled the start of a sprint to the finish for the Republican candidates still standing in Iowa. For Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, however, that sprint means a race for second place. Polls show they are both trailing Mr. Trump in the state by roughly 30 points. They are set to meet next week in a one-on-one debate — Mr. Trump, confident in his lead, has skipped the debates — and will also appear in separate Fox News town halls.Behind Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is in a distant fourth, despite campaigning vigorously. And former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, the field’s anti-Trump standard-bearer, is not even campaigning in Iowa, preferring to focus on New Hampshire, which votes on Jan. 23.DeSantis speaking during a campaign event in Sioux City, Iowa, on Wednesday.Scott Morgan/ReutersMr. DeSantis was seen for much of the year as the strongest challenger to Mr. Trump. But Ms. Haley’s more moderate image has appealed to wealthy donors and independent voters, lifting her standing in the race. She is now virtually tied with Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, where he had been favored, and beating him badly in New Hampshire.Although they and their allies have attacked one another for weeks, Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley barely mentioned each other on Thursday. Instead, Mr. DeSantis trained most of his fire on Mr. Trump, particularly on abortion, an issue Mr. DeSantis is hoping to use to woo Iowa’s influential evangelical voters.“I mean, when you’re saying that pro-life protections are a terrible thing, by definition you are not pro-life,” Mr. DeSantis said, referring to criticisms Mr. Trump had made of six-week abortion bans. He added: “How do you flip-flop on something like the sanctity of life?”Ms. Haley continued to characterize the former president as a force of chaos, criticizing him for raising the national debt, and asserting that, although some of the cases against him are “political in nature” and without basis, “he’s going to have to answer.”“I used to tell him he’s his own worst enemy,” said Ms. Haley, who served as Mr. Trump’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.For Mr. DeSantis, a confident performance in front of a national audience was a welcome change. He has largely underwhelmed in the G.O.P. debates. Mr. Trump has mocked him mercilessly, including over his sometimes awkward mannerisms and choice of footwear. Chaos in Mr. DeSantis’s campaign and an allied super PAC have often overshadowed his attempts to catch up to Mr. Trump and to fend off Ms. Haley.But Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has argued for weeks that Ms. Haley would stumble as the news media and her rivals focused more attention on her.Indeed, from the moment she took the stage on Thursday, Ms. Haley appeared slightly uncomfortable and on the defensive. Her anecdotes were at times difficult to follow, and she largely relied on canned remarks from her stump speeches, which hardly seemed to make for TV-ready answers.Haley greets people at a Lady Hawkeyes tailgate campaign event in Coralville, Iowa, last week.Rachel Mummey/ReutersMs. Haley has had a series of recent missteps on the campaign trail. Just hours before her CNN town hall, she drew fire from Mr. DeSantis’s campaign surrogates in Iowa for her comments at a New Hampshire town hall, in which she suggested that the state’s voters would “correct” the result of the Iowa caucuses. Last month, she flubbed the name of the Iowa Hawkeyes’ star basketball player Caitlin Clark and failed to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War.“I should have said slavery right off the bat,” Ms. Haley said on Thursday when asked to respond to criticism of her Civil War response, before contending that she had “Black friends growing up” and that slavery was “a very talked about thing” in her state. “I was thinking past slavery and talking about the lesson that we would learn going forward — I shouldn’t have done that.”She seemed to regain some footing as she spoke about her foreign policy stances, her experiences as a mother and her brushes with racism and prejudice in South Carolina as the daughter of the only Indian immigrant family in a small rural town.“We weren’t white enough to be considered white,” she said, deploying a line she often uses. “We weren’t Black enough to be considered Black. They didn’t know who we were, what we were and why we were there.”For once, both candidates largely stuck to their contention that they were running to beat Mr. Trump, not each other.Mr. DeSantis mentioned Ms. Haley most directly in a line that was fast becoming his campaign’s catchphrase: “Donald Trump is running for his issues. Nikki Haley is running for her donors’ issues. I’m running for your issues.”Ms. Haley hardly mentioned Mr. DeSantis by name, even after being directly asked about his policies. When the CNN moderator Erin Burnett asked if Ms. Haley supported the efforts of Mr. DeSantis and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas to transport migrants from the Southern border to more liberal areas of the country, she demurred.“Well, I’ll talk about Governor Abbott,” Ms. Haley said. “Because I think he was courageous. He was the first one to do it.” More

