by The only numbers that will really matter in Monday’s Iowa caucuses will be the number of votes counted for Donald J. Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.
But there are a number of numbers that help explain the race for the Republican nomination. In most polls, Trump has a solid lead, while Haley and DeSantis are far behind in the fight for second place.
Here are seven numbers that show how we got here and what comes next.
28 percentage points
Trump’s lead in the Iowa poll
The bar is set.
In the Iowa poll released Saturday night by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom, Trump was leading with 48 percent of likely caucusgoers. It’s a dominant showing that exceeds the total measured support for Haley (20 percent) and DeSantis (16 percent) combined.
How dominant is your 28 percentage point lead?
It’s more than double the largest margin of victory for a Republican in a previous competitive caucus. Trump led among all demographic groups in the survey. And his voters expressed greater enthusiasm than those of his rivals.
It wasn’t always expected to be so uneven. Trump lost Iowa in 2016 and his rivals, especially DeSantis, had a chance to overtake him in the state.
But on the eve of the caucuses, the most important fight in the first state in the nation is the battle for second place, and whether Haley can emerge in the place where DeSantis staked his candidacy.
3,000,000
The number of doors a pro-DeSantis super PAC has knocked on across the country
If DeSantis performs better than expected Monday night, his operation will credit the massive organizing effort led by his super PAC, Never Back Down, which has been aggressively knocking on doors since the summer.
The super PAC said that, nationwide, it knocked on its one millionth door in July, its two millionth door in September and its three millionth door in recent days. Never Back Down hit the three million mark by having Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, knock on that door while a local Iowa television news crew filmed it.
That timeline is inadvertently revealing: The super PAC actually knocked on more doors over the summer than in the past 100 days.
Much of the attention has been focused on Iowa, where the super PAC says more than 935,000 doors have been knocked on in total, for a caucus that has seen only a fraction of that turnout in the past.
Will Rogers, former chairman of the Polk County Republican Party, the state’s largest party, said he had recently received his sixth visit from Never Back Down, which he said had hired and trained top door-to-door canvassers. .
“Ron DeSantis and his campaign and Never Back Down have done everything they can to prepare for a 1600 on the SAT,” Rogers said. “He’s not going to be elected prom king yet.”
-33 degrees Fahrenheit
The projected minimum wind chill forecast in Des Moines on Monday night
It’s so cold in Iowa that the bishop of the Diocese of Des Moines granted a “general dispensation” to attend Sunday Mass. citing the severity of the winter storm. And it’s not expected to get any hotter on Monday night, when Iowans will gather for their caucuses at 7 p.m. local time.
The forecast has confounded expectations about who will vote and injected a surprising level of uncertainty into a race that Trump appeared to be comfortably leading. Until recently, both the Trump and DeSantis campaigns expected turnout to exceed 200,000 caucus attendees, breaking the record set in 2016, when approximately 186,000 people voted.
But the Arctic air has reduced those numbers, or at least raised serious questions not only about who will participate, but who will benefit.
Haley is expected to run better in more urban areas, where road conditions are less likely to be a concern, so that’s a plus for her. DeSantis is believed to have the largest organizational operation in the state, and that could give him an advantage in pushing his most likely supporters to the polls. Trump’s team has said she has the most passionate supporters, so put that on his potential ledger. But the former president, according to polls and internal data, has the best standing among potential first-time caucusgoers, who might not be as inclined to do so in the bitter cold.
Even the final margin in public polls could matter. Will Trump’s big lead dampen enthusiasm for braving the elements?
Add it all up to the biggest X factor of the final stretch.
3 percent
Nikki Haley’s vote share among Republicans who did not graduate from college in the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll
Perhaps no better figure reflects the arduous path Haley faces to prove that she is more than a factional candidate and can compete for the majority of GOP voters than her weak standing among voters who did not graduate from the university.
As Haley has been rising in the polls in recent months, both nationally and in early states, much of her growth has come from consolidating support among the GOP’s more educated voters. In fact, in the latest national Times/Siena poll, she was winning 28 percent of the vote among Republicans who graduated from college, practically hot on the heels of Trump’s 39 percent.
It was a completely different story among Republicans who didn’t graduate from college: Trump was winning commanding 76 percent support to Haley’s 3 percent.
One of the reasons Haley has a stronger race in New Hampshire is that, in some polls, she is not only chasing Trump, but even surpassing him among college graduates. In the most recent CNN poll in New HampshireHaley was winning 41 percent of those who had done graduate work, giving her a big lead compared to Trump’s 25 percent (she also had a 12-point lead among college graduates).
But their problem remains that the party’s base largely did not attend university. Until you start rising further into that crowd, your ceiling will remain low.
$46,499,124.63
The amount of spending by super PACs opposing Ron DeSantis
Trump is the favorite. But that does not entirely follow from the spending on the race.
Instead, it is DeSantis who has faced the brunt of attacks from super PACs in a storm of advertising and mailers blanketing Iowa.
The $46.5 million spent against him is a notable sum, and notably more than the total spending by anti-Trump and Haley super PACs combined, as of Friday.
Another way to look at it is the ratio of negative spending compared to positive support, where the results are equally lopsided. Spending to boost Haley has exceeded negative spending against her by nearly $50 million, and DeSantis has had to endure roughly $9 million more in attacks than he has received in supportive advertising from super PACs.
$5,865
DeSantis campaign’s TV ad spending this week in Iowa in conservative Sioux City market
In the state where DeSantis has filed his candidacy, his campaign is spending sparingly on television ads in the final days of the race, a sure sign of the financial strain he is experiencing.
In total, data from AdImpact, a media tracking company, shows that DeSantis is spending $202,400 this week on television in Iowa. That is not only less than the candidacy of Haley ($467,565) and Trump ($1.42 million dollars), but it is also a fraction less than the candidacy of one of the lesser-known candidates in the race, Ryan Binkley ($204,984), a self-funded candidacy. businessman and pastor who never qualified for a debate.
To be sure, DeSantis has air cover from super PACs that support him. But the discrepancy highlights how tight their budget is.
Nowhere is the spending more telling than in the western Iowa market of Sioux City, which covers some of the state’s most conservative congressional districts and is the kind of place where DeSantis once hoped to compete for votes with the former president.
Instead, DeSantis is spending just $5,865 there, according to AdImpact, compared to Trump’s $237,393.
0
Total debate appearances by the former president
Trump’s decision not to debate any of his rivals has proven to be one of the most shocking tactical decisions of the cycle. He has let his rivals fight among themselves – literally – while he has avoided the fray.
His rivals have complained. They have tried to goad him (or make him feel guilty) to get on stage. One of Chris Christie’s reasons for entering the race was that he was the only candidate who could face Trump in a debate. But Christie dropped out of the race without even getting her chance.
Trump has made it clear that unless he feels politically vulnerable, he will not run. And he still doesn’t feel vulnerable.
So on Wednesday, when Haley and DeSantis spent two hours debating on CNN in a climactic final clash before the caucuses, it couldn’t help but feel like a battle for second place. Trump, as he has done before, organized counterprogramming: a town hall on Fox News.
And Thursday’s numbers only rubbed salt in the wound of his two remaining main rivals: According to Nielsen, Trump’s town hall attracted significantly more viewers (4.3 million) than the debate (2.6 million).
