Former President Donald Trump is dominating the field of Republican presidential hopefuls in the Hawkeye State, according to an Iowa State University/Civiqs poll released Friday.
The poll dropped a day before Trump and GOP presidential nominee rivals, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, are slated to appear at the Cy-Hawk showdown, the much-anticipated annual college football game between the Iowa State Cyclones and the Iowa Hawkeyes in Ames.
Trump leads with 51 percent support among the poll’s 434 respondents who say they will “definitely” or “probably” will attend the Iowa Republican Caucuses early next year. DeSantis comes in a distant second, at 14 percent, followed by former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (10 percent), Ramaswamy (9 percent), and South Carolina U.S. Senator Tim Scott (6 percent).
When asked who their second choice was, 21 percent of respondents said DeSantis, followed by Ramaswamy (18 percent), and Scott (16 percent). Trump is the second choice of 14 percent of caucus-goers, followed by Haley (11 percent).
The poll, conducted September 2-7, has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.8 percent.
On the negative side of the ledger, nearly a third of respondents said they did not want former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to be the nominee, according to the Iowa State University News Service. Christie leads in the dubious category, perhaps not surprisingly. The former governor, who has made his opposition to Trump a significant part of his campaign, performed terribly in the 2016 Iowa caucuses and has said he will not waste his time on the Hawkeye State.
Another 20 percent of respondents said they don’t want former Vice President Mike Pence to be the nominee. Pence is polling at just 1 percent; Christie is at 3 percent in the survey.
The only other candidate with more than 10 percent opposition is Trump, with 18 percent of poll respondents saying they did not want him as the nominee, according the university news service.
“The race right now is clearly President Trump, a small second tier of four candidates — DeSantis, Haley, Ramaswamy, and Scott — and then a lot of candidates without much support at all,” said Dave Peterson, Luken Professor of Political Science at Iowa State. “Trump’s lead is strong, but it also might be something of a ceiling because most Iowans have strong opinions about him.”
Scott and DeSantis in particular have poured in a considerable sum in campaign ads running throughout the first-in-the-nation caucus state. As of this week, the DeSantis-backing super PAC had spent $16 million on TV ads in the Iowa market, with a new $25 million ad buy in Iowa and first primary state New Hampshire, according to CBS News.
A poll commissioned by the DeSantis campaign found the Florida governor with 22 percent support compared to Trump’s 45 percent. That poll, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies Sept. 5-6, has a margin of error of nearly 5 percent. Per usual, the POS poll doesn’t include a topline or demographic information about the respondents.
Yet, the pollsters insist in a memo, “This is a two-man race in Iowa. Now that the dust has settled after the first debate, Trump and DeSantis are the only two candidates with significant support – nobody else eclipses 6%.”
That’s a different take than many other polls, including the Iowa State University/Civiqs poll, which shows Haley and Ramaswamy nipping at DeSantis’ heels.
What remains clear is that the four indictments brought against Trump by his political enemies have done nothing to diminish his dominance in the contest.
“We’ve never seen anything like these indictments. They are a threat to American democracy, and Republican voters realize that,” Trump pollster John McLaughlin told The Iowa Star this week on NewsRadio 1040 WHO. “[The indictments] are only because he’s ahead in the polls. And that’s what I told him, ‘You’re ahead in the polls, you’re going to get indicted.’”
A CNN poll released this week shows Trump ahead of President Joe Biden by 1 percentage point in a general election contest.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