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      Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Politically Obtuse Plutocrats

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      All Wall Street wants is a good hypocrite — someone who can convince the Republican base that he or she shares its extremism, but whose real priority is to enrich the 1 percent. Is that too much to ask?Apparently, yes.If you’re not a politics groupie, you may find the drama surrounding Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, puzzling. Until recently, few would have considered her a significant contender for the Republican presidential nomination — indeed, she arguably still isn’t. But toward the end of last year, she suddenly attracted a lot of support from the big money. Among those endorsing her were Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, a new business-oriented super PAC called Independents Moving the Needle and the Koch political network.If this scramble sounds desperate, that’s because it is. And it looks even more desperate after Haley’s recent Civil War misadventures — first failing to name slavery as a reason the war happened, then clumsily trying to walk back her omission.But there is a logic behind this drama. What we’re witnessing are the death throes of a political strategy that served America’s plutocrats well for several decades but stopped working during the Obama years.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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      Trump Ballot Challenges Advance, Varying Widely in Strategy and Sophistication

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      Donald J. Trump’s eligibility for the presidential ballot has been challenged in more than 30 states, but only a handful of those cases have gained traction so far.John Anthony Castro, a 40-year-old Texan, long-shot Republican presidential candidate and the most prolific challenger of Donald J. Trump’s eligibility to be president, has gone to court in at least 27 states trying to remove the former president from the ballot.On Wednesday, Mr. Castro found himself in a mostly empty courthouse in New Hampshire’s capital, where he was making a second attempt to advance his arguments; his initial case was dismissed last fall.None of Mr. Castro’s lawsuits have succeeded. But the New Hampshire case is part of a growing constellation of ballot challenges — some lodged by established groups with national reach, many others far more homemade — that have been playing out in more than 30 states. Challengers in Colorado and Maine have succeeded, at least temporarily, in getting Mr. Trump disqualified, while other lawsuits have stalled or been dismissed. In at least 22 states, cases have yet to be resolved.Tracking Efforts to Remove Trump From the 2024 BallotSee which states have challenges seeking to bar Donald J. Trump from the presidential primary ballot.All the litigation has made for an odd, diffuse process in which some of the weightiest issues of American democracy are being raised not primarily by elected officials or a political party, but by an unlikely assortment of obscure figures, everyday citizens and nonprofit groups. Even some of the players are wondering what they are doing there.“How did we get to this point, where you have random brewers in Wisconsin throwing Hail Marys to try to get Trump off the ballot?” said Kirk Bangstad, a brewing company owner and liberal activist who filed an unsuccessful challenge to Mr. Trump’s eligibility with the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Mr. Bangstad, who is now considering a lawsuit, readily admits that he wishes someone more prominent would have taken up the cause.Kirk Bangstad, a brewing company owner and liberal activist who filed an unsuccessful challenge of Mr. Trump’s eligibility with the Wisconsin Elections Commission.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThough the ballot challenges vary in format, venue and sophistication, they share a focus on whether Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat make him ineligible to hold the presidency again. The cases are based on a largely untested clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which was enacted after the Civil War. The clause bars federal or state officials who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office.Some lawyers have argued since 2021 that the clause could preclude Mr. Trump from appearing on a presidential ballot, and lawsuits invoking that theory were filed in several states in 2023. But it was not until last month, when the Colorado Supreme Court found Mr. Trump ineligible for that state’s primary ballot because of the 14th Amendment, that the question vaulted to the center of American politics. When Maine’s Democratic secretary of state announced last week that she, too, was disqualifying Mr. Trump, it only intensified the spotlight on the issue.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, described the lawsuits in a statement last week as “bad-faith, politically motivated attempts to steal the 2024 election,” claiming that Democrats had “launched a multifront lawfare campaign to disenfranchise tens of millions of American voters and interfere in the election.” Mr. Cheung did not respond to a request for comment for this article.Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in state court in Maine on Tuesday seeking to overturn the secretary of state’s decision, and on Wednesday he asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Colorado ruling.The issue could not be more urgent: Republican presidential primary elections and caucuses begin this month, and polls have shown Mr. Trump with a commanding lead over his opponents.In the meantime, other cases continue to wind their way through state and federal court systems.Those lawsuits can generally be divided into three categories: Mr. Castro’s lawsuits, almost all of which have been filed in federal court; state challenges filed by two nonprofit organizations; and one-off cases brought in state or federal courts by local residents. In a handful of places — most notably Maine, but also Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Wisconsin — voters have challenged Mr. Trump’s eligibility directly with a secretary of state or an election commission rather than in court. In California and New York, some elected officials have written letters pushing for elections officers in those states to disqualify or consider disqualifying the former president.Most establishment Democrats have not publicly embraced the cause. President Biden said after the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that it was “self-evident” that Mr. Trump had supported an insurrection, but that it was up to the judiciary to determine his eligibility for the ballot. Several Democratic secretaries of state, who in much of the country are their states’ chief election officers, have included Mr. Trump on candidate lists and deferred to the courts on the question of his eligibility. A growing constellation of challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility have been filed in courts across the country, including federal court in Concord, N.H.Neville Caulfield for The New York TimesThe two national groups are Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW, which brought the Colorado case, and Free Speech for People, which filed lawsuits in Michigan, Minnesota and Oregon, as well as complaints with election officials in Illinois and Massachusetts. Those two groups have focused on state-level challenges. The Michigan and Minnesota Supreme Courts declined to take Mr. Trump off the primary ballot in those states. The Oregon lawsuit is still pending, as are the objections in Illinois and Massachusetts, which were both filed on Thursday.Ben Clements, the chairman of Free Speech for People, said he believed challenges originating in federal court “are not helpful” to the disqualification cause because of concerns about plaintiffs not having the legal standing to bring a case. But he said the array of lawsuits in state courts — such challenges were pending this week in California, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oregon, Wisconsin and Wyoming — were welcome.“Even if we wanted to, and even if CREW had taken an approach of filing multiple suits, we’re not going to hit all 50 states,” Mr. Clements said.Many people expect the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately decide the question of Mr. Trump’s eligibility. And outside of a few states, the challenges so far have not gained traction.Some cases have been dismissed, including a federal lawsuit in Virginia and Mr. Bangstad’s complaint in Wisconsin, both last week. Others have been withdrawn, including several of Mr. Castro’s lawsuits and a state case in New Jersey filed by John Bellocchio, a former history teacher. In an interview, Mr. Bellocchio said he was working on a second lawsuit, and that he was motivated by concern that the former president and his supporters “envision a Christian theocracy.”“You cannot have a theocracy and a democracy at the same time,” Mr. Bellocchio said in an interview.By far, the most persistent litigant is Mr. Castro, who, according to his campaign website, first ran for a county office at the age of 19 and has since run unsuccessfully at least twice for other offices, including in a special congressional election in 2021.Mr. Castro received a law degree from the University of New Mexico and a master’s degree from Georgetown’s law school. He said he had never been licensed as a lawyer by any state, but was certified by the I.R.S. to work on federal tax cases. Over the years, he has been involved in a dizzying array of legal disputes.Mr. Castro said he had hoped that someone better known would mount a Republican presidential campaign to challenge Mr. Trump’s ballot qualifications, but when no one else stepped up, he decided to do it himself.“My biggest fear was having the knowledge how to stop Trump and having to tell my grandchildren that I did nothing,” he said.At Wednesday’s federal court hearing, Mr. Castro needed to persuade Judge Samantha Elliott that he was a real candidate for the Republican nomination for president and had the legal standing to sue.Among his evidence: He had filed reports with the Federal Election Commission (as of September, records show his campaign had raised $678), and two of his relatives had driven around New Hampshire one day in October, installing a dozen yard signs, before flying home to Texas.In the courtroom on Wednesday, Mr. Castro appeared at times to be unfamiliar with court procedures. But he seemed to come to life as he cross-examined Michael Dennehy, a veteran political strategist and expert witness for Mr. Trump, who testified that it would be “impossible” for Mr. Castro to win any delegates in the state based on his nearly “nonexistent” fund-raising and campaign.If Mr. Castro’s goal is to disqualify Mr. Trump, some observers have suggested that his strategy may backfire.Derek Muller, an election law expert and professor at Notre Dame’s law school, said Mr. Castro risked creating unfavorable precedent with his failed lawsuits. Mr. Trump has already been able to use a judge’s opinion in one state — in which the judge dismissed a Castro lawsuit — to bolster his arguments in another.Mr. Castro is “single-handedly building up precedent for Trump, inadvertently,” said Mr. Muller, who has filed briefs in two state court cases analyzing the relevant election law.Mr. Castro disagreed. If anything, he said, his suits have forced Mr. Trump’s lawyers to “show their cards,” helping other challengers to hone their arguments. He said he plans to refile lawsuits in three more states this month.Tracey Tully More

