Trump, Haley top GOP candidate list on eve of primary season

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As the calendar finally turns to the U.S. election year of 2024, it is useful to think of the fight for the presidential nominations in the most important election of the 21st century in the sonata-allegro terms that defined the music of the mid- to late-18th century.

That was the period when American democracy took form – and it is the period that gave the West the musical form that is comprised of exposition, development and recapitulation.

With two weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses, the first test of the 2024 presidential election, the exposition period is far in the past. A baker’s dozen of Republicans declared their candidacies, all with high hopes and, for all but former president Donald Trump, slender chances of prevailing. The development period ended last week. The six candidates who remain in the race have refined their cases, polished their stump speeches, made their ad buys and identified their target voters.

Now begins the period of recapitulation: the final, frantic and frenetic appeals in Iowa, where the broad cornfields and scattered urban centres are crowded with candidates, and in New Hampshire, where the remote mountain fastnesses and the bustling towns off four interstate highways provide the setting for Main Street walks and town hall meetings.

For residents of those two states, the campaign has come home. For the rest of the country, the campaign illuminates a vital element of politics in the United States.

From start (for the campaign begins in these two early political states) to finish (where it ends, barring court appeals, in the November general election), the peculiar American political system makes national politics a state matter.

Presidential nomination fights have a regional feel, the opening events beginning in the classic Midwest setting of Iowa (spread in 499 kilometres of fertile farmland between the sector’s two defining rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, and the traditional capital of both the tuna-hot-dish casserole, fashioned with cheese, carrots, peas and onion soup mix, and the fried pork tenderloin sandwich). That is followed by eight days of feverish campaigning in the old Yankee redoubt of New Hampshire (the birthplace of Daniel Webster, the pre-eminent defender of the Union in the runup to the Civil War, and the sometime home of Robert Frost, the poet laureate of rusticated New England values).

With most states possessing a pre-mixed political character (California will go Democratic blue, Alabama Republican red, and so on), the campaign will be concentrated on a mere few purplish swing states where the real fight will be conducted (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia, maybe New Hampshire). The Democrats start out with about 232 electoral votes, the Republicans about 219, with the swing states determining which of the candidates reaches the 270 electoral votes required to win the White House.

But the next fortnight will be a contest that can be defined in five words of one syllable: Will he – or can she?

Will Mr. Trump, who holds onto a formidable lead in Iowa (more than 30 points in most polls) and a smaller one in New Hampshire (as small as 4 percentage points in one poll, but in safe double digits in most others), maintain his lead, build momentum and breeze to the status of presumptive nominee by mid-March?

Or can former governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Mr. Trump’s onetime ambassador to the United Nations, have a respectable showing in Iowa and inch close enough to Mr. Trump in New Hampshire, where she won the endorsement of popular GOP Governor Chris Sununu, to create a two-person race in late winter and early spring? She had a serious bungle last week; she seemed befuddled that slavery was a cause of the Civil War, which actually began in her state in 1861. Overall, however, her campaign is in a classic squeeze that she expressed with more precision than a score of political commentators have managed: “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough,” she said last month in New Hampshire. “Pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough.”

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has stepped up his campaigning in Iowa, principally with the mass rallies that suit his muscular political style rather than the more intimate campaigning that Jimmy Carter pioneered in the state in 1976 and has been copied ever since. “He’s not completely doing the Iowa thing but his campaign is organizing and constantly instructing his supporters how to caucus,” said Barbara Trish, the Grinnell College political scientist and, with William Menner, author of the 2022 Inside the Bubble: Campaigns, Caucuses, and the Future of the Presidential Nomination Process. “That didn’t happen the last two times, and it could be important.”

Three vital questions must be answered before the end of this month:

• How will Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose campaign has been hindered by colourful internal personnel politics that have been conducted with more passion than his public appearances, fare in Iowa, where he just competed a marathon of visiting all 99 counties – and can he finish far enough ahead of Ms. Haley (and within 20 percentage points of Mr. Trump) to remain a credible candidate going into New Hampshire? His conundrum: How to thread the needle between opposing Mr. Trump for the nomination and co-opting the 45th president’s issues and his resentments toward the elites.
• How will former governor Chris Christie of New Jersey do in Iowa (likely very poorly) and in New Hampshire (where his anti-Trump message has resonance)? His eventual crossroads: Will he in time side with Ms. Haley – and time is of the essence – in a desperate move to head off Mr. Trump’s third GOP presidential nomination?
• And is Vivek Ramaswamy, the business executive turned take-no-prisoners, right-wing pugilist, truly the voice of a new generation thirsty for new leadership but whose voters are concentrated in the liberal-leaning university towns of Iowa City and Ames in Iowa and Durham and Hanover in New Hampshire? The mystery: Is he onto something by basically bypassing television advertising and, in a back-to-the-future vision, focusing on what his campaign calls “addressable advertising” (the traditional retail campaign tools of an aggressive schedule of campaign appearances at Pizza Ranch outlets and community halls, telephone calls, social mail and neighbourhood canvassing, plus new-age social media)?

As the campaign reaches the crucial tests in Iowa and New Hampshire, some of the attention is diverted to an unusual venue far beyond the campaign stumping grounds and debate stages: the courts, where Mr. Trump faces 91 felony counts in four indictments – plus important judicial decisions regarding the nature and extent of presidential immunity from prosecution.

“The Supreme Court may stay away from this,” said Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University historian. “One way or another, court tests will be a mini-boon for Trump. It builds his outlaw persona and he will be able to fundraise on it.”