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For Trump and his potential 2024 GOP rivals, it’s all about Iowa

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DEMOINES, Iowa — Donald Trump was in Iowa on Monday. Government Ron DeSantis of Florida made his first visit last week. Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina made recent trips. And on Saturday, former Vice President Mike Pence will speak.

Despite Democrats choosing to snub Iowa in 2024, the state has never been seen by Republicans as significant in the presidential race. For one Republican, it was a do-or-die feeling — the first real test of Mr. Trump’s strength or vulnerability.

In modern times, no former president has sought to reclaim the White House. Mr. Trump’s loss or even less-than-convincing victory in the state caucuses, the Republican kick-off contest early next year, would signal near-fatal weakness in his campaign, according to GOP strategists inside and outside the state. . For this reason, both his rivals and Trump himself are paying increased attention to Iowa.

“I don’t see a formula where Trump loses Iowa and it doesn’t really hurt him and his chances as a candidate,” said Terry Sullivan, who ran Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Despite Mr. Trump handily winning Iowa’s 2016 and 2020 general elections, Republican activists in the state have said he is not guaranteed a 2024 caucus victory, although he remains the leader.

Last week a Des Moines Registration / Mediacom Iowa Poll found that Mr. Trump’s appeal is waning: if he becomes a candidate in 2024, only 47 percent of Republicans in Iowa would definitely support him in the general election. That’s a double-digit decline from the 69 percent who in 2021 said they would definitely support it.

“For a former president, winning the Iowa caucuses is everything,” said Bob Vander Platz, the state’s influential evangelical voter leader. “If he loses, it will mean a nomination” for everyone else, he said. “If he wins the Iowa caucuses, no one will stop him.”

After the Democrats decided that Iowa’s almost all-white, mostly rural population is not representative and replaced South Carolina as the starting state for their 2024 primaries, the Republicans are accepting the state’s traditional role as a testing ground.

The Trump campaign has hired seasoned state leaders and is planning to build Iowa’s caucuses infrastructure, signaling a desire to turn things around in 2016, when Mr. Trump was shocked to come second in the caucuses.

At the time, the politically inexperienced reality TV star believed that the large crowds at his rallies would easily escalate into a flood of rally attendees. Instead, he lost to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Mr. Trump was so angry that he flew out of Iowa without thanking his local staff. unreasonably tweet later that Mr. Cruz won due to “fraud” — a preview of his approach after losing re-election in 2020.

Trump advisers have said they do not intend to repeat the mistakes of 2016. “We have a major political operation in Iowa, run and coordinated by exceptionally competent professionals who know their stuff,” said Chris Lacivita, a senior Trump campaign adviser. “We are doing this because, firstly, we are serious, and secondly, we want to win.”

Mr. Trump has hired Marshall Moreau, who oversaw last year’s unsuccessful Republican Attorney General’s victory in Iowa, as his state director. He also hired Alex Latchman, former political director of the Iowa Republican Party, as his director of early voting states. Mr. Latchman witnessed Trump’s clumsy efforts in 2016.

“We have learned from this lesson,” Mr. Latchman said.

Unlike primaries, the caucus is a low-turnout caucus that requires voters to weather the usually cold winter night for hours-long speeches and voting in their local precincts.

In 2016, Mr. Trump’s Iowa staff, including a former Apprentice contestant, hired volunteer organizers but failed to teach them how to reach meeting participants or even provide literature to leave at the door. There were many dark nights at Trump’s headquarters in suburban Des Moines, when competitors had many volunteers on the phone.

Trump’s advisers said things would be different this time. They pointed to Mr. Trump’s first visit to Iowa on Monday as the 2024 nominee. The campaign said it was tracking the names and emails of thousands of people who signed up to participate and filled a packed 2,400-seat hall in Davenport, Iowa.

How Times reporters cover politics. We expect our journalists to be independent observers. Thus, while Times employees may vote, they are not permitted to support or campaign for candidates or for political reasons. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement, or donating or raising money for any political candidate or election campaign.

“The real work of a campaign starts when the president is on the move,” Mr. Latchman said. “We’re going to continue to consistently recruit these people every single day until February.”