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      Haley Jokes That New Hampshire Primary Will ‘Correct’ the Result of the Iowa Caucuses

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      Campaigning in New Hampshire on Wednesday, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina said that voters there would “correct” the result of the Iowa caucuses — the night before she was scheduled to appear for events in Iowa.“You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it,” Ms. Haley said, prompting laughter from the crowd of New Hampshire voters. “And then my sweet state of South Carolina brings it home.”Local campaign surrogates for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is vying with Ms. Haley for second place in Iowa polls for the Republican presidential nomination, seized upon the remark as dismissive of the state’s first-in-the-nation balloting, scheduled for Jan. 15.Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said, “I trust Iowans to make their own decisions. No ‘corrections’ needed.” Bob Vander Plaats, the Iowa evangelical leader who has also thrown his support behind Mr. DeSantis, called Ms. Haley’s quip an “admission of getting beat in the Hawkeye State.”Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley are scheduled to participate in back-to-back town halls Thursday night in Iowa. The events, to be broadcast live on CNN, will be among the few remaining opportunities for the two candidates to draw away support from former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Haley’s teasing remark also reflects her dim chances of a victory in Iowa, where Mr. Trump is the overwhelming favorite; he is polling around or slightly below 50 percent support. Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are polling below 20 percent in Iowa in a virtual tie for second place.In contrast, Ms. Haley has decisively risen from the pack of Mr. Trump’s rivals in New Hampshire. Recent polls there have shown her in second place far above other candidates, except for Mr. Trump.Ms. Haley’s quip also reflects the perils of campaigning across state lines in quick succession: Remarks playing to the local crowd in one state can become a liability in the next. More

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      DeSantis and Haley Will Appear in Dueling Town Halls Tonight

