Reuters World News - Iowa 2024: Trump versus the rest

Episode Date: January 14, 2024

We travel to cold, snowy Iowa, where Donald Trump dominates the polls, while his Republican rivals for the White House have been making their case for why they should be the GOP pick. Our host, Iowa native Christopher Walljasper, talks to voters on what's driving their decisions and Reuters political correspondents on why this caucus is unlike decisions of the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Y'all, it is cold outside. Now I get it. Nikki Haley is not kidding. This weekend in Iowa, temperatures dropped to negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit. But despite the weather, on Monday, voters from across the state will come out in sub-zero temperatures and blizzard warnings to caucus for their preferred Republican country. The Iowa caucuses are upon us. And for this special episode, I'm in my home state of Iowa to find out what's on voters' minds as they pick a candidate for president. I'll speak with our political correspondence on the ground on the state of play in the race.

And hear from voters who will be the first in the nation on why they're sticking with Trump, like Stacey Brooke, a mom in Cedar Rapids. He makes you feel like he's your coach and you're going into battle, whether it's like going to war. against all the bad in the world. And that's exciting for people. Bill Kouser, a farmer from Nevada. When Trump was in there, he made a lot of promises and he kept most of them. Josh Davis, a pastor in Davenport.

And I think all of the state trying to get him kicked off the ballot and all that they're doing, it's only helping him. Or those looking for an alternative like retiree Lloyd Holichick from Marion. He's the best one of the bunch because she's willing to support. the Ukrainian war.

Ankeny pastor Todd Stiles. I'm going to the next strongest pro-life person, which I think's Ron. Susan Filer in sales and marketing outside of Cedar Rapids. I'm leaning toward Nikki more because she's more centrist. Or Des Moines accountant Cheryl Weissheight.

We have to get rid of Biden. I'm Christopher Waljasper in Iowa. Top sitting there. You Lynn? Are you Chris? Nice to meet you. One of the first places I stopped in Iowa was this place called the Wilton Candy Kitchen. Wilton is this small town in eastern Iowa with a population of less than 3,000 people.

But I wanted to check out the candy kitchen because it's this old-fashioned soda fountain. It's been around for more than 100 years. It's got dark wood and an old countertop. They serve ice cream drinks and can make you a green river. It's also a place where politicians have stopped over the years for a photo op. or a chance to campaign for the Iowa caucuses. Candy Kitchen was actually, this building was actually built in 1856. I met Lynn Aucl Tree there.

He's owned the place for around a decade. The inside looks virtually the same as it did 100 years ago. And Lynn played the part. He was wearing a red sweater and a little bow tie. You want to do a chocolate mall, cherry Coke. Do you want to do... When you say make a cherry Coke, you're not just going to pop the top on a bottle of Coke. No, I'm going to make a chocolate.

you with soda water and syrup real old-fashioned. It's a place that's steeped in tradition, which is kind of like the caucuses. I mean, they're not the most modern or efficient ways to cast your vote for an elected official. Coke syrup. But they retain this small town sensibility that encourages conversation and working it out with your neighbors. Give it your taste. That's pretty darn good. Yeah.

As politicians barnstorm the state, Vice President Pence was here a year ago in September. They often make pit stops in places like the Candy Kitchen. Mitt Romney came through and was here. It's a tradition that goes back decades. Mrs. Eisenhower was on the train, and a longtime Candy Kitchen owner, Thelmonopoulos, she presented flowers to her.

We have a picture of that back in our museum. Aucl Tree says that he gets guests from across the country and the political spectrum in the store. And he likes to hear these conversations unfold. As long as everyone's nice and respectful, and it's a great atmosphere and a great backdrop for people to kind of have a hometown feel of Iowa. But I think there's nothing more valuable within politics

is the ability to be heard, to be listened to, and have a conversation. And I think that's kind of, the caucus is kind of akin to that. There you go. I mean, it's a get-together in a room type of thing and kind of have a conversation. Sometimes voices are raised. Sometimes there's, you know, opinions given. And it's kind of an interesting, it's just an interesting development that gives a great pulse for what's next. Enjoy. That pulse of what's next is precisely why you see so much attention and money and manpower spent in this relatively small Midwestern state.

