SHANE GOLDMACHER: 7 numbers tell the tale of the GOP primary

EDITOR'S NOTE: Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent for The New York Times covering the 2024 campaign and the major developments, trends and forces shaping American politics.

The only numbers that will truly matter in the Iowa caucuses today will be the number of votes tallied for Donald J. Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.

But there are a number of, well, numbers that help explain the Republican nominating contest. In most polls, Trump holds a solid lead, while Haley and DeSantis are battling it out far behind in a 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 has been set.

In the Iowa Poll released on Saturday evening by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom, Trump was winning 48% of likely caucusgoers. It’s a dominant showing that’s more than the total support measured for Haley (20%) and DeSantis (16%) combined.

Just how dominant is his 28 percentage-point lead?

It is more than double the largest margin of victory for a Republican in a competitive previous caucus. Trump led among every demographic group in the survey. And his voters expressed greater enthusiasm than those of his rivals.

It wasn’t always expected to be this lopsided. Trump lost Iowa in 2016 and his rivals, especially DeSantis, had a chance to outwork him in the state.

But on the eve of the caucuses, the biggest fight of the first-in-the-nation state is the battle for second, and whether Haley can emerge in the place where DeSantis has bet his candidacy.

3,000,000: The number of doors a pro-DeSantis super PAC has knocked on nationwide

If DeSantis has a stronger-than-expected showing on Monday night, his operation will credit the large organizing effort that has been spearheaded by his super PAC, Never Back Down, which has been knocking on doors aggressively since the summer.

The super PAC said that, across the country, it knocked on its millionth door in July, its two-millionth door in September and its three-millionth door in recent days. Never Back Down marked the three million number by having Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, knock on that door while a local Iowa television news crew filmed her.

That timeline is inadvertently telling: The super PAC actually knocked on more doors over the summer than it has in the past 100 days.

Much of the focus has been on Iowa, where the super PAC says more than 935,000 doors have been knocked on in all, for a caucus that has seen only a fraction of that participation in the past.

Will Rogers, a former chairman of the Polk County Republican Party, the state’s largest party, said that he had recently received his sixth door-knocking visit from Never Back Down, which he said had hired and trained the best door-to-door canvassers.

“Ron DeSantis and his campaign and Never Back Down have done everything to prepare themselves to get a 1600 on the SAT,” Rogers said. “He’s still not going to be elected prom king.”

-33 Fahrenheit: The projected minimum windchill forecast in Des Moines on Monday evening

It’s so frigid in Iowa that the bishop of the Diocese of Des Moines granted “general dispensation” from attendance at Sunday Mass, citing the severity of the winter storm. And it’s not expected to be any warmer by Monday night, when Iowans are set to gather for their caucuses at 7 p.m. local time.

The forecast has muddled expectations for who will turn out and injected a surprising level of uncertainty into a race that Mr. Trump had appeared to be leading comfortably. Until recently, both the Trump and DeSantis campaigns had expected turnout to exceed 200,000 caucusgoers, breaking the record set in 2016, when roughly 186,000 people voted.

But the Arctic air has lowered those figures — or, at least, raised serious questions of not just who will turn out, but who will benefit.

Haley is expected to run strongest in more urban areas — where road conditions are less likely to be a concern — so that is an advantage for her. DeSantis is believed to have the largest organizational operation in the state, and that could give him an edge in nudging his likeliest supporters to the polls. Trump’s team has said it has the most impassioned supporters, so put that in his potential ledger. But the former president, according to polls and internal data, is running strongest among potential first-time caucusgoers, who might not be as inclined to caucus in the freezing cold.

Even the final margin in the public polls could matter. Will Trump’s big edge dampen enthusiasm to brave the elements?

Add it all up to the biggest X factor of the final stretch.

3%: Nikki Haley’s share of the vote among Republicans who did not graduate from college in the most recent N.Y Times/Siena College poll

There is perhaps no better figure that captures the uphill climb that Haley faces to prove she’s more than a factional candidate and can compete for a majority of GOP voters than her weak standing among voters who didn’t graduate from college.

As Haley has ticked up in the polls in recent months, both nationally and in the early states, much of her growth has come from consolidating support among the most educated voters in the Republican Party. In fact, in the latest Times/Siena survey, nationally, she was winning 28% of the vote among Republicans who graduated from college, practically nipping at the heels of Trump’s 39%.

It was an entirely different story among Republicans who did not graduate from college: Trump was winning a dominant 76% support to Ms. Haley’s 3%.

One of the reasons Haley is running strongest in New Hampshire is that, in some surveys, she is not just chasing but actually beating Trump among college graduates. In the most recent CNN poll in New Hampshire, Haley was winning 41% of those who had done postgraduate work, giving her a huge lead compared with Trump’s 25% (she also held a 12-point edge among college graduates).

But her problem remains that the party’s base largely didn’t attend college. Until she begins rising more among that crowd, her ceiling will remain low.

$46,499,124.63: The amount of spending from super PACs opposing Ron DeSantis

Trump is the front-runner. But that is not at all clear from the spending in the race.

Instead, it is DeSantis who has faced the brunt of the attacks from super PACs in a blizzard of advertising and mailers blanketing Iowa.

The $46.5 million spent against him is a remarkable sum, and remarkably more than the total spending by super PACs against Trump and Haley combined, as of Friday.

Another way to look at it is the share of negative spending compared with positive support, where the results are just as lopsided. Spending to boost Haley has outpaced 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 super PAC advertising.

$5,865: The DeSantis campaign’s TV ad spending this week in Iowa in the conservative Sioux City market

In the state where DeSantis has banked his candidacy, his campaign is spending only sparsely on television ads in the race’s waning days, a sure sign of the financial stress it is under.

All told, data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm, shows that DeSantis is spending $202,400 this week on TV in Iowa. That isn’t just less than Haley ($467,565) and Trump ($1.42 million), it is also fractionally less than the candidacy of one of the race’s least-known candidates, Ryan Binkley ($204,984), a self-funded businessman and pastor who never qualified for a debate.

To be sure, DeSantis does have air cover from supportive super PACs. But the discrepancy underscores just how tight his budget is.

Nowhere is the spending more revealing than in the Sioux City market in western Iowa, 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 only $5,865 there, according to AdImpact, compared with Trump’s $237,393.

0: The former president’s total debate appearances

Trump’s decision not to debate any of his rivals has proved one of the more impactful tactical choices of the cycle. It has left his rivals to fight among themselves — quite literally — while he has avoided the fray.

His rivals have complained. They have tried to goad — or guilt — him onto the stage. One of Chris Christie’s rationales for entering the contest in the first place was that he was the only candidate who could tangle with Trump in a debate setting. But Christie exited the race without ever getting his shot.

Trump has made clear that, unless he feels politically vulnerable, he won’t show up. And he doesn’t feel vulnerable yet.

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 feel like a battle for second place. Trump, as he has done before, set up some counter-programming: a Fox News town hall.

And Thursday’s figures only poured salt in the wound for his top two remaining rivals: According to Nielsen, the Trump town hall drew significantly more viewers (4.3 million) than the debate (2.6 million).

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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