Welcome to Trail Mix, your 2024 election sanity guide. See something interesting on the trail? Email me at jake.lahut@thedailybeast.com.
This week, we look ahead to a major challenge facing Nikki Haley, even if she pulls off an early primary upset. Plus, an overview of the candidates’ closing messages before the first votes are cast.
BUILT THE WALL
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Even if Nikki Haley’s dream scenario comes true—a strong finish in Iowa’s caucuses and an upset win in New Hampshire—she’s going to run headfirst into a lethal obstacle.
Call it the great Trump firewall.
After the early primary states, contests loom in late February and early March across a slate of states where the former president has a dominant upper hand—and where anyone else would have to work fast to establish any organization.
Donald Trump’s strength in delegate-rich states like Texas, North Carolina, and California—all of which vote on Super Tuesday, March 5—has GOP operatives foreseeing a swift end to this anticlimactic primary campaign, even if Haley, or potentially Ron DeSantis, manage to beat expectations.
“Right now it is very hard to map out where either Nikki or Ron beat Trump in any state,” a former senior Trump administration official looking to support a different candidate told The Daily Beast.
In past competitive primaries, campaigns have invested early in communications and organizing muscle for states voting on Super Tuesday and beyond. But Trump’s popularity across the board has meant that his challengers have had to go all-in on Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, in hopes of piercing his air of inevitability early and attracting quick donor investment in later states.
DeSantis began his campaign promising to run a nationwide operation, with his deep-pocketed super PAC spending millions on door-knocking and organizing in Super Tuesday states. But when the that PAC faltered, along with the Florida governor’s poll numbers, DeSantis decided to bank it all on Iowa.
Haley, meanwhile, has split her resources more evenly between Iowa and New Hampshire as she enjoys a late surge, though her support is strongest in the latter state, which votes on Jan. 23.
While Republican operatives say Haley has foundations in other states—which could help to quickly stand up operations should a flood of cash come—the organization looks thin beyond her home state of South Carolina.
Nikki Haley speaks with a supporter during a campaign event at the Olympic Theatre in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA/AFP via Getty ImagesOnly recently did Haley get some serious cover, with the Koch network’s Americans For Prosperity group arriving last week to drop $17.4 million in digital ads and mailers across not just Iowa and New Hampshire, but also South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states of Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
But aside from a summer phone-banking session aimed at voters in Oklahoma from the pro-DeSantis Super PAC, a Daily Beast review of independent expenditures from outside groups across the Super Tuesday states revealed no other spending on advertising or voter outreach, which outside groups have to disclose. (The public won’t know what the campaigns have spent on the ground in total until the fourth quarter filing deadline on Jan. 31.)
The DeSantis and Haley campaigns did not respond to requests to detail their organizations and investment after the early primary states. But neither candidate currently has sizable operations in states beyond the first four contests—and their distant polling from Trump nationally has underscored the lack of presence.
It’s not as if Trump has a massive, unbeatable organization in the later primary states; his team hasn’t spent much time or money in those places either. Aside from having rolled out endorsements through the primary calendar, the former president’s campaign seems to have a light footprint in many states, like Texas, according to GOP operatives who spoke with The Daily Beast.
But Trump’s stubborn lead will be difficult for Haley or DeSantis to eat into if they don’t get sprawling operations going fast.
Even though the Trump campaign doesn’t have scores of boots on the ground ready to knock on doors, those close to the former president’s operation say he doesn’t need them. (The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.)
For Trump, little organization is needed—at least for now—in places where his opponents aren’t competing and where polls show him up by 50 points or more.
“It’s a pretty hard firewall,” said one national GOP operative.
Perhaps Trump’s greatest asset is his campaign’s work to shape the primary schedule so they could mathematically clinch the nomination on Super Tuesday, when fully 30 percent of all Republican presidential delegates will be up for grabs. Notably, that date falls before any potentially damaging information could come out about Trump in court, much less a conviction.
“Trump did something unanticipated,” Doug Brinkley, a top presidential historian and professor at Rice University, told The Daily Beast. “While everyone was focusing on his 91 charges, he had gerrymandered the Republican Party. Nobody was focusing on how he came in and was able to create, with the RNC, a calendar that plays into his hand on Super Tuesday. He’s been able to build a series of iron walls around him in case Plan A and Plan B fail.”
The most effective overall strategy from the Trump campaign has been their successful efforts to convert more states in the GOP primary to a winner-take-all system, where whoever finishes first comes away with all of the delegates—and other candidates do not pick up any at all, no matter how well they do. Under the new rules this year, up to 38 of the 52 nominating contests could award all of their delegates to the winner.
