Now that the results are in from the Iowa Caucuses, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider what if anything they mean for the general election, so I assessed that issue at New York:

Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the Iowa Caucuses sealed his position as the overwhelming favorite to win a third straight Republican presidential nomination. For the millions of Americans who either hope or fear that our most-impeached and most-indicted president will consummate his comeback in November, the big question is what the Iowa results can tell us about the general election, beyond the high odds that Trump will be on the ballot.

The clearest answer is that Trump will be the nominee of a relatively well-united Republican Party that is familiar with his act in all its outrageous permutations and is fine with it. That’s quite the contrast with where he was the last time he participated in contested Iowa Caucuses, in 2016. Then he was an insurgent candidate who lost to the more conventional (if hard-core) conservative Ted Cruz, and eventually won the nomination by wearing down the opposition and taking a number of steps (including the choice of the hyper-conventional Mike Pence as his running mate) to win over skeptics. But even as the nominee he had a lot of intraparty problems; 33 percent of Republicans gave him an unfavorable rating in mid-October of 2016, according to Gallup.

The latest such poll this year, from YouGov, showed just 16 percent of Republicans giving him an unfavorable rating, despite eight intervening years of relentless mendacity, shout-outs to authoritarians, erratic (at best) management of a pandemic, and then the 2020 election denial followed by an attempted coup d’état via thugs invading the Capitol. And that’s just the high spots of a record that you’d think (and think wrong) might give a lot of Republicans pause about going to war with this particular general in the lead tank.

Yet as Iowa showed, they are plunging straight ahead. He won there by a record 30 points, with 51 percent, despite being heavily outspent by opponents on campaign advertising. Yes, caucuses like Iowa’s draw a very small percentage of voters, even within the limited universe of the GOP. But here’s the thing: Trump is actually doing a lot better in national polls of Republicans, registering the support of 61.4 percent of them in the RealClearPolitics averages. And the entrance polls in Iowa do indicate that Trump is winning broad support within the GOP, across ideological and geographical lines. Nothing happened there that should make you doubt the general election polling that shows him leading Joe Biden.

There are some shadows in the Iowa numbers for Trump, however, as the ever-insightful Ron Brownstein points out at The Atlantic after looking at the entrance polls:

“[N]oteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance-poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three in ten said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination.”

This confirms that Trump’s conduct on January 6, along with the criminal charges he faces, could have a crucial effect on the general election, even though these same factors may have actually helped him win the nomination (in part by forcing his most formidable rivals to defend him!). But it is very, very difficult to assess at this early point where exactly the various court procedures involving Trump will be just before and on Election Day, much less what exactly they will reveal and how the revelations (or the unprecedented spectacle of a presidential nominee in the dock) will affect the campaign and the outcome. You cannot just assume the people (in Iowa or elsewhere) who now say a criminally convicted Trump isn’t fit to serve as president will vote for Joe Biden or some other non-Republican candidate. How many of them said in October of 2018 that the swinish man revealed by the Access Hollywood tape would never get their vote for president … and then voted for him anyway just weeks later? Yes, Trump’s conduct and efforts to hold him accountable will become part of a powerfully presented comparative case by the Biden campaign to make voting for the Republican difficult if not impossible even for voters who aren’t happy with the incumbent’s performance. But it’s one of many variables that will determine how many swing voters there are in November and which way they will swing.

Trump’s hold on a majority of his partisans is fierce, though like Biden he is going to have some defectors, and it’s likely to be a close general election unless conditions in the country improve enough to lift Biden’s job-approval ratings significantly. Anyone hoping that Trump would stumble early on the road back to the White House is likely going to be disappointed.

Watching the now-customary chaos among House Republicans, I predicted at New York that this time all the dysfunction may prevent rather than trigger a government shutdown:

Since Republicans won narrow control of the U.S. House a year ago, the most important dynamic affecting the 118th Congress has been utter disarray within the GOP ranks. The only real leverage the House GOP has over big national policy issues is its ability by inaction to shut down the federal government, since affirmative legislation in both congressional chambers is required to enact the annual spending measures necessary to keep Washington humming. Because Republicans only have a tiny majority (down temporarily to just one seat thanks to recent resignations), it only takes a few rebels to keep their conference from any particular course of action. Within the hard-core conservative House Freedom Caucus there are enough members willing to risk a government shutdown to make very basic decisions on federal spending levels impossible. They’re also happy to wreak vengeance on any Speaker who cooperates with the hated Democratic enemy to avoid disaster, as Kevin McCarthy did last fall.

