Iowa may be first step on Trump’s long march back to the White House
It begins. More accurately, it has begun. In fact, in Iowa, it is already over. The quadrennial turmoil and madness that attends an American presidential election commences with the primaries or caucuses that enable voters, not to select a president, but to choose a presidential candidate to carry their party’s colours in the November election.
The primaries are a mobile circus that sweeps like a dust-storm across states, elevating each in turn to become the cynosure of media and political attention before rolling on, leaving a community that just twenty-four hours previously was the epicentre of the nation looking as abandoned as a ghost town, with metaphorical tumbleweed blowing along its streets. Such, now, is the fate of Iowa. The circus has decamped and all eyes, for the moment, are on New Hampshire.
The Iowa contest produced few surprises, but even by confirming expectations it contributed to a clearer understanding of the presidential race. Donald Trump won by a record margin, as the first non-incumbent to carry the state by more than 50 per cent of the vote. Received psephological wisdom held that, if Trump won by 50 per cent, or a margin of around eight points lower than that, he was on his way; if his vote fell below 40 per cent then, suddenly, the Republican nomination would be competitive. In the event, he won with a spectacular 51 per cent of the vote.
There has been comment on the low turnout of around 15 per cent of registered Republican voters, but that was plainly due to the appalling weather, with blizzard conditions and warnings that frostbite could set in ten minutes after exposure to the cold, which was hardly calculated to entice voters away from their firesides. It looks as if caucus-goers were deterred in equal proportions across the campaigns, so that the result was probably identical in percentage terms to what it would have been under more favourable conditions.
Ron DeSantis managed to salvage his campaign by securing second place by around 2 per cent over Nikki Haley, who came third. Vivek Ramaswamy, with only 8 per cent of the vote, threw in the towel and abandoned the presidential race, endorsing Donald Trump. So, not many ripples from that small pebble, though it is possible Ramaswamy might renew his ambition in some future election. DeSantis has raised a war chest of more than $100m, the one aspect in which he rivals Trump, but his donors must already be wondering if it is money well spent.
Squeaking through to second place in Iowa was an absolute necessity for DeSantis if he was to keep his cap in the ring. New Hampshire, however, with a very different demographic from Iowa, is said to be favourable territory for Nikki Haley, though it might have been more favourable if she had registered more than third place in her first electoral outing. Some observers are painting Haley in New Hampshire as a threat not only to DeSantis but even to Trump.
That seems a long shot. If Trump wins New Hampshire by a significantly smaller percentage than in Iowa, with Haley a reasonably close second, that would increase her credibility; but so far as overtaking Trump is concerned, it seems unlikely that Haley – whom DeSantis portrayed as a tool of the country club RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) although she is well regarded by Trump, or was until she challenged him – could emerge from the melee of Super Tuesday in March with her campaign intact. For the reality is that anyone opposing Donald Trump is facing a phenomenon.
Donald Trump is beginning to resemble a force of nature. He is unstoppable by any legitimate means, though his opponents, fearing that, long ago adopted underhand tactics to prevent him re-entering the Oval Office. That he is now rampaging, like a big beast in the political jungle, towards a second term is due to a number of factors: his larger-than-life personality, the prestige of having already occupied the White House and retaining the title of “President”, but most of all the massive assistance he has received from the Democratic Party.
The Democrats are so afflicted by TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) that they have lost all sense of proportion, of respect for the American constitution and of the need to conserve the institutions of state in their proper function, without abusing them. The US judicial system has been prostituted to partisan rancour: the charges against Trump are absurd and the American public knows it. With every fresh indictment against him, Trump has risen in the polls.
The reasons are not far to seek. Outside the partisan extravagance of the committed supporters of the two parties, the overwhelming majority of Americans believe strongly in fair play, in the need to guarantee justice for everyone. The public reaction is not a sentimental crusade on behalf of Donald Trump, but a self-interested recognition that, if they can do that to the immediate former President of the United States, what security does Joe Public in Main Street, Peoria have?
Heaped upon that is the Democrats’ more recent, fatal blunder: attempting to exclude Trump from the ballot. That profoundly offends Americans in their most cherished perception of democracy. The democratic electoral principle has always been that anyone who has the necessary citizenship credentials has the right to be on the ballot paper: thereafter, the American voters will do the excluding, if deemed appropriate, not some bunch of woke manipulators from the DC swamp.
