The vote in Iowa, in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, granted a resounding victory Monday evening to former President Donald Trump who collected more than 50% of the votes cast during the caucuses in this state of Midwest.
But the wave, although it seems spectacular, is far from completely sealing the fate of this race, due to a very low participation rate and especially the particular political context of Iowa which still leaves a little hope for rivals of the populist, and this, a few days before the vote, a little more significant, which will be played out next week in the New Hampshire primaries.
This is because nearly 50% of voters in Iowa, a very conservative state, ultimately did not choose Donald Trump and his political speech of revenge, tinged with hatred and unfounded accusations of electoral fraud. of which he says he was the victim in 2020. Hit by freezing weather conditions, the Iowa caucuses also delivered their lowest participation rate since 2008, with barely 111,000 Republicans, out of the 752,000 registered on the state’s electoral lists as of January 2, to have traveled to choose their candidate, or 15%, compared to 29% in 2016.
“In fact, Donald Trump only obtained 56,260 votes,” summarizes Steffen Schmidt, professor of political science at Iowa State University, contacted by The duty the day after this electoral exercise. The very low participation rate also raises several questions about the value of this victory. But in politics, illusion is more important than reality and that’s what continues to drive Donald Trump up in the national polls.”
Monday evening, barely two hours after the start of the caucuses, Donald Trump trumpeted his victory by strangely calling for unity within his party, but also by promising good years to come for the oil and gas industry. and extraction. “We’re going to dig, baby, we’re going to dig,” he said, echoing the pro-oil industry slogan used in 2008 by Republican candidate Michael Steele during his campaign. The populist also promised to “seal the border”, a component of his anti-immigration nationalist identity discourse to which his base is very receptive.
“By surpassing 50%, Donald Trump enjoyed a very good evening,” political scientist Tim Hagle of the University of Iowa said in an interview. But the race is not over yet. The vote against him is still very important, even if it is divided between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. The governor of Florida came in second, garnering 21.2% of the vote, followed very closely by the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, with 19.1%.
Ron DeSantis also defied the odds by avoiding a third place which would certainly have threatened his survival in this race, in the short term at least. “It wasn’t the worst or best scenario for him,” Tim Hagle said. He beat Nikki Haley for second place, but did not close the gap to Donald Trump. His path to winning the Republican nomination still remains difficult, but not impossible. He performed well enough on Tuesday night to justify staying in the race.”
Injured candidate
“His problem,” adds David Redlawsk, a specialist in voter behavior at the University of Delaware, “is that he has no real political organization outside of Iowa and may not have not the money needed to succeed in building one quickly for the future. As for Nikki Halley, she is coming out of Iowa a little hurt, and that could slow down the momentum she had gained in the New Hampshire primaries, the next step in this race for the Republican nomination.
Monday evening, the former governor of South Carolina did not give up, even posing as a bulwark against the “Trump-Biden nightmare” which risks reoccurring next November, if Republican voters decide to choose the populist as candidate.
The ex-president is multiplying false statements about the 2020 elections while maintaining a worrying and threatening bellicose rhetoric, aimed at his political opponents, the founding institutions of the rule of law as well as the country’s minorities, rhetoric which several historians associate with that of authoritarian regimes.
The day after his victory, the ex-president also went to New York to attend jury selection in a defamation trial pitting him against columnist E. Jean Carroll. Last May, a court recognized that Trump had sexually abused Carroll in 1990 and demanded payment of $5 million in damages to the victim. The real estate mogul’s legal setbacks should also punctuate the current electoral campaign, with the man facing 91 charges in four separate cases, including one for attempting to steal the 2020 elections and another for launching an insurrection against the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Rampart from the nightmare
The candidacy of Nikki Haley remains “the only and above all the best hope of putting an end” to this nightmare, she said from Des Moines. “But it’s more than that. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. There is nothing to be proud of. »
A recent American Research Group poll on the New Hampshire primaries, conducted just before the Iowa caucuses, places Nikki Haley tied in voting intentions with Donald Trump, at 40% each.
The division of the vote in the camp of alternatives to Donald Trump, however, remains the big issue in this race. “It was this division that also existed in 2016, which allowed Trump to become the Republican candidate that year,” says Tim Hagle. In the current race, the fact that he presents himself almost as an incumbent president seeking a new mandate [plutôt que comme le président déchu de son poste après un unique mandat]puts him up against better numbers than in 2016, and makes it even harder for someone else to beat him.”
On Tuesday, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson threw in the towel by withdrawing from the race for the Republican nomination, after coming in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses the day before. He congratulated Donald Trump on his victory, but has not yet given his support to any of the candidates remaining in the race.