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      It’s another busy day on the presidential campaign trail in Iowa.Eleven days out from the caucuses, two of Donald J. Trump’s rivals, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, will participate Thursday night in back-to-back town halls to be broadcast live on CNN.For Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, who have been battling for second place, the town halls will provide prime-time opportunities for them to win over Iowans ahead of the Jan. 15 caucuses. Mr. DeSantis will go first at 9 p.m. Eastern time, followed by Ms. Haley an hour later.Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur, is keeping up his fevered sprint across Iowa, aiming to beat the odds on Caucus Day despite his fourth-place position in state polls.The man they are all trying to take down, Mr. Trump, won’t start appearing at Iowa events until Friday, but his surrogates are stumping on his behalf. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right firebrand from Georgia, and Eric Trump, a son of the former president, will hold simultaneous campaign events in different parts of Iowa Thursday night.Mr. Trump, the overwhelming favorite of Republicans in Iowa, is regularly shown in state polls to be around or slightly below 50 percent support, with Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley polling below 20 percent in a virtual tie.But Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis have so far spent far more money attacking each other than they have Mr. Trump, and they have both been very cautious whenever they do venture toward criticizing the former president.Ms. Haley has focused on policy differences between her and Mr. Trump, on attack ads Mr. Trump has put out against her, and on the “chaos” that she says has followed him throughout the years. Although Mr. DeSantis has gone after Mr. Trump for making campaign promises in 2016 that he failed to keep while in office, Mr. DeSantis so far appears more comfortable attacking Ms. Haley. He has called her a liberal, a flip-flopper and the favored candidate of Wall Street, while Ms. Haley has mostly ignored him when speaking on the campaign trail.Mr. DeSantis’s refusal to more directly criticize Mr. Trump is a version of a problem every other candidate in the race faces: Seemingly every approach to talking about Mr. Trump, whether it’s aggressively attacking him or coming to his defense, has failed to draw away significant support.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is not campaigning in Iowa and is instead staking his candidacy on the later New Hampshire primary, has most aggressively gone after Mr. Trump throughout the race. However, Republicans have so far had little appetite for that message.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

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      Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.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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      DeSantis Keeps Getting Asked: Why Won’t He Directly Criticize Trump?

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida takes questions from voters at every campaign stop, so he often faces variations of the same question — sometimes several times in a single day at different events scattered hundreds of miles apart.And he seems to be growing tired of one frequently asked question in particular: Why doesn’t he more directly attack former President Donald J. Trump?It came up again Wednesday at a community center in Waukee, Iowa, where Christopher Garcia, a 75-year-old retired gas serviceman, pressed Mr. DeSantis in a lengthy back-and-forth.Mr. DeSantis responded that, well, he does criticize Mr. Trump, who is leading the Republican presidential field by a wide margin.“I’ve articulated all the differences time and time again on the campaign trail,” the Florida governor said. He accused the news media of wanting the Republican candidates to “smear” each other with personal attacks. “That’s just not how I roll,” he added.It is true that Mr. DeSantis often enumerates what he says are Mr. Trump’s failures to keep the promises he made as a candidate in 2016 once he got into office. But Mr. Garcia was asking Mr. DeSantis something deeper and more personal: Did he think Mr. Trump’s often vulgar language and crass insults — such as mocking Carly Fiorina’s physical appearance and belittling John McCain’s military service — made him unfit for the White House?“The guy has no class,” argued Mr. Garcia, who said he had nonetheless voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020.Mr. DeSantis declined to offer his own opinion on Mr. Trump’s conduct. But if Mr. Trump were to win the Republican nomination, Mr. DeSantis said, “the whole election will be a referendum on his behavior.” He then returned to listing Mr. Trump’s unfulfilled campaign pledges.Christopher Garcia, of Woodward, Iowa, listens to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, one of the Republican presidential candidates, on Wednesday.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressMr. Garcia, sitting in a plastic chair with his walker leaning against his knees, raised his hand again, hoping to continue the conversation. But Mr. DeSantis did not return to him.How, and even whether, to attack Mr. Trump is a challenge that all of the former president’s rivals have struggled to surmount. As of yet, no approach seems to be working that well.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is attacking Mr. Trump most aggressively, in terms both political and personal. But Republican voters have shown little appetite for his message.Nikki Haley, the former United Nations Ambassador now widely seen as Mr. Trump’s nearest challenger, takes only carefully calibrated shots at the former president. But her recent rise in the polls may have as much to do with her crossover appeal to Democrats and independents as with her cautious approach to Mr. Trump. And Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who is quick to attack the rest of the field, has lavished praise on the former president, leading some voters to question why he is running at all.So far, Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, and their allied outside groups, have spent far more money attacking each other than Mr. Trump.After the DeSantis event wrapped up, reporters swarmed Mr. Garcia for interviews, reflecting both the heightened attention on the Iowa caucuses, which take place on Jan. 15, and what seems to be one of the core issues confronting Mr. DeSantis’s campaign.Mr. Garcia, who lives outside Des Moines, said he planned to caucus for Mr. DeSantis, although he would vote for Mr. Trump in a general election. He was not impressed with the governor’s critiques of Mr. Trump on Wednesday, calling them “vague.”“Are these people afraid to take Trump head on?” Mr. Garcia said of Mr. DeSantis and the other candidates. “I mean, is that the problem?” More

