Jean-Éric Branaa is a lecturer at the University of Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas and a specialist in the United States. He is the author of Geopolitics of the United States (PUF, 2022).
LE FIGARO. - On Monday, January 15, Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses with more than 50% of the vote, taking a serious lead over his competitors. Does this confirm his status as the clear favourite to win the nomination and face Joe Biden in the presidential election?
Jean-Éric BRANAA. - Donald Trump has always presented himself as a challenger and assured that he would turn the table upside down, as he did in 2016. We can now see that he has an outgoing president's score, i.e. more than 30 steps ahead of his competitors. He is therefore both a challenger and an incumbent. This is unprecedented in an election campaign. In short, Trump reigns supreme in this primary, which he should win handily, and it should be folded by March.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in whom conservatives had pinned their hopes, is now far behind the former US president. How can we explain this descent into hell?
It's not a descent into hell at all. Ron DeSantis is second in Iowa, which is pretty honorable compared to Donald Trump. And then, he did very well in conservative strongholds. For example, in Story County, in the center of the country, he won 26.5% of the vote against 33.9% for Trump, in the very conservative Lyon County, he is at 28% while Trump is at 58% while Nikki Haley is only at 7%. In short, Ron DeSantis is doing more than well in these counties. He's taking back the votes of conservatives who are tired of Trump and his business. The governor of Florida, younger than the former president, is emerging as a challenger for the coming years.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley finished third with about 19 percent of the vote. But can she do well in New Hampshire next week and eventually establish herself as a credible presidential candidate?
Nikki Haley's positioning over the past few weeks has not been good. She shot herself in the foot by positioning herself as a direct opponent of Donald Trump and attacking him head-on, particularly on his legal woes or the invasion of the Capitol, which displeased Republicans.
The issue of immigration has been central since the beginning of the campaign.
Jean-Éric Branaa
She has put herself outside the Republican campaign. Now she is under attack by the most fervent Trumpists, who accuse her of being a Democrat and I believe that label will stick to her for a long time.
It's possible that it will manage to score respectably, and much higher, in New Hampshire, which is mostly made up of CSP+ graduates. But I don't think that it can become, in the long run, a real major rival for the former president and that it will mainly serve to feed the media electronics, but in the end it will not be a major rival.
What were the themes of the beginning of the campaign?
When we ask Republican voters in caucuses, as we do all pollsters, we realize that two-thirds of them are convinced that the election was stolen from Donald Trump in 2020 and that there is a problem with democracy in the United States. In addition, the issue of immigration has been central since the beginning of the campaign.
Some commentators claimed that "wokeism" was a central theme of the election. This is an important question for many Republican voters, but all of them have the same opinion: they are opposed to woke ideology, if it can be defined at all. It's not an issue that mobilizes voters today, in a primary. On the other hand, it will be more decisive in September and October, during the face-to-face with Joe Biden.