As the Republican presidential primary heats up this summer, most White House candidates are spending their time at events in Iowa and New Hampshire, the states that will kick off the nomination process early next year. . Not Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump.
The Florida governor will address more than 1,500 Republican worshipers Saturday at the Music City Center in Nashville. A few weeks later, the former president will pass through Alabama to headline the state’s biggest GOP event of the summer.
Trump, the early GOP front-runner, and DeSantis, trailing him for second place, are barely ignoring voters in states reigniting Republican competition. Over the past month, they’ve both held rallies and other major events in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, sometimes even appearing in the same state on the same day.
But they are doing more than other GOP candidates to bolster their standing in states like Tennessee and Alabama that will hold elections on so-called Super Tuesday. This is when the most delegates, which candidates win state by state, are up for grabs in a single day of the primary cycle.
Only Trump and DeSantis, who have raised tens of millions of dollars to support their campaigns, have the resources to work meaningfully beyond the early states. And GOP leaders beyond Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina say it’s a smart strategy.
“I know everyone’s focus is on Iowa and New Hampshire,” said Tennessee GOP Chairman Scott Golden, who noted that early voting in his state begins in mid-February, before Carolina of the South does not organize its contest. “But it’s worth taking a little time to come to Tennessee.”
For presidential candidates, Super Tuesday is a date circled in red — next year is March 5 — that can make or break a campaign.
Coming soon after contests in early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, the set of roughly 14 primaries takes place across a wide geographic area, from California and Texas to Massachusetts and Maine. The day is also a test of a campaign’s ability to organize supporters, its financial strength, and a chance for candidates who are still standing to increase their delegate totals.
In 2016, for example, Trump’s Super Tuesday dominance signaled, against conventional political wisdom, that the businessman and reality TV star was likely to be the party’s nominee. President Joe Biden also sailed through Super Tuesday in 2020, quickly forcing most of his remaining rivals out.
This cycle, Trump and DeSantis have set up key endorsements in Super Tuesday states, starting to hire staff and preparing fans to knock on doors.
The early start reflects the candidates’ confidence that they will be in contention in March, when the field has generally been winnowed. Public polls show Trump currently leading comfortably, followed by DeSantis, with other candidates trailing. They include former Vice President Mike Pence, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, the former Governor of New Jersey.
Of course, targeting Super Tuesday states is no guarantee of winning the nomination. After a late entry into the 2020 Democratic presidential race, billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s strategy was to bypass early contests and win in Super Tuesday states. The former New York mayor spent more than $500 million but finished well behind Biden in carrying delegates.
Trump and DeSantis haven’t entirely had the Super Tuesday states to themselves. Candidates, including former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, have traveled to California and elsewhere. Haley is among those who traveled to Texas to visit its border with Mexico. But their campaigns focused almost solely on the early states, some on one in particular.
Pence, an evangelical Christian, primarily targeted Iowa, where a large portion of GOP primary voters are evangelicals. Christie is counting on independent-minded voters in New Hampshire to support her anti-Trump candidacy, while Haley and Scott are hoping for strong performances in their home state of South Carolina, which votes 10 days before Super Tuesday.
Trump and DeSantis have the money to run a larger campaign. Trump will report raising more than $35 million in the second quarter of this year alone, his campaign said, while DeSantis’ campaign said he raised $20 million in just six weeks after announcing his candidacy.
Trump officially entered the race with the huge advantage of having previously run and won races in those states, and his campaign in many of them hasn’t stopped since he lost the 2020 election. In 2021, for example, Trump held a “Save America” rally in Alabama that the state GOP said drew some 50,000 people.
“The people of Alabama have a special relationship with Donald Trump,” Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl said, noting that Trump easily won the GOP primary in 2016 as he took on the sense. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida for the nomination. Trump also easily won the general elections in Alabama in 2016 and 2020.
Although it’s a small state compared to many other Super Tuesday contests, Wahl said places like Alabama allow candidates to show support among conservative voters who are “the heart of the Republican Party”.
“It’s states like Alabama that are going to be where (Trump) hopes to gain a lot of traction,” he said. “And if other candidates want to beat him, they have to compete with him in those states.”
DeSantis and Never Back Down, the super PAC that backs him, are trying. The PAC plans to invest $100 million in ground operations targeting the first 18 states — the first four states plus Super Tuesday states — including paid staff such as state campaign managers. The door-to-door campaign is well underway in early states and will begin in Super Tuesday states this summer, with a goal of having 2,600 people supporting the governor of Florida by Labor Day.
“Nobody else is doing what we’re doing at this point,” spokeswoman Erin Perrine said.
She described knocking on the door as a crucial part of PAC’s work because when DeSantis supporters tell voters about his personal story — a blue-collar upbringing, serving in the military, his legislative accomplishments — they like what they hear.
“They know the name, but they don’t necessarily know the man,” Perrine said. “We’ve seen that when we show people the man that we take Trump supporters and they come to Camp DeSantis.”
One of the most prominent mentions of DeSantis in a Super Tuesday state was of Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, who joined the Florida governor for a rally in Tulsa last month, a move that sparked controversy. wrath of Trump and some of his allies in Oklahoma.
The state party is neutral on the race, Chairman Nathan Dahm said, but he said Oklahoma still appears to be tilting in favor of the former president. He noted that he passed a house as he ran that for six or seven years had proudly displayed “Veterans for Trump.”
Still, Dahm said Super Tuesday contests can offer redemption to a contestant who might stumble in an earlier state.
“You can never know what dynamics are going to change,” he said. “They should have a long-term strategy. Oklahoma is part of that.”
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Associated Press reporter Kim Chandler contributed from Montgomery, Alabama.