In Iowa, where the assault on the former president should begin, she hovers around 16 per cent, a whopping 35 points below Trump and even below DeSantis. After all, she languishes at a meagre 11 per cent in national polls. Yet, despite impressing the press with her strong debating skills and gaining growing financial support from a number of wealthy donors, Haley is not a strong candidate – in fact, she is quite weak. The only apparent exception is the great hope of mainstream conservatives, former Governor of South Carolina and former US Ambassador to the UN (under Trump) Nikki Haley. Non-Trumpian or openly anti-Trump Republican candidates – from Trump’s former Vice-President Mike Pence to New Jersey’s ex-governor Chris Christie – are little more than footnotes in the primary book. Clearly, right-wing voters prefer the original to the copy. Their strategies do not seem to have paid off: their combined support amounts to a miserable 15 per cent ( 11 and 4.5 per cent respectively) of the conservative electorate. Other candidates, like the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, followed suit. Rather than emphasising his greater electability based on his economic record and resistance to anti-Covid-19 regulations (very much unpopular amongst US right-wing voters), DeSantis doubled down on a fierce anti-progressive culture war, often taking more extreme positions than Trump himself on issues such as abortion. In the following months, however, it became clear that this assumption rested on shaky ground. Īfter candidates endorsed by Trump performed poorly in the 2022 midterm elections, the expectation was that the Republican Party would shift towards less controversial (though no less radical) figures, such as Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, fresh from a triumphant re-election. After Super Tuesday on 5 March 2024, when sixteen states will select their delegates to for the Republican convention in Milwaukee in July, the former president should have closed the nomination file. State-level polls show Trump leading everywhere, starting from Iowa, often with gaps not too dissimilar from the national data. The idea that another candidate could gain such momentum from a victory in the early Republican primary season in Iowa or New Hampshire that they can go on to beat the former president seems remote. Opinion polls credit the former president with a staggering advantage (up to 63 per cent) in the race for the Republican nomination and have him slightly ahead of Democrat Joe Biden in the general election. It is a menacing shadow, not only for what the former president could do if he returned to office but also because the political and institutional balances of the United States are threatened by the repercussions of his many legal troubles, the latest of which could even see him excluded from the race for the White House. Donald Trump casts a long shadow over the upcoming presidential – and congressional – elections in the United States.
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