2024 polls: Trump support surges ahead of Iowa caucuses

Iowa’s rise in political importance was unplanned — the process used to be dominated by political insiders and there was little opportunity for regular members to have any influence, as The New York Times has noted.

That began to change in 1968, with both the country as a whole, and specifically the Democratic Party, experiencing significant unrest amid the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. The battle between party leaders and rank-and-file members came to a head at the Democratic Convention, where protesters clashed with law enforcement.

The uneasiness stretched onto the convention floor, and the party eventually began to rethink the process for how they choose their presidential candidates to include the voices of regular party members.

This led to new rules for the 1972 contest and the four stages in which Iowans now choose their preferred candidates, beginning on the precinct level. The precinct votes are the caucuses where people gather in community centres, sports halls and, in less populated areas, even people’s homes. But there’s also voting taking place on the county, congressional district and state levels.

These new rules, while making the process more accessible and inclusive, also led to further delays as newly formed committees needed updated election materials. However, the state party only had an old machine to make the required copies, leading the state party to decide they needed at least a month between each voting stage to get everything in order in time.

The national convention was set for early July, meaning that the state convention could take place in June, but at the time, the state party was unable to locate a big enough venue, pushing each stage further back, meaning that the process had to begin earlier in the year.

The party chose 24 January as their start date in 1972, making the caucuses the first presidential contest in the nation. While the New Hampshire primaries had been first since the 1950s, Iowa Democrats weren’t in earnest moving their contest earlier to garner national attention, The Times noted. But the national spotlight came to Iowa anyway, beginning with the campaign of South Dakota Senator George McGovern. The longshot candidate was struggling in the polls against the frontrunner, Maine’s Senator Edmund Muskie.

On caucus night, state party officials convened at the party headquarters, where New York Times reporter Johnny Apple was one of about a dozen members of the press in attendance. He was the only one who asked for the results that night, but the party wasn’t ready to release them, having not expected any interest. A party official, Richard Bender, organised a phone tree to get all the results from around the state.

Apple’s article published the following morning revealed Muskie as the winner but that McGovern had received 22 per cent of the delegates, helping bring the caucuses into the national spotlight. Muskie’s less-than-impressive win went against all expectations. Similarly, McGovern’s strong second-place finish was also a surprise.

As with the surprising wins of Barack Obama in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, John Kerry in 2004, George HW Bush in 1980 and Jimmy Carter in 1976, the strong second-place result for McGovern first showed in 1972 that a lesser-known candidate can come from behind and do better than expected thanks to the new rules first used almost 52 years ago, changing the narrative and building momentum for a nascent campaign.

Des Moines Register politics reporter Katie Akin has been to countless events in Iowa this campaign season.

“The entire Iowa caucus game is really about expectations,” she tells The Independent. “And that’s true throughout the entire early campaign all the way up until caucus night.”

“It’s the first chance for these candidates to really impress or disappoint the people who are watching this race. And that is all based on how they are expected to do versus how they end up doing,” she adds.

Donald Trump is pulling ahead in Iowa ahead of the state’s caucuses on 15 January.

Biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke author Vivek Ramaswamy received about five per cent in the poll, with former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie being the only other candidate polling at more than one per cent.

The field of Republican candidates has winnowed significantly since the beginning of the campaign, going from eight hopefuls appearing on the stage during the first primary debate to just four in the fourth showdown.

Biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke author Vivek Ramaswamy has been mimicking him while at times struggling to explain why he’s running against a man he has called “the best president of the 21st century”.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been creative in finding different ways to call Mr Trump a wildly incompetent and dangerous criminal.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has argued that he would be a more competent, and most importantly, younger, version of the ex-president who would be able to run again in 2028.

Former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley initially instituted the “pro-having it and pro-eating it” cake policy of disgraced former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson when it came to Mr Trump, attempting to remain on the fence and not annoy either Republicans supportive or critical of the former president. More recently, she has become slightly more outspoken in her criticism.

