The contest is approaching the point where polls, angry spats between candidates and media reports about internal campaign backstabbing no longer count for anything. That’s because voters begin to decide on January 15 in the Iowa Republican caucuses who will carry their banner into November’s election.
After a short Christmas break, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are holding events Thursday in New Hampshire and Iowa — the states on which their long-shot campaigns for the GOP nomination initially rest.
The faraway GOP front-runner is, meanwhile, spending the holidays intensifying his unique and often bizarre 2024 bid. The former president, who faces 91 criminal charges across four cases, told his adversaries to “ROT IN HELL” in a bitter Christmas message as he wages a legal battle on multiple fronts that is inseparable from his White House bid.
On Wednesday, he celebrated the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision not to bar him from the ballot based on the Constitution’s curb on insurrectionists serving in office. A contrary decision from the Colorado Supreme Court to kick him off the ballot there is being appealed to the US Supreme Court by the state Republican Party, and Trump is expected to file his own appeal soon.
And in a cryptic sign of Trump’s autocratic intent, he reposted a word cloud on social media that shows that the word voters most associate with his potential second term is “revenge.”
Joe Biden, meanwhile, is in the US Virgin Islands, savoring a few moments of peace on a New Year’s vacation before a fateful year that will decide whether he joins the club of one-term presidents or claims political absolution with reelection. His hopes are clouded by low approval ratings, a sour national mood, concerns about his age and signs that his 2020 coalition is splintering. But Trump’s untamed extremism may be making his point for 2024 – that his predecessor is too dangerous to democracy to allow back in the Oval Office.
In a normal campaign, Haley would be peaking at just the right time, ahead of the Iowa caucuses and the first-in-the-nation GOP primary in New Hampshire a week later. A slow-boiling rise in polls and donor enthusiasm – based on solid debate performances and shrewd political positioning – has created momentum in the Granite State, where she has a case to be the most credible anti-Trump candidate. But with the former president dominating the GOP, there needs to be a major upset if the coming nominating contests do anything more than establish the runner-up to Trump.
A critical moment is approaching, however, for Haley’s strategy of only criticizing Trump obliquely as an agent of chaos rather than homing in on his greatest potential general election weakness — the four criminal trials looming over him and his assault on democracy with his false claims about the 2020 election. Haley has been loath to directly upbraid Trump to avoid alienating GOP primary voters among whom he remains hugely popular. And even if that tactic works for her in New Hampshire, she still would face a showdown a month later in her home state of South Carolina, where Trump is massively popular.
In the coming days, Haley plans to appear repeatedly with New Hampshire’s popular Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who endorsed her and has long argued that his state will reshape the GOP primary race and begin Trump’s slow eclipse. In one Granite State appearance Wednesday that has picked up attention, Haley was confronted by a voter in New Hampshire who called her out for not mentioning slavery when she was asked about the cause of the Civil War.
The chances that anyone could emerge as a strong challenger to the former president are diminished by the size of the GOP field. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has vowed to stay in the race, debuting a seven-figure ad buy in New Hampshire on Thursday in which he pushes back against those calling for him to drop out. And biotech tycoon Vivek Ramaswamy, who has furiously rejected reports that his team’s decision to pull advertising is a sign of a doomed campaign, said on Fox News Wednesday, “We’re going with this to the very end.”
DeSantis fights for political survival
During the Christmas and New Year holiday in 2022, DeSantis was still basking in a thumping reelection win in a disappointing midterm election year for Republicans that appeared to position him as a significant threat to Trump. But the Florida governor suffered through a chastening 2023, in which his sometimes awkward campaign trail persona and misfiring campaign and super PAC operations suggested that he was not ready for the intense scrutiny of national politics.
DeSantis is throwing all his efforts into Iowa in the next two-and-a-half weeks, knowing that a performance that defies plunging expectations could give him a new lease on life but that a poor showing could effectively end his campaign. In an interview with the conservative Newsmax network Wednesday, DeSantis made a pitch to critical evangelical voters in the Hawkeye State as he spoke about his faith and Iowa’s “basic decency.” He added: “There’s patriotism, people are God-fearing. That’s the backbone of America. The ingredients for a great comeback are there.”
