DES MOINES, Iowa—Somehow, they were both right.
Addressing supporters at his caucus after-party outside Des Moines Monday night, Ron DeSantis claimed his second place performance meant his campaign “got our ticket punched out of Iowa.”
Just minutes later, addressing her own supporters down the road, Nikki Haley was even more bullish about her presidential bid, after nipping at DeSantis’ heels in a state where he has long seemed inevitable to finish ahead of her. “I can safely say tonight, Iowa made this Republican primary a two-person race,” she said.
That Donald Trump would coast to a commanding victory in the Iowa caucuses was never really in doubt. The former president won over 50 percent of the vote, arguably exceeding his own sky-high expectations for his performance. But somehow, the muddled finishes for DeSantis and Haley worked out even better for the former president than he could have possibly imagined.
DeSantis’ second place finish denied Haley the title for the clear Trump alternative. Meanwhile, Haley finishing just two percentage points (and about 2,000 votes) behind DeSantis denied him any real momentum out of a state where he desperately needed a boost.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks during a campaign stop at the Drake Diner on the day of the Iowa Caucus.
The two fighting each other to a stalemate means neither is ready to resign, which in turn means Trump will once again avoid a head-to-head match. He’ll be able to let Haley and DeSantis attack each other in New Hampshire while he stays mostly clean from the expensive mudslinging.
Although Haley and DeSantis both tried to spin their Iowa performances as a win, ironically, it’s Trump who might win the most from them both being able to claim some pyrrhic victory—and Trump’s team was quietly celebrating their good fortune a day after the caucuses.
The general take from a senior Trump adviser Tuesday night was that Haley and DeSantis had “absolutely” negated each other’s momentum coming out of Iowa.
“The battle for first place loser turned into the battle of the double loser,” the Trump adviser said. “And it was interesting from the standpoint of Nikki spending tens of millions of dollars in Iowa. They got greedy, then they started slipping up and making mistakes, and they opened the door back up for Ron.”
Both Haley and DeSantis effectively spent tens of millions to get about 20,000 votes in the Iowa Caucuses. (Trump only got about 56,000 votes, but his win in Iowa was decisive, and his campaign and the PACs associated with him spent far less than Haley or DeSantis in the state.)
And again, Trump somehow lucked out in that both Haley and DeSantis feel emboldened to continue campaigns that are largely competing for the same Trump-skeptical GOP voters.
At this point, Trump himself seems to understand the utility of keeping both of them in the race—and not training his attention to just one candidate.
Trump’s victory speech was unusually magnanimous Monday night—as magnanimous as Trump can manage to sound about his competitors, at least—and everyone seemed to note that Trump avoided his normal insults, like calling Haley “Birdbrain” or the Florida Governor “Ron DeSanctimonious.” He even called his two main rivals “very talented” and “very capable” people.
Instead of knocking either competitor—or both of them—Trump simply said it was time to “come together.”
That was, of course, a calculated message to all Republicans, Haley and DeSantis included, that they should coalesce behind him. But notably, the Trump campaign initially planned to hit DeSantis and Haley in the former president’s remarks Monday night.
According to the Trump campaign senior adviser, the former president personally scrapped those shots in favor of the more conciliatory tone.
“He had prepared remarks, and he ditched them for that,” the Trump adviser told The Daily Beast. “Some people call them riffs, but he went out there and that was the tone he wanted to take.”
The adviser noted that Trump took the time to actually adapt his speech and write out those small remarks about Haley and DeSantis by hand, revealing that it was a thought-out—but not long prepared—game plan.
With the New Hampshire primary just a week away on Jan. 23, the Trump campaign plan seems to be to let Haley and DeSantis continue to bloody each other while Trump focuses on later states.
Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis speaks at a campaign event ahead of the Iowa caucus.
Throughout the whole campaign, the Trump alternative candidates have all mostly avoided attacking their main rival, focusing on knocking each other out in some game theory gambit.
But one of Trump’s greatest advantages in the GOP primary is the schedule. Super Tuesday is loaded with delegate-rich states where he dominates, meaning he could in effect lock up the nomination even before there’s ever a real one-on-one race.
Certainly, Haley and DeSantis both advancing to New Hampshire helps Trump, as even with Haley’s solid lead over the Florida Governor there, he’ll still take votes from the former South Carolina Governor.
And all the while, the voters who have never shown interest in supporting any other Republican but Trump will still be by his side.
Of course, the one Republican who ran the most Trump-sycophantic campaign—Vivek Ramaswamy—also dropped out Monday night, and Trump actually is poised to pick up the majority of those votes, as polling has suggested.
That bump could be critical, as Haley focuses on converting the sizable number of independent voters—technically known as “undeclared” voters in the Granite State—to support her campaign.
If Haley had emerged from Iowa as the lone true alternative to Trump on the GOP side, it could have been a very different story in New Hampshire, where only 47 percent of likely GOP primary voters have a favorable view of Trump—much lower than his recent national numbers of 82 percent.
But DeSantis did advance, and he was the top second choice among New Hampshire GOP voters in a CNN poll from last week, meaning he could pick up votes just because other candidates have now dropped out.
Perhaps the worst case scenario for those hoping for a Trump alternative is that, once again, DeSantis and Haley finish within striking distance of each other, with both deciding to punch their tickets to South Carolina.
If that’s the case, both will continue spending against each other for the next month. And even if one candidate emerges from Haley’s home state on Feb. 24, that candidate would have less than two weeks to finally train their focus on Trump before Super Tuesday on March 5.
Trump’s team doesn’t seem to think it could be that lucky, however. The senior Trump adviser’s assessment of the race in New Hampshire was that “Ron is as good as dead.”
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