Iowa caucused

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Noel King: The Iowa caucuses are over and the top four vote getters are making moves. Vivek Ramaswamy is out of the race. We did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight. Nikki Haley is on her way to New Hampshire with a third place finish yesterday. And God is so good. Governor Ron DeSantis and the chip on his shoulder are headed straight to South Carolina. They, the media was against us. They were writing our obituary months ago. His real obituary may someday note he came in second in Iowa. He got about 20 percent of Iowa votes to Donald Trump's 50-ish. And the winner, Donald Trump, is back in court today, so a jury can decide how much money he has to pay for defaming a writer he sexually abused. Iowa has spoken. This is what we want, Iowa said loudly. That's coming up on Today Explained.

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Noel King: Explained. 2024 Explained. Jonathan Martin is a columnist for Politico. He's been in Iowa this election season covering the primary. That's something he's done in every presidential election since 2008. This was by far the coldest and the least dramatic. The coldest, the least dramatic. What's the headline this morning? What's the big takeaway for you?

Jonathan Martin: It's still Trump's party. Good short headline. You spend time talking to people on the ground. Sometimes this can be illuminating, sometimes not. What did you hear when you talked to voters that you thought was telling or interesting?

Noel King: Well, that's why it was worthwhile to be there the week before, because it was extraordinarily telling. I went to a couple of Nikki Haley events, and what it revealed was that she and Ron DeSantis are effectively competing against each other for what I call the sort of stub of the pre-Trump Republican Party that is still willing to participate in Republican contests. Now, some of them aren't even Republicans anymore. Some of them have become Democrats. Some of them have become independents. But they're still eager enough to try to save the soul, if you will, of what was their party, or in some cases still tenuously is their party.

Jonathan Martin: But what we saw from the results was that the majority of the Republican Party still wants Donald Trump. And that's been clear in surveys throughout 2023. But this is the first live action. This is the first time we've seen actual Republican voters in practice. And they overwhelmingly supported the former president. Trump finished the Republican caucuses with a historic 51 percent of the vote. You're looking at it right here, significantly more than Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley's second and third place totals combined.

Noel King: Well, I want to thank everybody. This has been some period of time. And most importantly, we want to thank the great people of Iowa. Thank you. We love you all. And here's the tricky part about winning the Republican nomination. You have to win Republican votes. And so Nikki Haley obviously is confident about her prospects in New Hampshire, and we can talk more about that in a second. But her challenge going forward is going to be that Trump has got a lock on what is today's Republican Party, which is much more heavily downscale, working class. And her voters are mostly college-educated and upscale. And that's just not a fair fight.

Jonathan Martin: Let's talk about the fight that was presumed to be fair at least six months ago. Ron DeSantis. Yeah. Ron DeSantis was going up against Trump. He was looking strong for a while. And then in Iowa, he really went all in. He visited every county. I remember Governor Reynolds telling me early on, you got to do all 99. Like, that's the people that do that are the ones that win Iowa. But it's also just an important tradition. Talk to real Americans. Listen to real Americans. And yet last night, results show he barely broke 20 percent. What didn't work for Ron DeSantis? Or did Ron DeSantis just not work for Iowans?

Jonathan Martin: Look, he had a ton of hype at the end of 2022. He was one of the few good news stories for the GOP. And I think for a time, he and the people who were eager to move past Trump in the GOP thought, whoa, we've seen this movie before. Big state governor who has a good election night on an otherwise tough cycle for our party and can unify the wings of our party going in to a presidential cycle. This feels like George W. Bush going into 2000. It's time for people to vote here in Iowa in less than two days. The people of this great state are going to start the process to determine who is going to be the nominee of the Republican Party. It's the process that I like to say is the beginning of the end of the Clinton era in Washington, D.C.

Jonathan Martin: Well, it couldn't have demonstrated just how much the party has changed anymore in the two decades plus since Ron DeSantis turned it out to be a dud of a candidate. Now, he put a lot of work in, a lot of sweat equity into Iowa. He won some key endorsements. But ultimately, he was effectively challenging a de facto incumbent in Donald Trump. And the other challenge was that once Nikki Haley came on in the fall with a series of good debate performances, you know, she locked in a lot of what I was saying earlier, kind of the pre-Trump Republicans. And so DeSantis was squeezed, right? He wasn't getting the Trump people and he was losing the kind of old guard types who had left the party. And so he didn't have much to show for it.

