DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Ambitious Republicans are starting to act in Iowa, there is a long testing ground for future presidents. The first step is to find out if the activists have outgrown the last one.
Former President Donald Trump remains a massive presence in Iowa, where he won twice by healthy margins. He hinted that he will run again, and its false statements that the last election was stolen still dominates some Republican circles.
But that does not mean that Trump froze the field of potential Republican presidential candidates to 2,024. Several Republican Party politicians have plans to travel to Iowa and other states with early nomination this spring. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is the first since the election to personally assess the interest of Iowa residents this week.
Party activists say these early arrivals are welcome, despite Trump’s enduring popularity and the widespread belief that he was somehow wronged in his defeat in 2020. But interviews with Republican Party county party leaders and local activists in across the state expose the difference between his declared love for Trump and the hope that he will run again.
“There are Trumpsters who can’t wait for him to run again. They are the only ones who still moan and regret that they were duped in the election, ”said Gwen Ecklund, a former veteran county president in conservative western Iowa. “But there are some – ordinary Republicans – who are turning the page.”
That’s what Pompeo will be looking for at this early stage. The former Trump diplomat and successful Kansas politician planned to speak on Friday with a regular Republican breakfast group and promising Republicans in Des Moines, as well as meet privately with senior Iowa party officials.
Pompeo has just come out of a national political lecture at the United States Conservative Union CPAC conference last month in Florida. As expected in Iowa, Pompeo distinguished himself subtly, without alienating Republicans still loyal to Trump and waiting for a return in 2024.
“I had a chance to bring American hostages from Pyongyang home,” Pompeo told the audience in Orlando. “’America first’ requires a lot of courage. You need a secretary of state willing to come into a room and tell you what it looks like, and a president who will support you ”.
Others will try to follow the same line.
Florida Senator Rick Scott plans to follow the old path of presidential prospects with an April 1 trip to Cedar Rapids. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott is scheduled to meet Republicans in Quad Cities in eastern Iowa on April 15, all signs of an exceptionally early start to the 2024 campaign.
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who met virtually with Republicans in the early New Hampshire state, is also making plans to visit Iowa in the coming months, advisers said.
They will have a fair hearing, said Henry County Republican President Nancy Amos. But most in his southeastern corner of Iowa want to see Trump run again.
“Oh, sure, we will hear from you. It’s not that we’re not going to give others a chance, ”said Amos, who represents one of a series of Mississippi River counties that Trump carried after Democrat Barack Obama before. “It’s just that most of the conversation is about Trump.”
Trump’s enduring popularity, however, does not mean that everyone wants him to run again. Although Trump won over Crawford County – where Ecklund is co-chairman of the Republican Party – by more than 30 percentage points twice, she found Republicans “ready to move on” and “tired of extreme controversies”.
Across the state, opinions about Trump have declined somewhat since he conquered Iowa by about 8 percentage points in November. In The Des Moines Register’s March Iowa poll, 53% of Iowa residents viewed the former president in an unfavorable way and 45% in a favorable way, almost the opposite of a year ago.
In a non-scientific measure, a straw poll of 1,000 participants at the CPAC conference found that 97% of these devout conservative activists approved of the work that Trump had done as president, although only 68% said he, now 74, should run again. in four years.
Still, Trump elicited much applause and a standing ovation in Orlando when he said to the public, “Who knows, I might even decide to beat them a third time,” alluding to his false claim that he won the 2020 elections.
Members of his own administration, including Attorney General William Barr, say no evidence of widespread electoral fraud was discovered. Courts in several battlefield states have launched a flurry of lawsuits filed in the name of the president.
In a January Pew Research poll, carried out after the deadly uproar on U.S. Capitol Hill by Trump supporters, a majority of 57% of Republicans said Trump should remain an important political figure for many years to come.
To maintain his influence, he will have to find a way back into the spotlight, a challenge without his Twitter account, said Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who advised Republican Senate candidates, including Iowa Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst.
“At some point he will find out how to get more attention than he is getting now, or he will disappear at sunset,” said Goeas. “I just think Donald Trump two years from now will be very different from Donald Trump a month ago.”
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Hannah Fingerhut contributed from Washington.