The entrance polling of the Iowa caucuses on Monday night – where people are asked before they cast their votes who they are voting for and why – make abundantly clear that for Donald Trump’s Republican challengers, running against him was always futile. And yet, the polling also makes clear that Trump’s challenges in winning a second term as President are as severe and steep as they have ever been.
Let’s start with the futility of the campaign: 65% of people who voted on Monday night told the pollsters that they had made their decision long before the last month of the campaign. The tens of millions of dollars spent in the last few weeks made no difference to these people. Of that 65%, Donald Trump won 66% of the vote. By contrast, of those who made up their minds in the last month – IE, those who were open to voting for multiple candidates, Trump only came third, with 25%, behind both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis (who had an absolutely disastrous night, much to your correspondent’s dismay). Trump’s decision not to debate didn’t hurt him. One gets the distinct impression, looking through the data, that for a great many voters, very little he might do could hurt his standing with them.
Issues didn’t especially matter either: Trump is running as explicitly the least pro-life of the candidates, and Iowa is a deeply evangelical and pro-life state. And yet he won the pro-life evangelicals by more than he won the votes of people more in line with him on abortion. Ron DeSantis had the endorsement of virtually every religious and pro-life leader in Iowa, as well as the support of Iowa’s popular Governor. Didn’t matter – the voters wanted Trump.
Any objective reading of the figures makes it clear: Unless Iowa is an unprecedented outlier and freak result, Trump’s Republican opponents are wasting their time. And have always been wasting their time. They’ll go through the motions, but this nomination is only going to one person.
And yet, the polling has real notes of caution for the Trump campaign for when the time comes when he is no longer running against fellow Republicans for the party nomination, and is instead running against Joe Biden or another Democrat for the big job.
66% of Republican voters in the Iowa Caucus expressed the belief that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the Presidency in 2020. Predictably, Trump won the support of those voters in a landslide. But here’s the cautionary tale: Almost one third of voters in a Republican Primary Caucus said that they believe that Biden did win legitimately in 2020 – ie that they don’t believe Trump’s “stolen election” schtick. Of that one third, Trump won the support of only 11%. Haley and DeSantis got 82% between them.
65% of voters said that if Donald Trump were convicted of a crime, they would still consider him fit to be President. Trump won 72% of those voters. But here’s the kicker: Fully one third of Republican voters say that if Trump is convicted of a crime, they would not consider him fit to be President. Trump won only 10% of the votes in this cohort.
And this is the picture: Trump is dominant in the Republican Party because two thirds of the voters love him, and believe he won in 2020, and believe that it does not matter if he is convicted of a crime. This is enough to dominate, and crush, in a Republican Primary election.
The problem will arise in the general election: When one third of your own party has very little loyalty to you, expresses scepticism in your claims of election fraud, and says that it would not consider you fit for office if you were convicted of a crime, well. Trump had best hope he is not convicted of a crime.
If one believes the stolen election story about 2020, then very little, it appears, will convince a person otherwise. Which is a pity, because the 2020 election results tell a story that these entrance poll figures back up: That Trump lost in 2020 not because the middle or the left of the electorate turned on him, but because large numbers of Republican voters chose not to vote for him.
In almost every swing state he lost in 2020, Republican candidates running statewide won more votes than Donald Trump. For example, this is what Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger had to say at the time about claims of fraud:
“What happened in the fall of 2020 is that 28,000 Georgians skipped the presidential race and yet they voted down-ballot in other races,” Raffensperger told the House panel. “The Republican congressmen ended up getting 33,000 more votes than President Trump. And that’s why President Trump came up short.”
One can believe that or disbelieve that and chances are, nothing I write here will change your mind. But the figures line up with the polling from Iowa: There are a lot of Republican voters who love Trump, but his performance with the rest of the party suggests that there are a lot of Republican voters who find him completely unacceptable. They’ll vote for other Republicans, but not for Trump.
Unless Trump can reduce the number of those voters substantially by November, when the Presidential Election is scheduled, then it will be very hard for him to win. Regardless of how popular, or unpopular, Joe Biden is.