Jonathan Martin: Nikki Haley comes in right behind DeSantis, but still right behind DeSantis is third place. Last week, we talked about how well Haley appeared to be doing in some polls. Where do the results from Iowa leave her going into the New Hampshire primary? Not very well. Look, she was hoping to ride the momentum from her debate showings, the buzz she had picked up, the surge of financial support. This pining among a lot of, again, the old guard of the party for anybody but Trump. And then they see her head-to-head numbers against Biden in a trial heat general election, and she's winning overwhelmingly. And so for a lot of Republicans who are embarrassed by Trump and just want to find somebody that can be the nominee and defeat Biden, wow, I mean, this is somebody who's compelling, right? And so I think she didn't have much organization. You smartly pointed out that DeSantis had done 99 counties in Iowa. She hadn't done that. And she concentrated instead on where ultimately most of her voters were, the cities and high-income suburbs in Iowa. But ultimately, it was too little too late. And there just weren't enough of those folks to give her a good showing, especially given that she was competing with DeSantis for that very anti-Trump voter in a lot of cases.

Jonathan Martin: Jonathan, in a state with more of those folks, though, might Nikki Haley have a much better showing? Might she be proving something if Iowa wasn't quite Iowa? Well, that's precisely why she's optimistic going into New Hampshire. But it's also why New Hampshire could pose what I wrote last week is something of a false dawn. Because New Hampshire is an outlier when it comes to the Republican nominating process. We saw that speaking in 2000. We saw this in 2000 where John McCain won and there was a moment where is Bush really in trouble? My friends, a wonderful New Hampshire campaign has come to an end, but a great national crusade has just begun. Well, no, New Hampshire is overwhelmingly, compared to other states, high income, secular, educated, when the rest of the party is the opposite of those things. And you add to that the fact that, as you're going to hear a zillion times in the next week, independents can vote in New Hampshire. And when there's no major action in the other party, and there's really not that much this year on the Democratic side, a lot of those independents go play in the Republican primary. And so, yes, Nikki Haley is going to go to New Hampshire, and she's going to find a lot more of the kind of voters that she was trying to win in Iowa. Tonight, I will be back in the great state of New Hampshire. And the question before Americans is now very clear. Do you want more of the same? Or do you want a new generation of conservative leadership? And I expect her to be much more competitive in New Hampshire. But to what end? To what end? Because where does she go from there?

Jonathan Martin: Okay, so it sounds like the takeaway is nothing guaranteed for Haley. Anything else in New Hampshire worth looking out for? Does the broader electorate, do the people watching, do we need to care how Ron DeSantis does in New Hampshire? I think DeSantis matters in New Hampshire mostly as is he taking votes from Trump or from Haley. And I think that's where DeSantis could be a factor here in New Hampshire. It's totally possible that he sits on votes that Nikki Haley otherwise needs. And is she losing to Trump there by nine or by two? That's a totally plausible scenario, especially if DeSantis is in the race and taking votes. And her choice as to whether or not to go on to South Carolina, I can assure you, is going to be shaped in part by whatever the margin is there. Now, if she wins New Hampshire, DeSantis or no DeSantis, I think she almost certainly goes on to South Carolina. But if she loses there to Trump, I think the margin does shape her decision going forward.

Noel King: That was Politico's Jonathan Martin. Coming up, whatever happened to Teflon Ron? The rise and fall and fall of Ron DeSantis. Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime. And Chime gets that, says Chime. Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts. So when you set up direct deposit through Chime, they say you get access to fee-free features, such as free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more. Chime says with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft, up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals. Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees. You can work on your financial goals through Chime today. You can open an account in two minutes at Chime.com slash explained. That's Chime.com slash explained. Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC. Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission of payment file. Fees apply at out-of-network ATMs. Bank ranking and number of ATMs according to U.S. News and World Report 2023. Chime checking account required.

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Noel King: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR. What's in your LifeKit? I'm asking. They didn't ask that. Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key. Instead, you can listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR. Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career. If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change. From fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout, each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with. Life Kit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.

