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

Donald Trump at a rally.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

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."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

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.