CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — Nikki Haley swings through Iowa this week fresh from the announcement of her presidential campaign. Your South Carolina compatriot, Senator Tim Scott, will also be here as he decides his political future. And former Vice President Mike Pence was in state to court influential evangelical Christian activists.
After a slow start, Republican presidential candidates are pouring into the leading state in the presidential race. Former President Donald Trump is particularly absent from the list, at least for the time being.
Few of the White House hopefuls in Iowa live up to the high expectations Trump has. He finished second to devout social conservative Ted Cruz in 2016 and twice led the state by a wide margin as the Republican presidential nominee in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
“It’s really impossible for this guy to live up to those expectations. You are enormous. They’re homemade,” said Luke Martz, a veteran Republican strategist from Iowa who helped run Mitt Romney’s 2012 Iowa caucus campaign. “I don’t see how someone who says ‘I’m that guy’ can come in and even get a second place.”
But in the three months since he announced his bid for a comeback, Trump has not set foot in Iowa, the first place where his claim to party dominance will be tested early next year.
Certainly Trump has a campaign presence in Iowa. Alex Latcham, who is part of Trump’s national team but lives in the state, has been working to find a caucus campaign manager. But Trump held a kickoff rally Jan. 28 in South Carolina, where his 2016 primary victory sealed his status as the GOP leader. And earlier that day he ducked a spot at the state’s annual GOP meeting in New Hampshire, where he also won the nation’s first primary seven years ago.
Though the caucuses have been out for nearly a year, they remain the first event on the calendar, and some Iowa GOP activists have taken note of Trump’s absence.
“I thought that was pretty interesting,” Polk County GOP Chairwoman Gloria Mazza said of Trump’s stops in New Hampshire and South Carolina. “Because Iowa comes first on the nation, doesn’t everyone come here first?”
Meanwhile, others follow.
Though Pence is not yet a candidate, his advocacy group Advancing American Values launched a campaign last week to organize opposition to school policies, like one in an east Iowa county that has become a flashpoint among conservatives.
Pence was in Cedar Rapids Wednesday to rally opponents of a policy by the nearby Linn-Mar Community School District that is at issue in a federal lawsuit. The school board last year enacted a measure that allows transgender students to apply for a gender support plan to begin social transition in school without their parents’ permission.
The issue, an early focus of the Republican presidential outlook in 2024, is particularly contentious among Christian conservatives, with whom Pence routinely identifies. And at Wednesday’s event at a pizza restaurant – it felt like an early campaign stop – Pence exemplified his traction.
“We are not co-parenting with the government,” Pence said to a cheering audience of more than 100. “We trust parents to protect their children, and no one will ever protect America’s children better than their mothers and fathers.”
Haley has rallies scheduled in the Des Moines and Cedar Rapids areas Monday and Tuesday. Meanwhile, Scott is speaking at an event at Drake University on Wednesday, part of a so-called national hearing tour aimed at informing his plans before he speaks at the annual Polk County Republican fundraiser in a suburb of Polk County that evening Des Moines speaks.
Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who visited Iowa in January and met with Legislative Republicans at the Capitol in Des Moines and Republican activists in western Iowa last week, is making quiet progress.
Although several potential candidates, including Trump, campaigned for midterm candidates in Iowa last year, these first impressions are important as the GOP presidential primary begins. That’s especially true as many in the GOP are waiting to see if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis goes ahead with a White House bid.
But as the field of candidates grows in the coming months, Trump still retains a core of Republican support that could be difficult to overcome.
In October, 57% of Iowa Republicans said they hope Trump decides to run in 2024, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll, while 33% said they hope he wouldn’t and 10% said they weren’t sure.
“Obviously there is a contingent that will support him anyway,” said Steve Scheffler, a member of the Iowa Republican National Committee. “But there are more and more people who want to step on the hoops before making a decision.
Thomas Beaumont, The Associated Press
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