Tim Reed is one of our national affairs reporters and has been covering the Iowa caucuses for two decades. Right? Since 2004. So I sat down with him to unpack it all. Tim, you've been covering the Iowa caucuses since 2004. Talk to me about how the caucuses have changed over the years and what you're seeing this year that is maybe unique. This year is unique because they're. there is one candidate in a competitive caucus who is so far ahead of the other two main contenders.

And that's Donald Trump. He's ahead by 20 to 30 points according to the opinion polls. That's never happened ever before in a competitive Iowa caucus. Yeah. And that's fascinating because he's also an incumbent, but not an incumbent, right? So that's really a dynamic that we haven't seen in history. We've never seen this in history. Iowa is notoriously bad, in fact, for predicting who will become the eventual presidential nominee.

Only three times since the early 70s when the Iowa caucuses really began properly and became competitive, has the Republican Party picked their candidate. So the fact that Trump is almost definitely going to win Iowa and is also looking like the clear frontrunner to become the Republican nominee, is unique this year. Trump lost the Iowa caucus in 2016, right? So Trump, yes, he lost the 2016 Iowa caucus to U.S. Senator Ted Cruz from Texas. He lost by four points. But the Trump campaign has really learned a big lesson from that defeat in 2016. It's also a defeat Trump has never conceded. He's also never conceded that he lost the Iowa caucuses as well as he never conceded that he lost to Joe Biden in the general election in 2020.

But the Trump campaign is far more sophisticated and organized this time round. They have many more people on the ground, and they are not taking anything for granted. So how have these candidates been campaigning to win over Iowans? So to win the Iowa caucuses, you need enormous organization on the ground, and you need people to speak on your behalf in over 60, hundred caucus sites on caucus night. If you don't have people there talking for you, you are not

going to win the caucuses. So the Trump campaign has spent months and months and months signing up people in Iowa to become representatives for Donald Trump on Monday night. Trump has flown into the state far fewer times than his rivals, but he's hold massive rallies. And at those massive rallies with 1,000, 2,000 people in attendance. His campaign staff have been signing up people at the door, getting thousands and thousands of names into a database to help. Haley and DeSantis, his two main rivals in Iowa, have been holding much smaller events, doing much more a traditional Iowa caucus campaign. They also believe they are well organized, but in terms of sheer numbers, Trump probably has the advantage.

And how do their approaches differ? So DeSantis, yes, he has spent more time in Iowa and really banked a lot in Iowa because if he doesn't have a strong showing in Iowa, his campaign is over. Nikki Haley has spent a lot of time in Iowa, but she's also spent a lot of time in New Hampshire where she's becoming competitive with Trump. And then she also has home-filled advantage in South Carolina, which is the third state to vote. She's been able to spread her time a little bit more over the first three states, whereas Ronda Santos has really banked a lot in Iowa in time and money and effort. Now, at this point, you might be saying, wait a second, what is the caucus again?

How does this whole thing work? So here's our national politics correspondent, Jim Oliphon. Well, the main difference between a caucus and a primary is that a primary is run by the state. A caucus is run by the party, the state party. So in this case in Iowa, the caucuses are run by the Republican Party. The state and the board of elections, they have nothing to do with it. It's an all an internal party thing. And basically what it involves in about 1,000 precincts all around the state,

people get together at community centers, high school gyms, church, firehouses, and they have what basically is like a little town meeting, and they cast a straw poll for who they want to be president. Okay, I'm just going to make sure how many do we have. Go ahead and stand up if you'd like to speak for a candidate. And supporters of each candidate usually have somebody there as a surrogate who gives a speech on the candidate's behalf, and then people vote by a secret ballot, and it's tallied up.

It's really pretty simple. So I'm just asking you for his support tonight. Thank you. So why does Iowa do it like this? A lot of it involves tradition that they're very unwilling to change. It also, like I said, it allows the party complete control the process. What it really does is it rewards the most engaged voter. And this is why some people don't like the caucus process because they claim it's less democratic,

because basically you have to come out at a certain time period, in this case, 7 o'clock at night, You've got to go and go to a certain place, stand there for an hour, cast your vote, and only a certain amount of the electorate is going to be able to do that, either because they have a job or maybe they have some sort of a disability or something where they can't do it, or maybe they're old, or maybe they don't have a car, but there are a lot of limiting factors at play. And so typically what you see is about only 30% of Republican voters participate in the caucus process.

