In the three months since he announced his bid for a comeback, Trump has not set foot in Iowa, the first place his claim of party dominance will be tested early next year.
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Nikki Haley is swinging through Iowa this week fresh off announcing her presidential campaign. Her fellow South Carolinian Republican, Sen. Tim Scott, will also be here as he decides his political future. And former Vice President Mike Pence was just in the state courting influential evangelical Christian activists.
“It is genuinely impossible for this guy to try to manage these expectations. They are enormous. They are self-made,” said Luke Martz, a veteran Iowa Republican strategist who helped lead Mitt Romney’s 2012 Iowa caucus campaign. “I don’t see how anyone who is saying ‘I’m the guy’ can come in and even get even a second-place finish.”
Though the caucuses remain nearly a year off, they remain the first event on the calendar, and some Iowa GOP activists have taken notice of Trump’s absence. The issue, an early focus of 2024 Republican presidential prospects, is particularly contentious among Christian conservatives, with whom Pence routinely says he identifies. And at Wednesday’s event at a pizza restaurant — it had the feel of an early caucus campaign stop — Pence illustrated its traction.
Quietly making inroads is former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who visited Iowa in January, and met last week with legislative Republicans in the Capitol in Des Moines and Republican activists in western Iowa.
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