Trump’s resounding Iowa win shows his 2020 election lie is working

For anyone else running for public office, a laundry list of criminal charges after attempting to overthrow an election would be a liability.

For Donald Trump and his vehement followers, the court cases don’t show accountability – they show a conspiracy against their leader, one worthy of doubling down their support.

Trump’s commanding victory in Iowa on Monday, and polling that shows the majority of Iowa Republicans do not believe the 2020 election was legitimate, illustrate how the former president has successfully transformed efforts to hold him accountable for anti-democratic actions into something to rally his supporters around.

President Joe Biden has centered his early campaigning around the threat Trump poses to US democracy. In turn, Trump has called Biden the “true threat to democracy”. The role-reversal seems to be working with his supporters.

An NBC News entrance poll found a resounding 90% of Trump voters didn’t believe Biden legitimately won the election in 2020. A much lower 40% of Ron DeSantis don’t believe Biden won. For Nikki Haley, just 19% held that belief.

“On the one hand, the turnout for the 2024 Iowa caucuses was much lower than past caucuses, so these results certainly skew higher than what we would find in a nationally representative sample because those who turned out are conservative (89%) or very conservative (52%),” said Sara Mitchell, a political science professor at the University of Iowa, citing an entrance poll by ABC News. “On the other hand, Trump’s rhetoric about the ‘big lie’ has reduced Republican confidence in election outcomes generally.”

Indeed, national polls show Republicans hold deep skepticism over the legitimacy of Biden’s win. Just 31% of Republicans nationally believe Biden’s election was legitimate, a slight drop from 2021, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

In interviews and at speeches at caucus sites, several Iowa Republicans underscored how the belief that the 2020 election was stolen holds a strong grip on the party.

Brett Mason, a Linn county voter who gave a speech to his neighbors imploring them to vote for Trump on Monday, said he had two minutes to talk to Trump and asked him why he was running again. The former president said America wanted him in 2020 but the election was stolen from him.

“He said, I’m running because America put me in there and I don’t want to drop the ball for them,” Mason said. “That was impressive to me.”

Election lies are obviously not a new line of attack for Trump. When he lost in Iowa in 2016 to Ted Cruz, he said the Texas politician “didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it”. When Trump wins, though, his supporters believe the results are to be trusted.

“I think he’s the only one who can beat the cheating Democrats,” Ron Osborn, a 73-year-old retired farmer, said on Monday at a caucus in Malcolm, Iowa.

If Trump is convicted of any of the 91 criminal charges he faces, he can rest assured that his base won’t turn on him. Sixty-five per cent of GOP caucus-goers said Trump was fit to serve as president even if he were convicted of a crime, according to entrance polling by CNN.

Some Republicans who voted for other candidates in Iowa were clearly sick of the election narrative and of Trump in general, but not enough of them to come anywhere near the former president’s hold on the party.

A poll of likely Republican caucus voters published ahead of the vote found that 61% said their support of Trump would not be affected by a potential criminal conviction before the general election. The NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll said 19% of Republican caucusgoers would be more likely to back Trump if he is convicted.

The exit polling numbers also show why other Republicans have shied away from taking the issue head on – it’s a losing electoral prospect in a primary. Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor who tried to position himself against election denialism, acknowledged Trump’s victory and suspended his campaign on Tuesday after a minuscule showing in Iowa. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, spoke against Trump’s stolen election claims; he suspended his campaign before the Iowa caucuses.

Independents and moderates, though, could still line up behind a candidate who speaks against Trump’s attacks on democracy. But that candidate would have to first make it to a general election, a near-impossible task. Haley, the candidate most likely to consolidate the anti-Trump voting bloc, fared worse than expected in Iowa.

Accountability always comes with a backlash. Efforts to keep Trump out of the election through the courts may only solidify the beliefs of a coordinated conspiracy.

And the Maga movement has proven for nearly a decade that there’s little Trump could do, and little anyone could do to hold Trump accountable, that would change their support for him.

For Republicans who aren’t aligned behind Trump, and unwilling to choose a Democrat, the choice seems already made for them.

Kevin Rigdon, a Cedar Rapids voter who caucused for DeSantis, said if Trump is the nominee again, “there’s gonna be a lot of people that are gonna hold their nose, like me and my wife, and support him”.