But usually these are the people, the voters who pay the most attention, who are most politically engaged, who likely may have gone and seen a candidate or two or three. And so in that way, it does involve the most informed voter. Let's pray to God. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for America. Now, in Iowa's case, that often means an evangelical voter, because the church is there do a very good job of organizing and getting their side involved in the process.

together amongst our peers to stand up and make a case for a candidate, to say this is why I think you should vote for him. God, we are so blessed. And that's why we have seen in the last several cycles the candidate most favored by social conservatives come out ahead as the winner of the caucuses. Amen. And Iowa Democrats aren't selecting a nominee at all on Monday, right? What the Democrats are doing this year is they're doing everything by mail-in ballot. But it doesn't matter because they don't really have a competitive race. Just the other thing, I think it's important to know that this is not a winner-take-all situation for all the effort and interest we put into Iowa.

The delegates, we're not talking about that many of them, 40. And compared to a state like Texas or Florida, that's nothing. And what happens is these delegates are split up proportionally based on the percentage of the vote. So if somebody gets 27 percent and somebody gets 20 percent, and somebody gets 24%. That person might get only one more delegate than the others. So the stakes are not about the number of delegates. It's really about the narrative.

And it's all about who comes out looking strong, who comes out looking weak, and then who moves on from there. So the biggest thing to take away from Iowa is not the number of delegates awarded, but simply it's our first sense of how these Republican voters view the candidates in the field. As Republican candidates vie for support of Iowans, they've tried to distinguish themselves on the issues, but also in their leadership style.

But how voters will respond on Monday is still yet to be seen. Joshua Davis is a pastor at the Wesleyan Nazarian Church in Davenport, Iowa. It's on the eastern side of the state right on the Mississippi River. Davis explained to me why he's all in on Trump. He may not be the perfect moral man that the church wants, but that's okay. We're not trying to hire a Christian. We would love to have a Christian. Now, I believe Donald Trump professes to be a Christian, and he probably does, and I'm not judging him on that.

But just because he's not the type of Christian you would like to see, you understand what I'm saying. The one thing you can know is you're going to get what he says. Tim, does that track with what you're hearing? So again, the majority of voters have really passionate about Donald Trump and think he has been badly done by that they think he's a victim of the conspiracies and the lies he's spread about his loss in the 2020 election. And the Trump supporters are really much more passionate than probably DeSantis or Haley supporters. Now I spoke with Randy and Cheryl Weissheight at a DeSantis event in Ankeny, Iowa this weekend. He has a record, and I like governor to have a strong record that accomplish the goals that they set out to accomplish. And that's what we need in our president.

So I haven't decided yet, and so I haven't seen him for a while, so I was impressed with what he had to say. So I'll make my decision Monday. So DeSantis decided that his campaign strategy would be, I am going to have the same policies and the same ideas as Trump, but I'm just Trump without the chaos. Now, I support doing the border wall, and I think had Donald Trump built that, Biden would not have been able to let in 8 million people.

The problem for DeSantis was that he then ended up in the same lane as Donald Trump, and Donald Trump has crushed him. So there is about 50, 60 percent of Republican voters who actually don't like Donald Trump. DeSantis hasn't really garnered many of those. At a Nikki Haley event in Cedar Rapids this week, I spoke to a woman named Stacey Brooke. She says she voted for Trump in the last election,

but is leaning towards Haley now. Unfortunately, sometimes Trump comes across a little bit too hard to the right, and we need to kind of more, kind of smooth those edges out so that we appeal to more people. Nikki Haley has run a different kind of campaign. She's run as a more pragmatic conservative. She's run as a foreign policy hawk. If we supported Ukraine, Israel, and the border,

that's less than 20% of Biden's green subsidies. So don't ever let them tell you that you have to choose. What we need them to choose is national security. They need to keep Americans safe. They need to prevent more. That's how you do. Whereas Trump and DeSantis have run more as foreign policy isolationists. So Haley has actually created a path for herself, and so she's managed to hoover up a lot of

the anti-Trump vote within the primary electorate, and that's why she's much more competitive in terms of the second place fight going on now with Ron DeSantis. As Nikki Haley attracts a more centrist conservative, it seems like she's also maybe pulling in an appeal for a centrist Democrat who maybe has some concerns around Biden and his policies over the last year, his age, some of the concerns we've heard about Biden running again. Yes, I'm leaning toward Nikki more because she's more centrist. That's Susan Filer. She was at the same Haley event and says that she was a Democrat, but now considers herself

an independent. If it was between Biden and Haley, I would probably lean more. Or Haley? Nikki Haley's closing argument to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and the country generally is that she is way more electable than Donald Trump and more electable than Rhonda Santos. And polls bear this out. In head-to-head polls, she beats Biden in a general election in some polls by double digits and has a much better chance of beating Biden in a general election according to polls than

