IOWA - DesMoines Register-NBC-Sezler Poll: Haley rising, but Trump remains far ahead.

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63% of Trump first-choicers say their minds are made up (therefore, 27% of voters are locked in for Trump); 30% of DeSantis first-choicers (therefore, around 5% are locked in for DeSantis), and 26% of Haley first-choicers (around 4% are locked in for Haley). A further 5% report that they are locked in for some candidate outside the top three, for 41% locked in total, which strikes me as really strange -- are Ramaswamy and Christie supporters really so entrenched?

This isn't a bad poll for Trump by any means, but I don't think only 27% considering themselves certain to vote for him and 59% of voters considering themselves still open to persuasion by someone is one of his better ones. (Also, that 59% frankly seems like an underestimate based on low numbers locked in for 'specific candidates' and many candidates having very high 'actively considering' numbers.) I think this poll comes from a universe where a path to defeating Trump in Iowa exists.

The top four candidates (Trump/DeSantis/Haley/Scott) all have stunningly strong favorables, given that the race has in fact been fairly negative. None of Trump's attacks on DeSantis or Haley have landed at all, but similarly none of the legal proceedings against Trump seem to have hurt him even a little. DeSantis's and Scott's very embarrassing campaigns have not hurt their favorables a whit (and DeSantis continues to show better-than-Trump, ridiculous favorables which should not be possible for someone not running away with this race). Trump, DeSantis, Haley, and Scott are all remarkably well-known (well, for the three non-Trumps) and remarkably well-liked. This is meaningfully different from 2016, when it was easy for Trump to hurt other candidates by attacking them -- and when Trump's own favorables were not that great. The dynamics seem quite different.

Against that backdrop, it's notable that Vivek is now pretty well-known and his favorables -- 43/37 -- are above-water but pretty anemic. Many people have decided they don't like him; this did not happen to any of Trump, DeSantis, Haley, or Scott.

(We're also late enough that we can pretty confidently say a Trump collapse from his current position of strength would have absolutely no parallel in the primary era. Of the front-runners who collapsed in prior cycles, only Giuliani had yet to do so at this stage, and he had much less strength than Trump did).

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Lastly, I like reporting first choice plus second choice; I think this is often a more accurate framing early in the cycle, when it isn't clear if certain people will run at all. We're getting late enough that I'm not sure it's still a valuable way to think, but here it is:
Trump 55
DeSantis 43
Haley 33
Scott 17
Ramaswamy 13
Burgum 6
Christie 6
Hutchinson 2
Binkley 1

Almost everyone does better on second-choice than first-choice, except Trump himself (only the second choice for 12% of voters; I think distinctly the remnant DeSantis still has are people that are not enamored with Trump, unlike earlier on where almost all DeSantis supporters had Trump as a second choice and vice versa) and Christie (...I'm guessing his first-choicers are Democrats crossing over, or in some way single-issue anti-Trump people? he's almost no one's second).

Lastly, a fun one -- the "actively considering" numbers:
DeSantis 68 (yes, really)
Trump 67
Haley 55
Scott 49
Ramaswamy 32
Burgum 19
Christie 16
Hutchinson 9
Binkley 6

These mostly correlate with favorability, but it's hilarious to me that an outright majority of the electorate is "actively considering" all top three candidates, and more than two-thirds are still actively considering Trump and DeSantis. (DeSantis is somehow getting annihilated in the top-lines and totally preserving all of his favorability and goodwill for 2028.)

Anyway, incredibly weird poll and incredibly weird race. Nobody on this forum seems to be noticing one of the main things setting this race apart from other recent primary cycles: how are these people so dang popular? (Trump quote: "How stupid are the people of Iowa?" Why do they think this is an excellent set of candidates?)

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Anyway, incredibly weird poll and incredibly weird race. Nobody on this forum seems to be noticing one of the main things setting this race apart from other recent primary cycles: how are these people so dang popular? (Trump quote: "How stupid are the people of Iowa?" Why do they think this is an excellent set of candidates?)

I wouldn't say this at all; I mean, the lowest unfavorable any of the candidates have is 22%. Most are closer to 30%. That's pretty high for just a GOP primary electorate.

Over half the electorate actively considering voting for the top three candidates feels really strange to me; it's very different from 2020-D or 2016-R or 2012-R, when the main options seemed much more sectional. (2016-D is maybe similar, but that was a two-man race, not a theoretically open field.) The voters exist for any of the outcomes of "Trump runs away with it"/"DeSantis runs away with it"/"Haley runs away with it"; that's actually really odd.

Good point about the unfavorables, though. It's pretty normal for polls to find about 10-15% of the electorate responding "unfavorable" to any politician, even if they've never heard of him, just as a blanket 'anti-politician' positioning. Among Republican primary voters, that number may now be as high as 20-25%. But that makes the rest of the numbers weirder -- if we say 20% of this electorate hates all politicians, which feels like a reasonable guess to me, then DeSantis is at 86% and Trump at 83% of people who might like him actually liking him. (And Scott is at 76% and Haley at 74%). Those numbers are absurd. By 21st-century politician standards -- and especially 21st-century Republican politician standards -- these people are actually insanely popular.

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DeSantis 69/26%
Trump 66/32%
Scott 61/22%
Haley 59/29%
Ramaswamy 43/37%
Burgum 42/37%
Pence 32/65%
Christie 20/69%
Hutchinson 17/45%

Interesting; you'd think Haley would have higher favorables but seems like she may have a bit of a ceiling; DeSantis and Scott having better favorables is a bit surprising, especially DeSantis being #1. Probably the only thing keeping DeSantis lower is the overlap with Trump voters.

Haley's been attacked/painted as a particularly hawkish candidate by Trump and Ramaswamy, right? I kind of want to find her favorables from whenever she announced, because I don't think she was all that well-known, and I wonder if the attacks literally outright helped. There does seem to be a fraction of voters who won't vote for anyone perceived as very hawkish but that fraction is only about as big as/a little smaller than "people who dislike Trump" (ie, it's not actually a super meaningful part of the electorate).

That said I don't think Haley actually is a particularly hawkish candidate (and, like, given that this electorate is going to be 1/3 independents my guess is that 'Ukraine aid' as an issue is above-water), so I don't think her performance necessarily says much about how someone more strident than her would play.