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The Iowa caucuses on Monday night will mark the official start of the presidential primary season and serve as an early test of Donald Trump’s frontrunner status for the party’s nomination for the White House. It could set the tone for the Republican race to come.
But Iowa voters have delivered surprises before. Here are five things to watch when Republican voters gather for hundreds of local meetings across the Midwestern state to cast the first ballots of the US’s 2024 White House race.
Is Trump really as strong as the polls suggest?
The polls make Trump the clear frontrunner in a shrinking field of Republicans vying for the party’s presidential nomination. Iowans on Monday will show whether the former president is living up to the billing.
The latest FiveThirtyEight average of statewide surveys in Iowa shows Trump winning by a landslide, with support from just over half of Republicans. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is coming second, on 17 per cent, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis is just shy of her on 16 per cent. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy trails in fourth place with 6 per cent.
The surprise will come in any deviation from those numbers, especially for the former president — making Iowa an initial test of the pollsters too.
If Trump wins by a smaller margin than the polls suggest, he will face questions about whether his candidacy is as strong as it once seemed — or whether the constant legal threats he is facing are beginning to erode his support. If he wins by a bigger margin, he will trumpet the outcome as showing he is the party’s presumptive nominee, as the race heads to New Hampshire for a primary on January 23.
What happens to DeSantis?
DeSantis has bet it all on Iowa, investing huge amounts of time and money on campaigning in the Midwestern state, where he has repeatedly reminded voters about his stops in each of the 99 counties. He has been endorsed by prominent evangelicals and also by the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds.
If the Florida governor cannot finish in second place behind Trump in Iowa, with its bedrock of socially conservative evangelical Christian voters, he will almost certainly face calls to drop out of the race before New Hampshire, where primary voters tend to be more liberal and independent-minded.
Meanwhile, Haley has steadily gained ground in Iowa polling and appears to be within striking distance of Trump in New Hampshire. If she defeats DeSantis in Iowa, the result will strengthen her case that she will be the Republican best positioned to challenge Trump for the party’s nomination.
Who will brave the cold?
Iowa caucus goers are no strangers to wintry conditions. But temperatures across the state are forecast to reach record lows on Monday, dropping to -29C in the state capital of Des Moines.
On Friday, Trump’s campaign cancelled all his rallies in Iowa on Saturday “out of abundance of caution”, and instead said it would host “tele-rallies”, send messages on social media, and use “good old-fashioned telephones to keep Iowa caucus-goers excited”.
A bit of cold would not necessarily be a problem in other states, using different voting formats. But aside from forcing last-minute changes to the campaigns, voter mobilisation is crucial in the Iowa caucuses, where people gather at their local precincts to try to convince their neighbours to back their preferred candidate. Ballots are cast in person at the caucuses — no absentee or mail-in votes are allowed.
So turnout will be crucial to the outcome, meaning that the kind of snowstorm and cold snap under way in the state could throw a new wrinkle into the proceedings. Does this help DeSantis’s ground game? Trump’s local voters tend to be older and many of them already expect the former president to trounce his rivals — will this, or his own late cancellations, make them more or less likely to turn up in the cold?
How will the evangelicals vote?
As many as two-thirds of Republican caucus-goers expected to turn out in Iowa self-identify as evangelical Christians, and politics watchers will be looking to see how many of them stick with Trump.
In 2016, the thrice-married former president initially struggled to win over evangelicals — he lost that year’s Iowa caucuses to Texas Republican Ted Cruz — but ultimately secured their support, and in many cases, undying loyalty. Many evangelicals praise Trump for his role overturning Roe vs Wade, by appointing three conservative justices to the US Supreme Court.
But many prominent evangelical leaders in Iowa, including Bob Vander Plaats, who has for several election cycles endorsed the caucus winner, have called on voters to move in a different direction. Vander Plaats has endorsed DeSantis in 2024. There are signs that some younger evangelicals have tired of the former president.
How evangelicals end up caucusing in Iowa will therefore be examined closely for what it says about the race — especially in places like South Carolina, another crucial early voting state where evangelicals represent a large share of the Republican electorate. Haley in particular is betting on a strong performance in New Hampshire catapulting her to success in her home state.
Does anyone else drop out?
The Republican field has narrowed significantly in recent months, most recently with the departure of Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, earlier this week. In addition to DeSantis, Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas who has kept campaigning despite failing to register above 1 per cent in the polls, may be suspending their campaigns before long.
Ramaswamy, who has spent large sums of his own fortune on his bid for the presidency, says opinion polls and the mainstream media are underestimating the enthusiasm of his base, leaving the “anti-woke” crusader poised for a surprise surge. Ramaswamy has visited all 99 of Iowa’s counties at least twice.
“I think the polls are drastically off,” Ramaswamy told CBS News on Friday. “I think we have a good shot of winning the Iowa caucus.”
Iowa’s voters will offer their judgment on this claim on Monday.