The individual that Democrats actually need to keep off the ballot is Joe Biden, but we are already in election year and the bloody civil war that would result from attempting to unseat an incumbent president, with all the White House patronage at his disposal, would shred the Democratic Party in the run-up to polling. Increasingly, a match between Trump and Biden is beginning to look like the kind of contest any responsible referee would stop in the first round.
The desperation of the Democrats is palpable and that may drive them to commit some ultimate excess calculated not only to devastate their party, but their nation as well. The Iowa result – Trump 51 per cent, DeSantis 21 per cent, Haley 19 per cent – realised the Democrats’ worst nightmare. Since Iowa, the bookmakers have adjusted the odds on Trump to win the presidential election from 6/5 to 11/10, implying he has a 47.6 per cent chance of victory, while Biden has an implied 33.3 per cent chance.
This situation could provoke the Democrats, or some of their out-of-control surrogates on judicial or jury benches, to commit the ultimate madness and imprison Donald Trump while he was heading towards irresistible re-election as president of the United States. By most readings of the constitution, that would not prevent Trump from being elected, indeed the tsunami of public anger would probably give him a landslide.
How would the United States, supposed leader of democracy and the Free World, appear to global public opinion, with its politics reduced to banana-republic coercion? How would Vladimir Putin capitalise on it? How many countries would want to proclaim themselves allies of America? It is a measure of how demented opposition to Trump has become that such a scenario can even be envisaged. No wonder the Biden administration is supportive of Donald Tusk’s dictatorial regime in Poland, with media shut down by police and legislators dragged out of the presidential palace and thrown into prison.
The ultra-left is ruthless, but America has the most heavily armed citizenry on earth and abusing its constitution to such an extremity could provoke civil disorder. The reason for the Democrats’ panic lies in the dramatic slump in Joe Biden’s electoral support since 2020. A USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll published on 1 January revealed that, among registered voters, Trump leads Biden among Hispanics by 39 per cent to 34 per cent: in 2020 Biden had a 65 per cent to 32 per cent advantage.
Voters under 35 overwhelmingly supported Biden in 2020; Trump now leads in that demographic by 37 per cent to 33 per cent. But what has most alarmed Democrats is that among African-American voters, 87 per cent of whom voted for Biden in 2020, only 63 per cent now support him. They have not defected to Trump – their support for him still stands at 12 per cent, as in 2020 – but have declared they will support some third candidate.
So, the Biden camp must be confronting the concerning question: if Hispanics, African Americans and the under 35s are no longer voting for Joe Biden, where the hell is his support going to come from? It seems unlikely there are enough white, suburban, upper middle-class Karens to keep bumbling Joe in the Oval Office.
Regardless of the outcome which, garlanded with a heap of caveats, looks like a Trump return to the White House, serious damage has been done to America’s legal and political institutions by the Democrats’ fanaticism. The iconic feature of this decline is the disingenuous description of the 6 January riot at the Capitol as an “insurrection”, a fantasy parroted by too many of the UK media. An insurrection would entail multiple coups in cities across the Union, with seizure of radio stations, subornation of the National Guard and violent usurpation of office holders.
What happened at the Capitol was a riot, in which all but one of the fatalities occurred among the rioters. Already 1,200 people have been charged and the authorities have stated that thousands more will be arrested. Prison sentences are being liberally handed down. Yet after BLM rioters burned cities like Portland, torching federal buildings, attacking police and causing considerably more deaths, the authorities decided to drop proceedings.
It was always an anomaly of the American constitution that judges were elected along political lines, though in less ideological days the system worked passably well. Today, however, party sectarianism rules the judicial system and has lent itself to extreme abuses, as in the politically motivated indictments of Donald Trump. Americans are well aware of what is happening and they will insist on choosing their president regardless of dirty tricks by the denizens of the swamp. Iowa pointed the way to the growing likelihood of the result the perpetrators of those tricks most dread, in the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
If that is the eventual outcome of the year-long circus that began in Iowa on Monday, irresponsible Democrats will have contributed bigly (as The Donald would phrase it) to their own defeat.
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