Noel King: Enough from me. Go listen to the show Life Kit. It's a podcast from NPR. We've got our ticket punched out of Iowa. I'm Zach Beauchamp. I am a senior correspondent at Vox, where I cover democracy in the United States and abroad and the far right. And I have a forthcoming book titled The Reactionary Spirit, which covers the rise of right-wing anti-democratic politics around the world. So, Zach, Ron DeSantis came in second in Iowa. You remember the old line, second place is the first loser. Is this the end of the line for Ron DeSantis?

Zach Beauchamp: Unequivocally, yes. Yes. DeSantis invested huge amounts of resources in Iowa. He moved something like a third of his campaign staff there, invested a tremendous amount of money. The candidate visited all 99 counties inside Iowa. The basic idea was that DeSantis was going to win the conservative lane, right? That he was the true conservative in the race. That's the person who tends to do well in Iowa, typically social conservatives, which is DeSantis' shtick of a kind. And so he thought that maybe a surprise win here or at least a strong performance could get him within striking distance of Donald Trump and turn it into a two-person race. Except that's not what happened. He got blown out by like 30-something points, barely ahead of Nikki Haley, who was never considered a serious candidate in Iowa. And DeSantis is negligible in New Hampshire. He doesn't look like a force in South Carolina. There's just no other way to say it, right? His donors are fleeing. He's done. DeSantis is done. He's not quitting yet, but there's no chance that he wins.

Zach Beauchamp: So, I mean, look, it's important to start the story really in November 2022. That's when Ron DeSantis was riding really high because Trump-backed candidates had performed really, really poorly in the 2022 midterms. It probably cost Republicans the Senate. Democrat John Fetterman claimed victory in a tight race over celebrity Dr. Mehmet Haas, who was backed by former President Donald Trump. New Hampshire Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan fought off a challenge from Trump-backed Don Bolton. These really, really strange and off-putting candidates that Trump had endorsed, they lost Republicans in the Senate. So that looked bad for him. And DeSantis had just won Florida, which, as we all know, has been a purple state until recently, by a really decisive margin. We usually see very tight races for governor here in Florida. You remember back in 2018 against Andrew Gillum just how close it was. But look at the spread here tonight. 57 to 42 to Democratic challenger Charlie Crist. So the core of his argument for the next few months, sort of implicit, he didn't really take shots at Trump, which is part of the problem, but implicit was, I'm a winner and Trump is a loser. I'll carry on his kind of politics, but I'll do it while I beat Democrats at the same time. And a lot of people in the Republican elite thought that would be persuasive. They really did. The problem is they underestimated. Once again, I don't know how people keep doing this. They underestimated Donald Trump's hold on the Republican base. It just it boggles my mind that professional politicians and political operatives keep doing this. After all the evidence we have for eight years.

Zach Beauchamp: But that, like, in a nutshell, that's what happened. Let's actually talk about this numerically first. What were the numbers showing us when Ron DeSantis was really doing well? How close was he to Trump? It was closer, but not actually close. Right. DeSantis' peak was sometime around January, February 2023, like a year ago. And he peaked at 13 points below Trump in the real clear politics average. Like in a normal primary, if the runner up is down 13 points, nobody considers that an especially competitive race, right? But that's sort of the wishful thinking was that everyone else would melt away and you'd have a DeSantis-Trump race where DeSantis managed to consolidate all of the people who didn't want to vote for Trump. That's not what happened, though. And really, you can trace the beginning of the end for DeSantis to the start of Trump's indictments. DeSantis himself has suggested this, by the way. I've criticized the cases, but I also think it distorted the primary. And I think it's been it's been that those have kind of been the main issues that have happened. Because it's helped him.

Zach Beauchamp: Is that what you're saying? And so therefore it's both that. But then it also is just crowded out, I think, so much other stuff. Remind me, remind me, because it's been a long year and a half. When did Trump's indictments start? And why did that signal the end for DeSantis? So the first Trump indictment was on March 30th. And in the next week or so DeSantis deficit with Trump roughly doubled from around the 13 13 maybe 15 to something in the high 20s right. In maybe a little bit over a week. So we talking really rapid the kind of thing that suggests that the event really did matter right. The indictment.

