The unmitigated victory of donald trump in the primaries held on Monday by the Republican Party in the state of Iowa, traditionally very conservative, confirms the former president’s enormous starting advantage. His 30-point advantage over the second place, Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, and 32 over Nikky Haley, former governor of South Carolina, reduces the unknowns for the future to just one, except for a major surprise: who will come second to the party convention next summer. Assuming DeSantis and Haley have enough money to stay in the running until then, something complicated in light of Trump’s spectacular pool of donors and the very limited ability of its adversaries to secure sufficient resources to continue in the fight. For the rest, the other names that appeared in Iowa have simply stopped counting.
In this scenario within what was expected, the failure of DeSantis’ strategy, who wanted to present himself as an aspiring candidate, is especially significant. more conservative than Trump, although less vociferous, supported by the most fundamentalist evangelical communities. On the other hand, the result obtained by Haley in a state that is not very favorable to her allows her to think that in the primaries of New Hampshire, on the 23rd, he has a good chance of achieving an honorable second place that will allow him to prolong his participation in the race and even grant him the status of representative of the Republicanism least dedicated to Trump, so minority that he has been left without relevant voices in the leadership. of the party, but that he felt identified with her in the last televised debate with DeSantis, from which he emerged the winner.
Not even the more than 90 charges that the former president will have to respond to in the coming weeks and months disturb this general scheme. The ability of the billionaire, always under judicial suspicion, to keep his voters mobilized is beyond doubt even after the poor results of the 2022 midterm elections, in which the candidates most directly sponsored by Trump were defeated. He controls the entire structure of the Republican Party, without possible dissent, and is aware that can remain in the breach, even after a conviction, because it is more than doubtful that the law can prevent a convicted person from running for president.
It remains to be seen if Trump’s dynamism continues to be the main source of mobilization of the Democratic electorate as it was against the odds in 2022. There is no doubt that the state of alarm remains among liberals and minorities at the prospect of the possible return of Trump to the White House, but Joe Biden’s first three years in the presidency have worn out his figure to the point that its acceptance rate is 38%. This implies that a considerable part of the Democratic electorate also harbors serious doubts about his suitability. Exactly the opposite of what happens with Trump, who emerges stronger from each visit to the courts and has made one in three 2020 Republican voters certain that his victory was stolen from him. The mobilization of the most reactionary in the face of the various cultural battles works in his favor. The divisions in the younger electorate over support for Israel, against Biden.