On his War Room podcast on Tuesday, former White House adviser and far-right activist Steve Bannon asked Trump loyalist Kash Patel whether he can “deliver the goods” and “get rolling on prosecutions” should Mr Trump win election in 2024.

“And I want the Morning Joe producers that watch us and all the producers to watch us – this is not just rhetoric. We’re absolutely dead serious,” Bannon said. “The deep state, the administrative state, the fourth branch of government never mentioned in the Constitution, is going to be taken apart, brick by brick, and the people that did these evil deeds will be held accountable and prosecuted, criminal prosecutions.”

Patel said a team of “all-American patriots” in all levels of government in a potential Trump administration beginning in 2025 will “come after” members of the press that he claims have “lied about American citizens” and “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

“We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” said Mr Patel, who joined the Trump administration in 2019 as a dubiously qualified intelligence official.

The former president has repeatedly raged at the suggestion that he, at the age of 77, is not as sharp as he used to be.

During a Fox News town hall on Tuesday night, Mr Trump said: “I’ll say our real president is Barack Hussein Obama – they’ll say ‘he doesn’t know who the president is, he thinks it’s Barack Hussein’ – no, I’m being sarcastic.”

“Whenever I sarcastically insert the name Obama for Biden as an indication that others may actually be having a very big influence in running our Country,” Mr Trump wrote in the post on 27 November.

“Ron DeSanctimonious and his failing campaign apparatus, together with the Democrat’s Radical Left ‘Disinformation Machine,’ go wild saying that ‘Trump doesn’t know the name of our President, (CROOKED!) Joe Biden. He must be cognitively impaired.”

During an event on Fox News billed as a town hall on Tuesday, host Sean Hannity gave him a chance to clarify that “under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.”

His supporters and campaign have framed his comments as a joke to attack his critics, a defence that has tried to rewrite and undermine his own words and actions over the last several months, including his explicit promises of a campaign of retribution and political vengeance against his rivals.

Hours before the town hall, his allies Steve Bannon and Kash Patel promised that another Trump administration would “come after” his political opponents and the media.

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” said Mr Patel, a former Trump-era intelligence official who is reportedly considered for another high-level role in a potential Trump White House. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.”

The ex-president remains atop the GOP field in a major way, having consolidated support from six in 10 Republican voters nationally according to a NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll released on Monday. Though Mr Trump will not appear this Wednesday for the debate held by NewsNation alongside his GOP fellows, his decision to skip the 2023-24 debate cycle appears to not have hurt his chances in the slightest.

Indeed, the poll shows few pieces of good news for his opponents. Mr DeSantis and Ms Haley are statistically tied, at 11 and 10 per cent respectively, while the former president’s base of support appears to trust him more on the most important issues to voters this year, including the economy.

Mr DeSantis, who has seen his campaign flagging for months, remains the second choice of a much wider segment of the party than any other candidate. But even that suggests that his base is more closely aligned with Mr Trump’s, and suggests that the former president’s support could surge even higher were the Florida governor to drop out.

The debate will be broadcast on NewsNation, a subscription-based network, and it will be streamed online on Rumble, the video-hosting site mainly used by right-wing voters. The first three debates were hosted by Fox News, Fox Business, and NBC News.

To qualify, candidates had to acquire 80,000 donors – at least 200 from 20 states and territories – and at least six per cent support in at least two national polls or one national survey and two polls from the early states – Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.

Former President Donald Trump has also qualified but he’s not expected to attend. He skipped the first three debates. The ex-president will instead attend a fundraiser for his Make America Great Again (MAGA) super PAC in Florida, Reuters reported.

Mr Trump isn’t planning on counter-programming the debate with his own event as he has done previously, Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita said, according to the news agency.

The campaign of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has said that they’ve fulfilled “all” the criteria to qualify, by the Republican National Committee has yet to confirm if he will appear on stage.

While Alabama is a deeply red state where Republicans easily win statewide races against Democrats, it does host a somewhat early primary contest on 5 March.