Notably, the DeSantis PAC’s withdrawal from California coincided with the Trump campaign’s successful efforts to overhaul the state’s delegate allocation process. Now, California will award all 169 of its delegates—the most of any state—to whoever gets more than 50 percent of the vote.
A senior aide to a rival campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity to The Daily Beast, begrudgingly credited top Trump advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita for orchestrating such a favorable playing field.
“I mean, the genius of the Trump organization—and I've wiped the vomit out of my mouth saying that—is, like, Susie and LaCivita have really changed the dynamics of this entire primary,” the Republican said.
Other Republicans with presidential campaign experience told The Daily Beast they see Super Tuesday as “already baked-in” for Trump, pointing to the advantages he enjoys from support among state-level GOPs remade in his image since 2016.
Donald Trump Jr. speaks during an event in Urbandale, Iowa.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesIn California, Texas, and North Carolina—which account for the highest delegate shares on Super Tuesday—Trump leads Haley and DeSantis by between 40 and nearly 60 points. The limited polling in other Super Tuesday states has been much more in line with his national lead, which stands at an average of nearly 50 points in FiveThirtyEight’s weighted model.
Even the anti-Trump Republicans who spoke with The Daily Beast remain pessimistic about a candidate like Haley, even if she were to overperform expectations, gathering enough momentum to put a dent in the Trump machine on Super Tuesday.
“There’s a small, small chance this thing gets upended,” the former Trump administration official said. They predicted the battle “won’t be fought on the airwaves,” nor would it come down to the ground game.
When asked if they still believed the conventional wisdom about a New Hampshire win translating into actual momentum among voters in other states, the rival campaign aide sighed.
“That’s the bill of goods we’ve all sold ourselves.”
ALWAYS BE CLOSING
With just days until Iowa Republicans head to churches and high school gyms to nominate a presidential candidate, the campaigns are camped out in the Hawkeye State delivering their closing pitches. Trail Mix surveyed the field’s final messages to voters in Iowa:
DeSantis, after hitting all 99 of Iowa’s counties, is offering a streamlined version of his stump speech to any Iowans who somehow might not have gotten a chance to hear it yet.
The big takeaway DeSantis wants to leave with voters: He’s the one guy left fighting for them.
“Donald Trump is running on his issues. Nikki Haley is running on her donors’ issues,” DeSantis says at the beginning of most speeches these days. “I’m running on your issues.”
Never a natural in the close-quarters campaigning of Iowa, DeSantis has trimmed his stump speech down by about 20 minutes, according to the Associated Press, and tweaked his campaign slogan to “Stop The Swamp” instead of the “Fight. Win. Lead” tagline his Never Back Down super PAC used for months.
Haley, meanwhile, is doing more manifesting than hard selling in her closing pitch.
She’s finally ramped up her criticism of Trump, with the gloves coming off in a brawl over a non-existent South Carolina gas tax, of all things.
The main point Haley is hammering home: She’s the one candidate with real momentum. While she has not banked as much on Iowa as DeSantis—New Hampshire is more favorable turf for Haley—the caucus state will be an early test of whether her support is broad enough to truly threaten Trump’s vice grip on the GOP.
Seeking to prove that Trump and DeSantis are worried, her campaign is increasingly reveling in their attacks. Recently, her team sent out a press release titled “Haley to Her Opponents: Why are You so Obsessed with Me?”
“Isn’t that sweet of him spending so much time and money against me?” Haley said of recent attack ads against her from the Trump side. On DeSantis, she called him “desperate,” and said “he’s lying because he’s losing” in a Fox News town hall on Jan. 5.
Trump, on the other hand, has sought to project an air of inevitability in his third GOP primary contest, starting with a big Iowa victory. So far, he has dispatched surrogates and allies to campaign in Iowa while he has remained in Florida or jetted to any of the jurisdictions where he faces criminal indictment.
If Trump has any closing message at all to Iowans, it’s been to pressure them to show up and caucus for him, no matter how many polls show him with a commanding lead.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks at a campaign event at Jethro's BBQ in Ames, Iowa.
Scott Olson/Getty ImagesAt rallies in Iowa in the campaign’s home stretch, Trump stayed focused on his bigger foe, President Joe Biden, mocking his age and suggesting he suffers from cognitive decline. He returned to favorite subjects like downplaying the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Perhaps the clearest possible closing message from Trump came at a Fox News town hall in Iowa on Wednesday night, where the former president put forward a muddled vision of his plans on the economy, abortion rights, and other key issues, while insisting that his second term would not be one of “retribution,” as he previously suggested.
“I’m not gonna have time for retribution,” he said. “We’re going to make this country so successful again.”
