It’s been 12 months since former President Donald Trump announced that he would be running for re-election. Even after this excruciatingly long primary campaign, it still feels wild that we are somehow only a month away from the first votes finally being cast in Iowa. And according to the most recent polling, Trump is still the front-runner — by a lot.
The latest NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll has 51% of likely Iowa caucusgoers ready to choose the former president as their top candidate next month. “Trump’s lead — the largest recorded so close to a competitive Republican caucus in this Iowa poll’s history — is fueled by majorities of evangelical and first-time likely caucusgoers, as well as by nearly three-quarters of Republicans who believe Trump can defeat President Joe Biden next year despite the legal challenges the former president faces,” NBC News reported Monday.
For comparison, Trump’s support is higher than the other five GOP candidates contesting Iowa combined.
For comparison, Trump’s support is higher than the other five GOP candidates contesting Iowa combined. There are a number of reasons why that statistic is so shocking, not least the fact that he has been entirely transparent about his autocratic plans for a second term. But for Trump to be so far ahead seems to be in defiance of what was at one point conventional wisdom about this race.
Back in June, I noted that the GOP field was beyond overcrowded, with 13 candidates throwing their hats into the ring to take on Biden next fall. The size of the field sparked flashbacks to Trump’s first run, when his eventual steamrolling of his opponents was aided by primary votes being diluted among too many opponents to prevent Trump from winning at least a plurality in most contests.
“I’m very concerned that we appear to be making the same mistakes that we made in 2016,” former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan told Reuters in the summer. Hogan said he’d considered vying for the nomination himself but was concerned that he’d be yet another leech, drawing votes away from a candidate who could unify the anti-Trump wing of the party. At the time, his logic sounded reasonable: The bigger the field, the more likely to benefit Trump, who was always going to command at least a third of the GOP base at any given time.
Except, the way the primary has played out, it has not really proven that a smaller field is necessarily worse for Trump. More than half of the candidates who had moved to unseat Trump have already bowed out, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. The field has been reduced to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and (ugh) Vivek Ramaswamy.
But the exit of their fellow contenders has done little to boost the remaining candidates’ fortunes. Haley’s star has risen recently, but only enough to vie with DeSantis for second. Likewise, DeSantis may have gained a few supporters since the last NBC News poll in October, but only enough to bump him up from 16% to 19%. Christie, Ramaswamy and Hutchinson are all still mired in the single digits. Trump, meanwhile, has seen his support grow in those two months from 43% to the current 51%. Contra 2016, a narrower field has only produced a more commanding lead for Trump. But why?
But the exit of their fellow contenders has done little to boost the remaining candidates’ fortunes.
Well, for starters, unlike 2016, the folks who have dropped out so far were never truly a threat to knock off Trump. Pence’s lane required him to convince people who’d voted for him as a running mate that he was right to block his boss’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election’s results. Scott, meanwhile, was running on a campaign of feel-good vibes that never fully clicked in opposition to Trump’s revenge-fueled bid to reclaim power.
As for those who remain, there’s still a long-shot chance that if either Haley or DeSantis dropped out, a true one-on-one fight could be enough to end Trump’s bid. But the problem is that neither of them have been willing to take off the kid gloves and really make the case that a Trump nomination would be bad for the Republican Party, bad for the country and bad for democracy. Haley has come closer, for sure, trotting out a line in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that echoed one she’s used on the debate stage: While Trump was the right president when he was in office, “chaos follows him wherever he goes.” But we’re still living in a world where neither of them has truly tried to frame Trump’s multiple indictments and attempts to seize power as a negative in the eyes of the electorate.
Instead, as journalist Ana Marie Cox has pointed out, they “continue to fight him on his own terms, rather than using his own tools against him.” The exceptions to this rule have been Christie and Hutchinson. But Hutchinson didn’t make the most recent debate stage, leaving Christie as the sole anti-Trump figure while Haley and DeSantis pitch themselves as more focused versions of Trump. (Ramaswamy, meanwhile, has just been doing his best Trump impression the whole time.)
If there were a solid belief among the remaining Republican candidates that stopping Trump was a priority, maybe we’d see a different set of results in the polling. A narrower field might have hurt Trump if the candidates still running against him actually stood for something different than he did or called out the threat he represents in unison. What we’re witnessing is a group of people who, when offered the choice between Coca-Cola and Diet Coke, are choosing the real thing, calorie count be damned.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.