Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ team had knocked on 947,000 doors across Iowa while the candidate had visited all 99 counties. It turns out Iowans just weren’t into him.
The former Yale baseball player would touch them all in Iowa in the months to come, collecting the GOP-beloved governor’s endorsement and mimicking senior Sen. Chuck Grassley’s annual 99-county pilgrimage, all with his charming young family in tow.
From the sweltering August heat of Iowa State Fair campaign stops to the sub-zero trudge Iowans made to their neighborhood caucuses Monday, DeSantis was never able to dip deep enough into that well of GOP voters who like Trump but were open to an alternative.
Even in this small sampling of voters — roughly 110,000 of Iowa’s 2.2 million people, practically a focus group on the national scale — Trump proved himself to be a daunting hurdle for his party’s rivals in a state he’d already carried twice.
But the bigger question is how does his campaign, low on cash, survive until the South Carolina primary, which remained 39 days away, especially given Trump’s relatively easy fundraising and donors who had waited to see strength from Haley begin to come off the fence.
While nearly half of the voters on Monday were looking for someone besides Trump, the former president could easily claim a majority of support in this increasingly conservative state, where Republicans hold all but one statewide elected office, both houses of the legislature and each of six seats in Congress.
As the snow fell along with temperatures in the final days of the campaign, perhaps all some voters needed to see was the line outside Simpson College as the morning sun offered weak comfort to the 100 people waiting in 18-below-zero weather to enter to see Trump’s midday event, which would draw more than 1,000 to the Kent Student Center.
The original article contains 1,114 words, the summary contains 281 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The former Yale baseball player would touch them all in Iowa in the months to come, collecting the GOP-beloved governor’s endorsement and mimicking senior Sen. Chuck Grassley’s annual 99-county pilgrimage, all with his charming young family in tow.
From the sweltering August heat of Iowa State Fair campaign stops to the sub-zero trudge Iowans made to their neighborhood caucuses Monday, DeSantis was never able to dip deep enough into that well of GOP voters who like Trump but were open to an alternative.
Even in this small sampling of voters — roughly 110,000 of Iowa’s 2.2 million people, practically a focus group on the national scale — Trump proved himself to be a daunting hurdle for his party’s rivals in a state he’d already carried twice.
But the bigger question is how does his campaign, low on cash, survive until the South Carolina primary, which remained 39 days away, especially given Trump’s relatively easy fundraising and donors who had waited to see strength from Haley begin to come off the fence.
While nearly half of the voters on Monday were looking for someone besides Trump, the former president could easily claim a majority of support in this increasingly conservative state, where Republicans hold all but one statewide elected office, both houses of the legislature and each of six seats in Congress.
As the snow fell along with temperatures in the final days of the campaign, perhaps all some voters needed to see was the line outside Simpson College as the morning sun offered weak comfort to the 100 people waiting in 18-below-zero weather to enter to see Trump’s midday event, which would draw more than 1,000 to the Kent Student Center.
The original article contains 1,114 words, the summary contains 281 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!