SHANE GOLDMACHER: 7 numbers tell the tale of the GOP primary
Monday, Jan. 15, 2024 -- There's $46,499,124.63. There's 3%. Here are five other figures that shed light on the dynamics at play before today's Iowa caucuses.
Posted — UpdatedThe only numbers that will truly matter in the Iowa caucuses today will be the number of votes tallied for Donald J. Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.
But there are a number of, well, numbers that help explain the Republican nominating contest. In most polls, Trump holds a solid lead, while Haley and DeSantis are battling it out far behind in a fight for second place.
Here are seven numbers that show how we got here — and what comes next.
The bar has been set.
Just how dominant is his 28 percentage-point lead?
It is more than double the largest margin of victory for a Republican in a competitive previous caucus. Trump led among every demographic group in the survey. And his voters expressed greater enthusiasm than those of his rivals.
It wasn’t always expected to be this lopsided. Trump lost Iowa in 2016 and his rivals, especially DeSantis, had a chance to outwork him in the state.
But on the eve of the caucuses, the biggest fight of the first-in-the-nation state is the battle for second, and whether Haley can emerge in the place where DeSantis has bet his candidacy.
If DeSantis has a stronger-than-expected showing on Monday night, his operation will credit the large organizing effort that has been spearheaded by his super PAC, Never Back Down, which has been knocking on doors aggressively since the summer.
That timeline is inadvertently telling: The super PAC actually knocked on more doors over the summer than it has in the past 100 days.
Much of the focus has been on Iowa, where the super PAC says more than 935,000 doors have been knocked on in all, for a caucus that has seen only a fraction of that participation in the past.
Will Rogers, a former chairman of the Polk County Republican Party, the state’s largest party, said that he had recently received his sixth door-knocking visit from Never Back Down, which he said had hired and trained the best door-to-door canvassers.
“Ron DeSantis and his campaign and Never Back Down have done everything to prepare themselves to get a 1600 on the SAT,” Rogers said. “He’s still not going to be elected prom king.”
The forecast has muddled expectations for who will turn out and injected a surprising level of uncertainty into a race that Mr. Trump had appeared to be leading comfortably. Until recently, both the Trump and DeSantis campaigns had expected turnout to exceed 200,000 caucusgoers, breaking the record set in 2016, when roughly 186,000 people voted.
But the Arctic air has lowered those figures — or, at least, raised serious questions of not just who will turn out, but who will benefit.
Haley is expected to run strongest in more urban areas — where road conditions are less likely to be a concern — so that is an advantage for her. DeSantis is believed to have the largest organizational operation in the state, and that could give him an edge in nudging his likeliest supporters to the polls. Trump’s team has said it has the most impassioned supporters, so put that in his potential ledger. But the former president, according to polls and internal data, is running strongest among potential first-time caucusgoers, who might not be as inclined to caucus in the freezing cold.
Even the final margin in the public polls could matter. Will Trump’s big edge dampen enthusiasm to brave the elements?
Add it all up to the biggest X factor of the final stretch.
There is perhaps no better figure that captures the uphill climb that Haley faces to prove she’s more than a factional candidate and can compete for a majority of GOP voters than her weak standing among voters who didn’t graduate from college.
It was an entirely different story among Republicans who did not graduate from college: Trump was winning a dominant 76% support to Ms. Haley’s 3%.
But her problem remains that the party’s base largely didn’t attend college. Until she begins rising more among that crowd, her ceiling will remain low.
Trump is the front-runner. But that is not at all clear from the spending in the race.
Instead, it is DeSantis who has faced the brunt of the attacks from super PACs in a blizzard of advertising and mailers blanketing Iowa.
The $46.5 million spent against him is a remarkable sum, and remarkably more than the total spending by super PACs against Trump and Haley combined, as of Friday.
Another way to look at it is the share of negative spending compared with positive support, where the results are just as lopsided. Spending to boost Haley has outpaced negative spending against her by nearly $50 million, and DeSantis has had to endure roughly $9 million more in attacks than he has received in supportive super PAC advertising.
In the state where DeSantis has banked his candidacy, his campaign is spending only sparsely on television ads in the race’s waning days, a sure sign of the financial stress it is under.
All told, data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm, shows that DeSantis is spending $202,400 this week on TV in Iowa. That isn’t just less than Haley ($467,565) and Trump ($1.42 million), it is also fractionally less than the candidacy of one of the race’s least-known candidates, Ryan Binkley ($204,984), a self-funded businessman and pastor who never qualified for a debate.
To be sure, DeSantis does have air cover from supportive super PACs. But the discrepancy underscores just how tight his budget is.
Nowhere is the spending more revealing than in the Sioux City market in western Iowa, which covers some of the state’s most conservative congressional districts and is the kind of place where DeSantis once hoped to compete for votes with the former president.
Instead, DeSantis is spending only $5,865 there, according to AdImpact, compared with Trump’s $237,393.
Trump’s decision not to debate any of his rivals has proved one of the more impactful tactical choices of the cycle. It has left his rivals to fight among themselves — quite literally — while he has avoided the fray.
His rivals have complained. They have tried to goad — or guilt — him onto the stage. One of Chris Christie’s rationales for entering the contest in the first place was that he was the only candidate who could tangle with Trump in a debate setting. But Christie exited the race without ever getting his shot.
Trump has made clear that, unless he feels politically vulnerable, he won’t show up. And he doesn’t feel vulnerable yet.
So, on Wednesday, when Haley and DeSantis spent two hours debating on CNN in a climactic final clash before the caucuses, it couldn’t help feel like a battle for second place. Trump, as he has done before, set up some counter-programming: a Fox News town hall.
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