Before Donald Trump takes the stage in Northern Iowa University’s gymnasium, a woman he once fired tries to convince the crowd of 1,000 that Trump’s victory is inevitable. “Hop aboard the Trump train. ‘Cause let me tell you what, folks. We are going places. And we are going places fast. And we are steamrolling anyone that gets in the way of our next stop, and that is the White House,” Tana Goertz, Trump’s Iowa co-chair and a runner-up on Trump’s reality-TV show The Apprentice, says to fire up the assembly.
Trump is not unstoppable, but says he will be if he takes the state. “If we win Iowa, I think we’ll run the table,” he tells the crowd in Cedar Falls. He might not be wrong. Trump is running neck-and-neck with Texas senator Ted Cruz in Iowa polls, but he has double-digit leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina. A setback in Iowa could wipe out those leads, but the momentum provided by a victory could very well make them grow. It’s possible that early Trump victories would spark a concerned backlash, but it’s just as likely an increasing number of Republicans would fall in line.
What’s clear in Iowa with 10 days left until caucus night is that the race remains very fluid. According to the latest Des Moines Register poll, which found Cruz leading Trump 25 to 22 percent with Florida senator Marco Rubio in third place at 12 percent, more than a third of Trump’s supporters and more than half of all likely caucusgoers say they could still be persuaded to back a different candidate. Indeed, for every committed Trump supporter I meet at Trump’s Iowa events, I meet another likely voter who hasn’t made up his mind.
Don Ertl, who has participated in every caucus since 1976, left Trump’s Cedar Falls rally still undecided. “I’m either for Trump or Cruz,” he says. How will he make up his mind? “Flip a coin. I don’t know. Maybe I have to talk to Ted again.”
Kevin Mankin waited outside the John Wayne Museum in Winterset for an hour in 14-degree weather to catch a glimpse of Trump, but he walked away still torn 50-50 between Trump and Cruz. “I’ll have to do some soul-searching,” he says. A Scott Walker supporter until the Wisconsin governor dropped out, Mankin likes that Trump is “not part of the establishment,” but says his “biggest fear” is that Trump’s “an egotistical rich successful man that’s looking for publicity. And that’s the only reason I’m not 100 percent behind him.”
Several other undecided likely caucusgoers complained that Trump doesn’t offer much of a policy agenda. “I’d like to hear more specifics,” Susie from Clive told me after she attended Trump’s Ames rally with former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. “I’ve never heard one specific out of him. It’s just, ‘We’re gonna do it. We’re going to get it done.’ ” At the Palin rally, Trump promised he would localize education. “How?” shouted one man in the crowd. “Just you watch,” Trump replied.
There’s a growing sense of fear—or resignation—among Trump’s Republican opponents that attacks on him simply won’t work because almost all his supporters are mindlessly backing him and impervious to new information that could dissuade them from voting for him. But that’s simply not true.
Attacks on Trump haven’t failed so much as they haven’t been tried. After six months of praising Trump as “terrific,” Cruz finally turned on Trump in the January 15 debate. In response to Trump’s accusation that Cruz is not a natural-born citizen because of his Canadian birth, Cruz attacked Trump’s “New York values.” Trump’s liberal views, past and present, on a variety of issues are certainly a vulnerability. But Trump may have gotten the better of the exchange because he crudely but effectively portrayed Cruz’s words as an attack on 9/11 victims and rescue workers.
Cruz didn’t follow through on the vague “New York values” attack with TV ads. And neither did anyone else. “Literally, zero dollars in super PAC advertising have been run against [Trump] this month,” the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker reported January 20. All the other Republican candidates remain interested in attacking anyone other than Trump.
For two weeks, from January 9 to January 23, Cruz didn’t hold a single event in Iowa as he campaigned in South Carolina and New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Trump has been shoring up his image among Christian conservatives. On January 18, Trump spoke at Liberty University, where Cruz launched his campaign. University president Jerry Falwell Jr. praised Trump for living “a life of loving and helping others, as Jesus taught in the Great Commandment.”