Mr. Trump has also bowed to campaign traditions he once shunned. During his speech in Davenport, he answered unscripted questions from the audience for 20 minutes. Prior to the rally, he unannounced a visit to Machine Shed, a popular Iowa chain.

One of Mr. Trump’s rivals, Ms. Haley, a former United Nations ambassador to the Trump administration, has traveled to Iowa twice since entering the race last month, and on both visits, she spoke at length with voters, relying on a one-on-one basis. . campaign style that helped her win election as governor of South Carolina.

Restaurant visits are a not-so-subtle way that Trump’s advisers in 2024 intend to create a contrast with his likely archrival, Mr. DeSantis, who is battling the wooden man’s reputation.

“Big rallies have worked in the past,” said Mr. Lacivita, a senior Trump adviser. “This is definitely a different campaign than in 2016. Now is another time. We’re going to do a mixture of retail politics and large-scale rallies.”

One national Republican strategist, Kyle Plotkin, had an opposing view of Iowa’s importance to Trump, noting that even if he loses there, his diehard supporters are about 30 percent of Republicans. in national polls – it would be enough for him to defeat the contenders who divided the voices of the opposition on the field.

Iowa GOP activists said Mr. Trump had a hot base of supporters, but many Republicans were open to an alternative, especially one they saw as more electable.

“I think Trump is supportive, but I wouldn’t say it’s in the bag,” said Steve Sheffler, one of two members of the Iowa Republican National Committee.

Gloria Mazza, GOP chairman for Polk County, the largest county in the state, said of the GOP base, “Are they looking for someone else? They can be”.

And Mr. Vander Plaats, the leader of the evangelical voters who make up the large Republican bloc in Iowa, said many are open to an alternative to Mr. Trump. “My concern, along with the fears of many other people, is that we are concerned about how America has pretty much decided on Donald Trump,” he said. “I think it’s time to get behind the next leader who can win in 2024.”

Mr. Vander Plaats said evangelicals had not forgotten that Mr. Trump blamed the significant Republican defeats in the 2022 midterm elections on the fact that candidates focused too much on the “abortion issue.”

“Putting the blame on the pro-life movement showed Trump’s character,” said Mr. Vander Plaats. “If you’re trying to win the Iowa caucuses, I wouldn’t put this base under a bus.”

If Mr. Pence enters the race, as many expected, the Trump campaign could run into trouble over the former vice president’s conversion to evangelical voters. And Mr. Pence may adopt a strategy of camping out in Iowa, spending most of his time in the state to put on a strong caucus.

“Mike Pence could do well in Iowa,” said Rick Tyler, Cruise’s top assistant in 2016. “I don’t think Trump has a chance in Iowa this time because he offended the evangelical base so much.”

Maggie Haberman made a report.

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POLITICS

GOP budget attack

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1 hour ago

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March 18, 2023

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Republican Senate budget planners have launched a multilateral attack on President Joe Biden’s fiscal year 2024 budget request, while Democrats have pointed to Congressional Budget Office analysis to say the GOP House budget plans are unrealistic. David Lerman, Peter Cohn, and Paul M. Kravzak of CQ Roll Call evaluate how the Biden draft was received on Capitol Hill and what it means for the appropriation process.

Show Notes:

The post-GOP budget attack first appeared on roll call.

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POLITICS

Twitter Files: Massive Censorship Project Rolled Out Against Politically Incorrect Speech About COVID-19

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2 hours ago

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March 18, 2023

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According to the latest release of “Twitter Files”, during the pandemic, the internet watchdog, the Stanford Internet Observatory, launched a sweeping effort to purge social media platforms of unwanted opinions related to COVID, whether or not the messages were true.

Internal emails released Friday by journalist Matt Taibbi show how the Stanford Internet Observatory Virality Project coordinated with several other academic institutions and publicly funded nonprofits to conduct a massive operation to monitor vaccine misinformation and shape platform policy to rid the web of from views that have disappeared. against the liberal mainstream.

Mr Taibbi said Twitter was one of six social media platforms that partnered with the Virality Project to monitor COVID-related posts during the pandemic.

In addition to the direct line for flagging posts, the collaboration also included a periodic roundup of vaccine misinformation spread across platforms, lists of repeat offenders, and lists of “truthful content that could contribute to mistrust of vaccines.”

