Donald Trump still gets big crowds in Iowa — but they won't caucus

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Donald Trump says he'll drop out of the Republican race if his poll numbers get too low, a prospect which so far is not on the horizon. On the ground, too, Trump is still pulling in big crowds. But in caucus states like Iowa, high poll and rally numbers won't necessarily translate to actual Election Day support.

An informal survey of Trump backers at a recent Iowa rally found that only one in 10 had participated in a caucus before, and the rest seemed unenthusiastic about the prospect of comparatively complicated participation in the political process on a cold Iowa night in February. As one attendee put it while refusing to pledge that she'd caucus, "I have never been to anything like that."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.