The running of the runners-up: In Iowa caucuses, the suspense involves second place

Americans begin the months-long process of selecting their president with virtually no doubt about who will win the first Republican nominating contest on Monday in Iowa.

Barring a catastrophic error in polling, Donald Trump will begin his political comeback with a resounding win that cements his front-runner status as the next Republican presidential nominee.

The only unknown involves the identity and strength of the second-place finisher: likely former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Their goal is to leave Iowa appearing like a viable alternative to the former president as the race shifts to New Hampshire, South Carolina and Super Tuesday.

It's easy to mock this running of the runners-up as futile, a scuffle for silver, as one jokester did by crashing an event where he handed DeSantis a mock participation trophy.

The counterargument is that momentum here could vault Haley, in particular, to victory in New Hampshire, where polls are tightening, and then it becomes a new race, as many of the states on Super Tuesday allow non-Republicans to vote.

Trump has the support of about half of Republicans in most early-state polls — a daunting advantage, for sure, while leaving a sizable cohort desperate for options.

"Too much drama. Just too much drama [from Trump]," said Kevin Wax, who came with relatives to volunteer for DeSantis, flying up from Tennessee, where his family runs a multi-generational travel business.

"I'm tired of the drama and just would like to get on with my life."

His wife, Rhonda, said she appreciated Trump's U.S. Supreme Court picks, but noted of her support for DeSantis: "I want someone in the White House that I can be proud of."

Brutal weather becomes election X factor

Their own experience underscores how unusual these caucuses have been, as brutal cold and snow forced the cancellation of late-campaign events.

The Wax family vehicle got stuck in a snowbank and a police officer had to help push it out, cancelling their plans to go door-knocking and forcing them to make phone calls instead.

The weather itself is becoming a campaign factor. The conditions here are miserable even by Canadians' winter-hardened standards, with a wind chill as low as –37 C and scores of vehicles lying in ditches after spinning off snowy windswept highways.

It requires some commitment to a candidate to knock on doors in those conditions, drive to a phone bank or simply to venture out to a caucus event.

WATCH | Winter weather forces Republican hopefuls to scale back campaign plans:

Iowa caucuses come up against winter storm

6 hours ago

Duration 2:54

Republican voters in Iowa spent the weekend deciding who to choose as a presidential candidate and whether they would be able to get to the polls after a massive winter storm.

This has prompted a burst of meteorological punditry about whether this weather hurts or helps Trump. His supporters are the most passionate, according to polls, but they're also disproportionately in rural areas, requiring extra travel to caucus sites.

Trump acknowledged he sees Haley as a rising challenger, which is no surprise given the number of disparaging emails about her his campaign has been pumping out lately.

In an echo of Trump's racist and birther smears of Barack Obama and Ted Cruz, he even falsely suggested she's ineligible to run for president because she was born before her Indian parents became U.S. citizens.

At a Saturday town hall, Trump said Haley may have leaped past DeSantis: "She may be replacing him."

The Haley bounce: Is it a mirage?

There's some evidence of a Haley bounce in what's referred to as the gold standard in Iowa polling: the final weekend survey published by the Des Moines Register.

It showed Trump at 48 per cent and Haley leapfrogging DeSantis into second place, with 20 per cent compared with his 16 per cent.

That's the good news for Haley.

The bad news? Signs her boomlet might be a mirage. Her support, in that poll, is by far the softest of the three main candidates — the least enthusiastic; most likely to change; and most reliant on non-Republicans getting involved.

Pollster Ann Seltzer referred to these numbers as practically "jaw-dropping," very troubling for someone trying to win a Republican nomination.

A staggering half of Haley's support comes from Independents and Democrats. Among actual Republicans, who will cast most primary votes, her so-called negatives have surged — with Republicans most likely to express negative feelings about her, among all the candidates.

A manager at a hotel in western Iowa shrugs Haley off as an old-style neoconservative, too keen on wars abroad and too moderate on policy at home.

"I know three people interested in Haley, and they're all Democrats. What does that tell you?" said Julie Thompson.

She's been inspired to volunteer for the first time ever by her favourite candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy; she calls him brilliant and sees him reflecting her priorities of small government, border security and avoiding foreign conflicts.

Thompson also likes DeSantis and would vote for Trump.

Running as a pro-Ukraine, more moderate alternative makes Haley something of an outlier in a party where pardoning Jan. 6 convicts is now far more popular than supporting Ukraine.

Haley is also being pummelled by negative ads reminding voters here of her recent gaffes; she said New Hampshire voters will "correct" Iowans' choice.

It may have been intended as a lighthearted joke, but it's now a soundbite filling the airwaves and drawing boos from crowds in other candidates' stump speeches.

That anybody-but-Haley sentiment is palpable in conversations with many Republicans. They include a construction worker who drove from Florida into a life-threatening snowstorm to volunteer for DeSantis.

Jonathan Morales described his governor and Trump as fighters — "battleships," he called them — willing to fight for policies detested by so-called elites, like a Mexico border wall.

The reason he favours DeSantis, he said, is he'd be smarter at navigating a hostile bureaucracy and get more done than Trump.

As for Haley, he said: "She's just clearly the prime example of an establishment Republican. And that's it. And it's a disqualifying factor."

Death-defying drive from Florida

Morales drove 26 hours from Tampa, unaware of the storm he was about to encounter. He said he only realized it when he stopped to get gas in Missouri and it felt like the wind was blowing the door off his car.

He called a friend back home in Florida who had checked the weather conditions and joked: "He was like 'Dude, it was nice knowing you.'"

With little experience driving on snow, Morales plodded along at 40 km/h, in the dark, counting about two dozen vehicles in the ditch, before he reached his hotel hours later.

"I've never felt that grateful," he said, calling it a life-changing scare.

Morales now plans to speak on DeSantis's behalf at one of the hundreds of caucus events around the state on Monday night.

Will this be a last hurrah for the DeSantis campaign? That may depend on whether he finishes second on Monday night.

Does Trump crack 50%?

Well-known elections analyst Amy Walter said she's watching several things on Monday night.

One is who finishes second. Another is whether Haley makes inroads outside her base, with more conservative, evangelical voters of the sort she'll need to win as the campaign moves on from more secular New Hampshire to southern states, including her own South Carolina.

And here's the final metric she's watching: Does Trump surpass 50 per cent? With margins like that, there would no mathematical chance of a rival surpassing him.

"That theory [about Trump being beatable] goes out the window," Walter wrote in an election preview for her Cook Political Report.

Given how timid they've been in criticizing him, pundits have questioned why these candidates are even running against Trump, aside from hoping he drops out, perhaps sidelined by a criminal conviction.

In the closing days, however, one can hear two consistent arguments against Trump at rivals' campaign stops. They involve personality and policy failures.

A congressman joked at a DeSantis rally on Saturday that Trump was more obsessed with his crowd size after the inauguration than with replacing Obamacare.

DeSantis himself argued that Trump was outmanoeuvred by Democrats who prevented budget cuts and a border wall and said, "I'm sick of Democrats winning."

If it's any consolation: On Monday night, he won't be beaten by a Democrat.