The package of truthful information that the Virality Project wanted to ban included “viral posts by people expressing hesitancy about vaccines” and/or “stories of real vaccine side effects.”

The watchdog also took aim at discussions about vaccine passports, warning that such messages have “spurred a broader anti-vaccine narrative of loss of rights and freedoms.”

Mr. Taibbi said the project was an “Orwellian proof of concept” that “accelerated the evolution of digital censorship from true/false judgment to a new, more frightening model that openly focuses on political narrative at the expense of facts.” “.

The Stanford Internet Observatory did not respond to a request for comment.

The Twitter Files are the result of Elon Musk opening up the company’s email vault to select journalists after he took over Twitter in October 2022. It exposed the company’s politically biased behavior and partnerships with federal officials during the 2020 presidential campaign and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. 19 pandemic.

In February 2021, the Virality Project emailed Twitter executives announcing the newly formed partnership and started a conversation about “how we can best collaborate with the Twitter team on this work.”

“Our goal is to connect with your team through which we can spread vaccine-related misinformation narratives that we flag either on Twitter or other platforms,” ​​a spokesperson for the Virality Project wrote in an email to executives. companies. .

The Virality project was given access to Twitter’s internal ticketing system to flag posts, and announced in a March 2021 email that it was “starting to expand” its notification process to other platforms.

Speaking before the federal government’s House Arms Subcommittee last week, Mr. Taibbi and fellow Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger warned of an “industrial censorship complex” that is undermining Americans’ free speech.

In December, two journalists began revealing the extent of the federal government’s collaboration with Twitter executives to moderate content on the platform.

The Twitter files also revealed what Mr. Taibbi describes as a vast network of censorship that included online speech monitoring programs spearheaded by non-governmental organizations to suppress speech outside the mainstream.

“This is a serious threat to people of all political persuasions,” Mr. Taibbi said. “The First Amendment and the American population, accustomed to the right of speech, is the left’s best defense against the censorship industrial complex. If there’s anything the Twitter files show, it’s that we risk losing this most precious right, without which all democratic rights are impossible.”

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US Representative from California. shows what often drought-stricken state does with storm water – twitchy.com

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5 hours ago

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March 18, 2023

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Recent severe storms in California have resulted in catastrophic flood problem in parts of the state:

Days after the last major storm passed, rising water levels continue to trigger evacuation orders and flood warnings across Central California, with more rain forecast early next week.

In Porterville, residents of two neighborhoods along the flooded Tule River have been ordered to evacuate, with about 5 miles of river between them under evacuation warning.

High water from nearby Success Lake upstream has already flooded dozens of homes in the area. Melting snow from the mountains feeds cold flood water that was waist-deep on Wednesday in some homes near a fault in the Tula River.

Naturally, in a state that often has a lot of draft problems, there is a way to store excess fresh water for future use, right? Well, apparently not.

Instead, it appears that some government officials are simply dumping large amounts of overflowing fresh water into the ocean. Republican House Rep. Kevin Keely shared this video:

Looks like they might want to bring it back later this year.

But Gavin Newsom is definitely laser-focused on what’s going on in Florida!

Newsom and the leftist progists in California have rather confusing “priorities.” But they will blame floods or droughts on “climate change” and stay on that wrong path.

The only “plan” Californian liberals have is to blame climate change and use it as an excuse to bleed taxpayers to spend more on their shenanigans to solve another non-existent problem.

unreal.

What are the chances that at some point in the summer or sometime later this year they actually want all that fresh water back? It will be too late.

Wow.

Editor’s Note: The title has been updated to note that Mr. Keely is now a US Representative, not a Californian. state representative, as originally stated. Thanks to those who made this reminder.

***

Connected:

The mask worn by California. State Rep. Kevin Keely in the Assembly Hall is a BIG tribute to the governor. Newsome’s hypocrisy

RedState’s Jennifer Van Laar urges Newsom OUT in heartbreaking topic for California blizzard victims

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Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Twitchy’s conservative reporting on the radical left and the awakened media? Support our work so we can continue to bring you the truth. Join Twitchy VIP and use promo code SAVEAMERICA to get 40% off your VIP membership!

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