Trump is the “only candidate,” Falwell said, who “cannot be bought. He’s not a puppet on a string like many other candidates.” Falwell denounced politicians who pandered to Christians during elections only to betray them in office. When Trump spoke, he declared, “If I’m president you’re going to see ‘Merry Christmas’ in department stores. Believe me. Believe me.”
On January 19, Sarah Palin endorsed Trump at the rally in Ames. Palin said that Trump would fight “crony capitalism.” Earlier that day, Trump appeared at the Renewable Fuels Summit, where he read a statement of support for government mandates to boost the ethanol industry. Palin said that Trump is “pro-life.” In December, Trump wouldn’t say if he opposes Roe v. Wade, and he flip-flopped to come out against third-trimester abortion only recently. Palin literally screeched that Trump would “kick ISIS ass!” In the September 16 debate, Trump asked, “Why are we fighting ISIS in Syria? Let them fight each other and pick up the remnants.” Palin said Trump “spent his life with the workin’ man.” To build Trump Tower, the businessman relied on 200 illegal Polish immigrants who later accused Trump of cheating them out of wages. “We worked in horrid, terrible conditions,” one told the New York Times.
There’s much, much more material than that to use against Trump in a GOP primary. But when I ask Representative Steve King of Iowa, Cruz’s national campaign co-chair, for the best reasons against voting for Trump, he replies: “I’m not going to make those arguments against Donald Trump.” The next day, Trump said at an event in Norwalk, Iowa, that Cruz was more deceitful than Hillary Clinton because he didn’t file an FEC report for a Goldman Sachs loan. “He said with him being a Canadian citizen, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ How did he not know that?” Trump asked. “Then he said with the loans, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ Smart guy. He doesn’t know that? Yeah, that’s worse than Hillary, when you think about it.”
Many caucusgoers may remain persuadable, but what’s going to persuade them not to vote for Trump if they don’t hear much of a case against him? Some Republican operatives have suggested that certain of Trump’s fans, who would be first-time caucusgoers, simply won’t show up on February 1. But the Trump campaign is working hard to make sure that they do.
“Is there anyone here that is new to the caucus process?” Iowa state senator Brad Zaun asks the crowd in Cedar Falls. Quite a few hands shoot up. “It doesn’t matter,” Zaun reassures them. “All the rallies that I’ve went to, there’s so many Democrats, so many independents. You can show up at the caucus on February first and you can switch to a Republican. That allows you to vote Mr. Trump.”
The latest Des Moines Register poll found that 2016 would be the first caucus for 29 percent of likely Republican caucusgoers. “The only time we saw it higher was the final poll in 2008,” says J. Ann Selzer, the well-respected pollster who conducts the DMR survey. In 2008, Barack Obama turned out thousands of young people and liberals as the share of first-time caucusgoers spiked to 57 percent.
Many of Trump’s supporters may not be traditional Republican voters, but Trump argues it’s crazy to think they will stand in the cold to attend his rallies but won’t show up on caucus night. It’s a fair point. Tim Miller, a middle-aged ironworker, didn’t caucus in 2008 or 2012 or even vote in either general election. He says the Cedar Falls event is his third Trump rally this year and he’s certain to caucus. “He doesn’t need PAC money or anything,” Miller says when asked why he’s backing Trump. “He’s not a bought-and-paid-for politician.” The Trump campaign collects the email address of every rallygoer, and Miller says he receives messages daily from the Trump campaign.
This remains a tight race between Cruz and Trump in the polls, and the January 28 debate could swing it one way or the other. “Things tend to be on the fluid side in Iowa,” says Selzer. “We look at more candidates than any other state. There’s no real upside to locking in all that early. You’re going to go to a caucus where your neighbors will talk to you about who they’re supporting and why they’re supporting them. Iowans tend to be a little more open up till the very, very end.”
Selzer says that as something of a warning to prognosticators: Even a candidate other than Cruz or Trump could win. In 2012, Iowa victor Rick Santorum was polling in the single digits two weeks before the caucuses. “Anything can happen in that pack of candidates,” she says. “It is impossible as a person who pays attention to the numbers and history to write anybody off.”
John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