So Congress lurches from stopgap spending bill to stopgap spending bill, and now Speaker Mike Johnson is in very much the same position that led to McCarthy’s defenestration by a maneuver to take away his gavel. He’s agreed with Senate Democrats on general spending levels for defense and nondefense programs (known in beltway jargon as a “top-line spending deal”) and wants now to translate the agreement into individual appropriations bills before the last stopgap spending measures expire on January 19 (for part of the federal government) and February 2 (for the rest of it, including the Pentagon). Predictably, Freedom Caucus hardliners don’t think the deal cuts spending nearly enough, and they also want to pass some right-wing “policy riders” on issues like abortion and the alleged persecution of conservatives by federal law enforcement officials. But Johnson’s their guy, unlike McCarthy, and they really don’t want to go through another “motion to vacate the chair” and then another impossible search for a Speaker who can somehow meet their demands without the power to force Democrats to go along with them.

Ironically, the continuing disarray in the House GOP conference may produce enough paralysis to keep the federal government operating. At the moment Johnson wants another stopgap spending measure (known as a “continuing resolution” or CR) to buy enough time to implement the top-line spending agreement. After issuing some threats to blow everything up, the Freedom Caucus rebels now seem inclined to favor a CR so they can buy time to unravel that agreement and unite Republicans around something more to their liking. Conveniently, Senate Democrats are moving a CR that would kick the can down the road until March. It’s looking more and more like a House GOP (and more generally, a Congress) that can’t agree on anything else might be able to agree to disagree at least a bit longer without dire consequences for the federal government. It’s even possible that the closer they get to November elections, the more Republicans will become inclined to just let voters decide how to resolve their differences with each other and with Democrats.

If Johnson is indeed rescued from a fatal revolt by the irresolution of the very rebels who took down McCarthy, there will be some observers who credit the novice congressional leader with Machiavellian talents not possessed by his wily predecessor. It’s more likely Johnson is Mr. Magoo, blundering through potential disasters by sheer luck. It remains to be seen if his luck runs out before this exhausting session of Congress ends.

As a long-time student of the intersection of religion and politics, I don’t often learn something that really surprises me, but reported at New York on an exception:

Barring a big surprise that defies all the polls, Ron DeSantis is going to fall far short of his original expectations in the Iowa Caucuses on January 15.

Where did DeSantis go wrong in Iowa? His strategy, to be clear, was to closely emulate that of the last three winners of contested GOP caucuses, Mike Huckabee (in 2008), Rick Santorum (in 2012), and Ted Cruz (in 2016), by building a formidable field organization and appealing to Iowa’s powerful conservative evangelical voting bloc via hard-core right-wing positions on cultural issues. He committed early on to appearances in all 99 counties in the state; turned most of his campaign over to veterans of Cruz’s 2016 effort; signed a “heartbeat” law banning abortions after six weeks that was virtually identical to the one signed by Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, an evangelical heroine; and succeeded in winning endorsements from both Reynolds and from evangelical kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats (who had supplied crucially timed endorsements to Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz). He also (at least initially) added the kind of money politicians like Huckabee and Santorum could never have raised.

None of it has worked beyond keeping the Florida governor in the game in Iowa even as he sank like a stone in the other early states, which he neglected. There have been three common explanations for DeSantis’s Iowa struggles: (1) organizational problems stemming from overdelegation of campaign chores to the Never Back Down super-PAC, leading to late-campaign chaos; (2) DeSantis’s meh personality, which only grew more evident thanks to his retail-heavy Iowa effort; and (3) DeSantis’s bid to out-Trump Trump, regularly running to his right, which was doomed to fail against the founder of the MAGA movement and the beloved daddy of its most right-wing elements.

There’s undoubtedly a significant element of truth to all these reasons DeSantis is falling short of high early expectations in Iowa. But there is another that helps explain why the Floridian’s intense cultivation of conservative evangelicals isn’t bearing the kind of fruit he surely anticipated: Evangelicals themselves are evolving in a way that strengthens their loyalty to Trump no matter what self-professed “kingmakers” want. The New York Times’ Ruth Graham and Charles Homans have reported on this phenomenon:

“Being evangelical once suggested regular church attendance, a focus on salvation and conversion and strongly held views on specific issues such as abortion. Today, it is as often used to describe a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically and Mr. Trump looms large.

“’Politics has become the master identity,’ said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor. ‘Everything else lines up behind partisanship.’”

