Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

Last Saturday, two days before the Iowa caucus, the Michael Smerconish daily question was "Is the Republican nomination already over". I voted "no" in the early morning, but was shocked to see that the majority had voted yes.

I was dubious about this, but then on the Smerconish CNN 9 AM show, he had an analyst on who pointed out that, while past Iowa caucus results were not very predictive of the final winner of the nomination, in all those past cases the winner never got more than 25% of the caucus vote. In this year, by contrast, Trump was polling around 50%, and that is in fact what he got. So, this analyst's conclusion was that the nominatin was in the bag for Trump.

And now another poll shocker. The question in last Tuesday's Smerconish poll was, "Is Donald Trump a more or less formidable candidate than he was in 2020?" I voted "less", but, amazingly, the majority voted more! While I don't have much admiration for the intelligence of the average US voter, surely voters will take into account all of Trump's proven negatives this time around.

Analysis in the past few days has shed a new light on the significance, or lack thereof, of Trump's big victory in Iowa. Analysts have pointed out that Iowa is totally unrepresentative of the Republican party nationwide. The bad weather helped Trump and DeSantis, and worked against Haley, based on polling of how enthusiastic each candidate's supporters were. Further, the analysts point out that the signifcant fact is not that 50% of caucus-goers voted for Trump, but thast 50% voted against him. The examople has been given of Obama running again, and having only 50% of his party opposing him. That would never happen.

Similarly, some pundits make much of the fact that 2/3 of GOP Trump supporters say a criminal conviction of Trump wouldn't make a difference to their vote. However, other pundits make the more significant point that 1/3 of this group would be influenced by such a conviction. In a general election, this level of defection would be a disaster for Trump. Consider that he starts with less than 50% of the electorate supporting him. Lose a portion of that and he loses in a landslide. Consider that Trump's approval rating during his presidency never once reached 50% (it fluctuated between 35% and 49%).