WASHINGTON.- One of the common criticisms of the marathon presidential race in the United States – a chain of electoral events that begins with the primaries and ends with the general election, the first Tuesday of November – is the enormous influence that the caucus from Iowa, a rural, small, evangelical and predominantly white state. The result of that peculiar election can catapult or bury a campaign. Iowa played that role again last night, opening the fight that will define who will be the Republican Party rival who will face President Joe Biden.
The unknowns to be revealed in the Iowa caucus were few: Will Donald Trump win, as all the polls anticipated? What will be the difference compared to the rest? And who will come in second place, Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis? The answers to these unknowns will impact the next event: the New Hampshire primary, next Tuesday.
And those answers were defined last night, in a dark and frozen Iowa, the starting point of the race for the White House and, this year, of the fight for the Republican Party’s presidential candidacy. The great favorite, apparent undisputed leader of the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln, is Donald Trump. Confident as ever, Trump appeared confident before the vote of a victory that would inject vertigo into his campaign and pave the way for his return to the White House.
“We are going to have a tremendous night tonight, the people are fantastic and I have never seen a spirit like the one they have”Trump told the press as he left his hotel in Des Moines, the capital of Iowa, this Monday, a holiday in the United States commemorating the birth of Martin Luther King.
The latest survey by the local newspaper Des Moines Register and the NBC network, released this weekend, had confirmed in the run-up to the elections the supreme leadership of Trump, who registered a support of 48%; in second place was Haley, with 20%, and in third, DeSantis, with 16 percent.
Being the first electoral event of the year, the Iowa caucuses once again attracted unique attention. Not only the result matters, of course, even if Trump wins and confirms his status as his favorite, but also how each candidate performs with respect to the expectation he generated prior to the vote. In the run-up to the election, Trump has led all polls by a wide margin, and a closer-than-expected victory threatened to leave him more vulnerable to his rivals. Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, has jumped to second place in polls in recent weeks. An eventual third place will take away momentum from her candidacy. For months, DeSantis seemed confident of winning Iowa. Nothing suggests that he will come out first, and if, on the contrary, he falls behind Haley, his campaign will be in intensive care.
With that game of expectations in mind, Trump, Haley and DeSantis and their campaigns sought to calibrate their narratives until the last minute, and encourage people’s participation in the final stretch in the coldest caucus in history: the wind chill approached at -40º degrees. The three main candidates of the Republican primary were waiting for the results last night in Des Moines, the state capital, after jumping from event to event – many were canceled due to inclement weather – during the last hours before the start of the assemblies, which began to take place. 7 p.m. local time.
For Trump and the rest of the candidates, participation was crucial. The caucus format, an eccentricity of the North American electoral process, requires a unique political commitment, and, above all, a considerable amount of time. Voters must go to one of the 1,657 places where assemblies are held – schools, churches, fire stations, post offices, sports complexes, gyms – to vote, and, unlike a traditional primary vote, they must do so after It is night, only after 7 in the afternoon. People also don’t vote right away. There is no dark room or voting booth, nor a ballot. Some sites have ballots with candidates’ names printed on them, but typically people vote by writing their candidate’s name on a piece of paper. Added to this is that there are bureaucratic steps typical of an assembly, and last-minute speeches and conversations to try to overturn preferences.
If Haley actually manages to take second place, the Republican establishment and the moderate wing of the Grand Old Party will quickly rally behind her candidacy in a last attempt to wrest the leadership of Abraham Lincoln’s party from Donald Trump.