And don’t forget about Vivek Ramaswamy, who has literally moved to Iowa and traveled all 99 counties twice. The young entrepreneur is closing with pro-Trump conspiratorial flair, claiming in a video message that “they” want to narrow the primary to a two-person race between Trump and Haley in order to “eliminate Trump.”
“I go so far as to say if you want to save Trump and his legacy, but save Trump, the man himself, I’m gonna ask you to vote for me,” Ramaswamy told a crowd on Wednesday. “And I know that’s counterintuitive, but that’s what this country requires.”
IN THIS ECONOMY?
During Wednesday night’s split-screen in Iowa, three candidates spread across two stages shared one thing in common: a borderline delusional vision of the U.S. economy.
Haley proposed a simple yet potentially catastrophic solution to bring down inflation, again promising to “quit borrowing, cut up the credit cards.” Such a proposal could crater the economy, with the federal government projected to have racked up $6.3 trillion in spending over 2023; it will need to borrow around $2 trillion to cover the revenue shortfall.
DeSantis, meanwhile, managed to undo his “flat tax” plan in a matter of seconds after CNN moderator Dana Bash followed up to ask him if working class Americans would pay the same as billionaires under his plan.
The Florida governor suggested exempting “the first forty, fifty grand” of individual income under his plan before the unspecified flat tax rate would kick in.
The candidates all painted a more dire picture of the economy than the numbers currently indicate, particularly Trump.
The former president suggested Americans are paying “$4 or $5” per gallon on gas, even though the national average sat at $3.07 that day.
Both Trump and DeSantis talked extensively about pursuing more off shore and domestic oil drilling, even though oil exports in the U.S. are at record levels and projected to reach a new record in 2024.
To cap things off, Trump doubled down on his recent comments hoping the economy would crash under President Biden.
“I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover,” Trump said during his Fox News town hall Wednesday night.
OFF THE BEATEN PATH
Vote First Or Die. New Hampshire and the Democratic National Committee continue to feud over the party's decision to snub the state's first in the nation primary status.
Now, the fight is getting litigious, NBC News first reported this week, with the state’s attorney general’s office sending a cease-and-desist order to the DNC. “Telling any person qualified to register to vote or vote in New Hampshire that the January 23, 2024, New Hampshire Democratic Presidential Primary Election is ‘meaningless’... constitutes an attempt to prevent or deter New Hampshire voters from participating,” New Hampshire assistant AG Brendan O’Donnell wrote to the party, referring to the state’s unsanctioned contest taking place the same day as the GOP primary.
Although the battle shows no signs of slowing up or getting less petty, Democratic sources in New Hampshire familiar with the situation say party brass will keep their powder dry until the 2028 calendar is in the works.
“Turn This Shit Off.” Ramaswamy released an unhinged ad on Wednesday night after failing to qualify for the CNN debate. Without his own counterprogramming option à la Trump, the fading biopharmaceutical entrepreneur decided to go all out and make Iowa viewers at home wonder if their TV sets were malfunctioning. “Take your remote, and turn this [bleep] off,” Ramaswamy said in the direct-to-camera ad airing on CNN during the Haley-DeSantis debate. The Ramaswamy campaign told The Daily Beast they placed the ad across all nine media markets across Iowa, meaning plenty of people in neighboring states got a heavy dose of Vivek in primetime.
TWEET OF THE WEEK
CBS News reporter Jake Rosen captured one of the most iconic photos of the cycle so far, capturing a dejected looking Dean Phillips sitting across the back of his campaign truck next to a full box of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Taking a moment to contemplate how he reached this point in a snowy hotel parking lot in Manchester, New Hampshire, Phillips grappled with the reality no voters were going to show up to his event. “Sometimes you build it, and they don’t come,” Phillips said, quoting the movie Field of Dreams, an iconic Iowa movie.
CAMPAIGN LIT
Burning bridges. Chris Christie suspended his campaign on Wednesday—but not before getting caught on a hot mic trashing his rivals, Jake Lahut reports.
Crisis season. Our Jose Pagliery steps back and traces the various constitutional crises Trump may be sparking as the 2024 election begins in earnest.
Birds of a feather. North Carolina governor frontrunner and top Trump ally Mark Robinson privately met with election denier Ginni Thomas in March 2021 before discrediting Biden’s win, Sam Brodey scooped.
Darker money. A little-known campaign finance fight could make it harder to understand who’s funding any political campaign or committee, Roger Sollenberger reports.
All hat. The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich dissects Haley’s tough talk—and finds little of substance underneath it.
Protest culture. Younger aides in the Biden White House are irking their older colleagues over their outspoken views on Israel-Palestine, testing a new paradigm where junior staff diverge from the politics of their bosses, Eugene Daniels reports for Politico.