DeSantis, who has already visited all of Iowa’s 99 counties, will begin a statewide blitz on Thursday with events in Ankeny and Marion, then appear with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who handed him his most important endorsement, in Clayton County, in eastern Iowa on Friday.
In both early states, however, polling in recent months has shown Trump is still a strong front-runner and is well-positioned to return to Washington after leaving in disgrace following his supporters’ mob attack on the US Capitol. Trump’s robust support among grassroots GOP voters, influence among Republican lawmakers in Washington and the reluctance of primary foes to openly take him on suggests that his control of the GOP is at least as strong as it was four years ago, despite his increasingly extreme behavior and rhetoric that has drawn comparison with the Nazis in 1930s Germany. Trump is expected to hold a string of events in Iowa in the run-up to the caucuses and his campaign and surrogates have increased attacks on Haley as she rises in New Hampshire.
Trump seems as strong as ever
Trump’s conduct of the 2024 primary campaign has been like no other presidential bid in history, partly because his route back to the White House is running more through the courts rather than a traditional political schedule. He spent much of the holiday season fulminating about special counsel Jack Smith, who heads a federal investigation into Trump’s 2020 election interference that is due to go to trial in early March – just before Super Tuesday — although Trump’s use of the appeals courts to try to establish that he is immune from prosecution as a former president could set back that start date.
The ex-president is likely to take the case all the way to the US Supreme Court, underscoring how the justices face becoming embroiled in a politically damaging set of disputes over the 2024 election.
In the latest spat in an increasingly acrimonious showdown between Trump and Smith, the special counsel on Wednesday wrote in a court filing that the judge should not allow him to inject false information into the eventual trial, to avoid prejudicing the jury and tarnishing the factual record. Trump has fused his court defense into his 2024 campaign by arguing that he’s a victim of political persecution by Biden.
Trump is also fixated on the ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court before the holiday that he is ineligible to appear on the ballot after infringing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists. But as Wednesday’s contrary ruling in Michigan shows, the issue is a divisive one and given the lack of a clear direction from lower courts, the matter is also likely to end up before the US Supreme Court.
Biden faces stiff reelection winds
The final stretch of the primary race is unfolding against a contentious political backdrop that will shape the terrain of a likely contest between Biden and the eventual GOP nominee. Multiple polls over the last year have shown that voters are not that happy with the prospect of a Trump versus Biden rematch in 2024.
While recent polls showing Trump leading the president in the key swing states sparked panic among Democrats, the former president’s history of scaring off suburban and moderate voters makes him a high-risk candidate for Republicans. Indeed, Haley’s campaign highlights surveys showing she would do far better than Trump in a general election against Biden. But again, her path to the Republican nomination appears deeply problematic.
While the US is performing far more strongly in growth and job creation than most Western economies, the public mood has been soured by months of high interest rates that have made it hard to afford mortgages, rent and new cars. The president received cheering news before the holiday with fresh data showing that inflation is coming back to normal. But the prices of many goods, including staple food items in supermarkets, remain much higher than before the Covid-19 pandemic, in a way that explains downbeat assessments among voters about the state of the economy entering the election year.
Biden is also consumed by global crisis, including wars in the Middle East and Ukraine that test his claims to be a foreign policy expert and could play into Republican narratives that he is weak and that the world is out of control on his watch. Signs that young, Black and Hispanic voters are cooling on the president also spell danger for the White House.
Yet Trump’s Christmas rants on social media keep playing into the main thrust of the president’s reelection campaign — that the risk that the Republican front-runner poses to US democracy, free elections and the fundamental values of American life mean that he should not be trusted with presidential power ever again. This is why Biden’s camp seized on Trump’s promotion of the word cloud on his Truth Social account featuring words like “revenge” and “dictatorship.”
“Donald Trump wants to be president to exact revenge on his enemies – and he’s not even trying to hide it,” the Biden campaign said in a statement.