Zach Beauchamp: And it wasn't just like something else was going on. So why did this matter, right? It mattered because it exposed the flawed premise at the heart of the DeSantis campaign, which is basically this. Ron DeSantis was campaigning on the idea that he was basically Trump, but smarter, Trump, but more effective, Trump, but more competent, Trump, but a winner, right? The problem is, why would any voter opt for Trump but when they could have actual Donald Trump? The things that were appealing about like real on-brand Trump were not just that he beat Democrats. It's that he had this whole set of grievances that he was able to mobilize and tap into and a sense of identity that he could speak to in a really deep way in his voters that DeSantis couldn't replicate. And he knew that Trump was very favorably regarded by most people in the Republican base. He knew that the majority of Republican voters in poll after poll believed Trump's lies about the 2020 election. So DeSantis didn't challenge the premise of Trump's candidacy, which was, you need me to win to avenge the defeat in 2020, or rather the stolen election in 2020, he couldn't attack that, right? He couldn't.

Zach Beauchamp: And he had to go along with this Trump script of the deep state being biased against him and so on. So when the indictments hit, the rubber hits the road, DeSantis, if he had a real challenge to Trump, would need to say, look, he just got indicted. This guy can't be our standard bearer. He might be in jail by the time the general election rolls around. But instead of being able to say that outright, he defended Trump. against the indictment in a competitive primary. That is when you know that the law has been weaponized for political purposes. That is when you know that the left is using that to target their political opponents. And again, that was true in all the indictments. Like the first indictment in New York is legally the most iffy. So I can sort of see questioning that indictment. But on down the road, some of them are really ironclad and some of them are really serious. Right. And DeSantis is throughout the entire indictment period just defending Trump, defending Trump, defending Trump, and saying the deep state is biased against him, doing this kind of weird performative thing where he says, Florida, quote, Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda. Which, like, come on, man, right? Like, none of that is going to happen. And all of this is just saying, you're just confirming Trump's narrative. You're saying he's right about everything. He's the real victim. He's the big centerpiece of American politics. And everything revolves around Donald Trump and his grievances with the American political and legal system. And once you concede that premise, right, what's even the point of campaigning? Right, why? Like, you're going, you're not going to beat the guy who you're basically saying I'm his sidekick. So DeSantis made a bet that he could separate Trumpism from Donald Trump. He could be Trumpy but without Trump's problems. And it didn't work.

Zach Beauchamp: What does that tell us about the rest of this primary season? Well, at one point, I described the contrast between Trump and DeSantis as being between the id of conservative populism and the ego of conservative populism, right? One is just wild, willing to cause chaos, to assail institutions willy-nilly in the most dramatic ways, whereas DeSantis-style far-right politics was methodical. It was comparatively less bombastic. It was legalistic. And what's clear is that the majority of the Republican base preferred the bombast. They prefer the conflict. They don't have the patience for this kind of quiet stuff or the appreciation for it.

Zach Beauchamp: Let's bring it back at the end to Ron DeSantis. He is still the governor of Florida. It's still a big job. He wanted to be bigger, and that didn't work. So what happens to Ron DeSantis' national political career now? Does he have one? Is it over? That's really hard to say. I think DeSantis has done immense damage to his national aspirations. Immense. The question is whether it's recoverable. And that depends a lot on events that are really outside anyone's ability to predict. For example, first and foremost, how long does Donald Trump live? Does Donald Trump's criminal trial seriously affect his ability to compete in the 2024 presidential election. With the Trump show, there's so many unpredictable events that could take place that some of them could end up rehabilitating DeSantis down the line or vindicating certain elements of his critique.

Zach Beauchamp: What we can say with real confidence is that Ron DeSantis has done tremendous damage to himself. And if he wants to be a national political figure going forward, he needs to do something that can rehabilitate his image and that can address the flaws, the sort of media narrative of him being a kind of incompetent campaigner who doesn't mesh well with actual voters. Like, he needs to do something to fix that. And I just don't know what it is that he will do or what he can do.

Noel King: Zach, thank you so much for taking the time for us. We really appreciate it.

Zach Beauchamp: Thanks a lot.

Noel King: Today's show was produced by Miles Bryan and Isabel Angel. Amina El-Sadi is our editor. Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers engineered. And Laura Bullard fact-checked with an assist from Victoria Chamberlain. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you. Thank you.