Trump and DeSantis. And her big appeal, one of her big pictures, is that she's not an extremist. So she's taken a much more middle line approach on the issue of abortion, for example, which cause Republicans a lot of problems in the midterm elections in 2022 after the Supreme Court overruled the federal right to an abortion. And a lot of moderate Republicans and some moderate Democrats like that about Nikki Haley, that she's not extremist on the issues, including abortion. And she's also a woman. Her parents are immigrants. She has a much broader appeal in suburban America than Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump do. And so this is her argument and also the argument of a lot of voters who like her, that she could beat Biden in a general

election because she will appeal to independence and moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans who really are a key voting bloc when it comes to who wins a presidential general election. And it's really important to remember that when it comes to the general election in November, there are really only six states that will decide the election are Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. and it's really just a few parts of those six states that will decide who becomes the next president. And a lot of that is in the suburbs of cities in those six states. And if you're more moderate, you have a better chance of winning a general election as a Republican.

So what happens after the Iowa caucuses? On Monday night, after the caucus votes, after the results, if everything goes well, we should have first, first, second and third place in Iowa by about 11 p.m., 12 p.m. Eastern time. The main candidates are all holding post-corkas parties, and then they will all likely jump on planes and fly to New Hampshire and start campaigning 6am, 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning, January the 16th in New Hampshire, and they will forget all about Iowa. So for the average American watching the results in Iowa on Monday, what's the main takeaway? The harsh reality about Monday is that Trump will win Iowa. One big question is, by how much?

If he has a blowout night, it might be a knockout punch for both DeSantis and Haley. If his margin of victory is not so big, then the big question is who comes second in Iowa? If Ron DeSantis, who has spent more time in Iowa than any other candidate and who is banking really everything on a strong finish in Iowa, comes third behind Trump and Nikki Haley, that probably completely dooms his presidential beard. It probably ends it. If Haley comes a decent third, she's still got life in her because she then moves on to New Hampshire, where voters will vote on January 23rd. and she is very competitive with Trump in New Hampshire. Chris Christie just dropped out of the race.

He had about 12 to 13% support in New Hampshire and a lot of his votes will go to Nikki Haley. And then after New Hampshire, the race goes to South Carolina, which is Nikki Haley's home state. So if Trump has a blowout win in Iowa and that would be a victory of over 20 points and then goes on and wins New Hampshire, that is probably the end of the Republican nominating race. I think that probably knocks out DeSantis and Haley, and I think it's then Trump's nomination.

How can that be? Two states out of 50 and relatively small states when it comes to numbers of delegates, does that just create an avalanche that becomes insurmountable? Yeah, that creates an aura of in ever, inevitability and momentum that's unstoppable. And that's what we've seen in previous primary races, both on the Republican and Democratic side. If someone particularly wins Iowa and New Hampshire,

they're pretty unstoppable. That's what happened. In 2004 in the Democratic race, John Kerry won Iowa and New Hampshire. He then marched on to the nomination. In 2008, Barack Obama, who came from an underdog position against Hillary Clinton. He won Iowa.

He actually lost New Hampshire, but then he won the next nearly every primary race through February of 2008 and had the nomination sewn up way before it was actually decided later that year. So a big win for Trump in Iowa, and then a win in New Hampshire would almost certainly seal the deal for him when it came to getting the nomination.

That's it for this special edition. We'll be back on Monday with our daily headlines show. Special thanks to Jim Oliphant, Tim Reed, Nathan Lane, Graham Slattery, Andrea Shalall, and all the other reporters covering my home state of Iowa this year. Reuters World News is produced by Jonah Green, Tara Oaks, David Spencer, Kim Vennel, and myself. Our senior producer is Carmel Crimmons. Our executive producer is Lila Ducretzer. Engineering and Sound Design by Josh Summer.

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