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      It’s 2024, and the Candidates Are Campaigning at a Furious Pace

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      Twelve days. Not that we’re counting.That’s how much time remains until Caucus Day in Iowa, where the first voting will usher in the 2024 presidential race when Republicans gather on Jan. 15 in school gyms, community centers and churches across the state.The Republican hopefuls seeking to topple former President Donald J. Trump for the party’s nomination have already spent tens of millions of dollars and months campaigning across Iowa. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has at least four events planned on Wednesday, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur running for office, is keeping up a breakneck pace while his poll numbers barely budge. Mr. Trump, with polling leads that seem insurmountable, has faced considerably less pressure to crisscross the state. But even Mr. Trump is headed to Iowa for campaign events this week.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, has barnstormed Iowa and is battling Mr. DeSantis for second place. But she’ll be campaigning on Wednesday in New Hampshire, the next state to vote in the G.O.P. nominating contest and one where she is pinning her hopes.But they are all staring straight up at Mr. Trump, who has maintained daunting double-digit leads in polls in Iowa, despite the 91 felony charges against him and after two states have barred him from their primary ballots after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.His campaign is seeking an overwhelming victory in Iowa to shut out his rivals before most Republicans get a chance to vote in the primaries. Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis, who remain far behind Mr. Trump in Iowa polls, look to be fiercely battling for second place.Mr. Ramaswamy, who has brashly promised a surprise showing in the caucuses, is polling a distant fourth in Iowa, with less than 10 percent support. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the race’s staunchest Trump critic, has not campaigned in Iowa, and is polling in fifth place behind Mr. Ramaswamy, the race’s foremost Trump proponent. Mr. Christie has instead staked his candidacy on the New Hampshire primary.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at the Iowa State Fair last year, when he was viewed as the clear No. 2 to Donald J. Trump.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesIowa is not a particularly valuable state to win in the presidential nomination process. The state awards very few delegates, and the victor there is not assured the party’s nomination. The last non-incumbent Republican presidential nominee to win the Iowa caucuses was George W. Bush in 2000.Still, the state holds symbolic importance as the first votes cast in the nation. The results can point to signs of momentum, of which candidates are rising or falling as the contest moves to larger states.But despite months of intense campaigning and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the race in Iowa has changed little from the summer, when the hopefuls were roaming the Iowa State Fair: Mr. Trump is still far and away the favorite.One exception has been the rise of Ms. Haley, and the decline of Mr. DeSantis. (On Thursday, they will participate in dueling CNN town halls.) While Mr. DeSantis had been widely viewed as the clear No. 2 when he entered the race, Ms. Haley has caught up to him in the jockeying for second place.That position is still far behind Mr. Trump, but observers are watching closely: A strong performance from either candidate could put pressure on the other to drop out and allow a stronger anti-Trump coalition to emerge. More