More and more white evangelicals are engaging in a sort of roll-your-own form of religious practice, and this appears to be a particularly advanced development in Iowa, according to Graham and Homans. These believers are detached from collective worship services as much as from formal denominations and feed on social media “prophets” and others who share Trump’s treatment of conservative Christians as an aggrieved constituency group longing for the good old days and paranoid about persecution by Big Government and secular progressives. From their perspective, Trump’s heathenish personal behavior and theological illiteracy aren’t nearly so alienating as it is for churchgoing folk who acknowledge strict codes of conduct and doctrinal teachings. Indeed, in some respects they are more like Trump than some of his churchier political rivals, as Burge tells the Times writers:

“An increasing number of people in many of the most zealously Trump-supporting parts of Iowa fit a religious profile similar to the former president’s. “’Iowa is culturally conservative, non-practicing Christians at this point,’ Mr. Burge said. ‘That’s exactly Trump’s base.’”

This trend is doubly deadly for politicians like DeSantis. Un- or de-churched evangelicals are not going to take orders from Bob Vander Plaats or Kim Reynolds. And they are more focused on MAGA issues rather than on the “social issues” as traditionally defined by the old-school Christian right:

“The evolving evangelical identity is already scrambling how politicians appeal to these voters. Mr. Burge’s research has found that ‘cultural Christians’ care relatively little about bedrock religious-right causes like abortion and pornography.

“In interviews across Iowa, non-churchgoing Christians who supported Republican candidates, even those who said they believed in governing the country by Christian principles, cited immigration and the economy most often as their top issues in this year’s election.”

That’s not to say these people have lost the sense of certainty — and sometimes self-righteousness — often associated with conservative Christians, whether it’s “traditionalist” Catholics or The-Bible-Tells-Me-So Protestants, Graham and Homans observe:

“At Mr. Trump’s rally in Coralville, it was Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old local evangelist who does not lead a church, who delivered the opening prayer.

The crowd responded tepidly to his impassioned recitation of several Bible verses. But the rallygoers roared to life when he set aside the Scripture and told them what they had come to hear.

“’This election is part of a spiritual battle,’ Mr. Tenney said. ‘When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.’”

Among these Iowans, Ron DeSantis, for all his contrived battles with Disney and Anthony Fauci and LGBTQ+ activists and the education establishment, can’t compete with Trump. Uninhibited by laws or the Constitution, and devoid of Christian charity, Trump will smite Satan and all his infernal minions on Day One.

I love historical analogies for campaigns and elections, and looked at a familiar precedent at New York:

It’s probably a by-product of our unstable and fractious political environment that observers constantly reach for historical precedents to anchor today’s dizzying developments in patterns we can recognize. So I am highly sympathetic to Nate Cohn’s effort in a New York Times column to suggest that Joe Biden’s reelection bid might resemble Harry Truman’s in 1948.

Truman is an eternal role model for embattled presidents whose reelection prospects seemed doomed; his upset win over Thomas Dewey is the perpetual consolation of struggling incumbents. It’s no accident that when Donald Trump was badly trailing Biden in the polls during the summer of 2020, his fans began predicting a Truman-style comeback.

Cohn, however, is focused on a particular analogy between 1948 and 2024: the fact that, like Biden, Truman struggled to overcome intense unhappiness over rapidly rising prices at a time when other economic indicators were quite positive:

“In the era of modern economic data, Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.”

What Cohn wants us to understand is that Truman’s remarkable comeback was accompanied by an intense presidential focus on fighting inflation:

“You might well remember from your U.S. history classes that he blamed the famous ‘Do Nothing Congress’ for not enacting his agenda.

“What you might not have learned in history class is that Mr. Truman attacked the ‘Do Nothing Congress’ first and foremost for failing to do anything about prices. The text of his speech at the Democratic convention does not quite do justice to his impassioned attack on Republicans for failing to extend price controls in 1946, and for their platform on prices.”

Cohn notes that Biden cannot emulate certain assets Truman had in his efforts to bring down inflation while blaming his Republican opponents for its persistence: a mechanism, government price controls, that was popular then but entirely disreputable now and a Congress totally controlled by the GOP, making it as culpable as the president for hard times.

But while Biden may not have some of the raw materials Truman used to build his remarkable comeback, he also doesn’t share some of the distinct problems the 33rd president faced.

Yes, Biden is coping with dissension in his party’s ranks but not the sort of formal crack-up that led to not one but two competing ex-Democratic presidential tickets in 1948: the States’ Rights Democratic (a.k.a. Dixiecrat) ticket led by Strom Thurmond, which attracted southern segregationists, and ex-Vice-President Henry Wallace’s left-bent Progressives. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is indeed an ex-Democrat from a famous Democratic family, but it appears he is taking away at least as many votes from the Republican column as from his former party.

Biden also suffers from a dyspeptic post-pandemic public mood that is similar in some respects to the angst afflicting Americans after the euphoric unity of World War II. That’s bad for any incumbent president. But Truman had the additional handicap of his party having controlled the White House for 16 years, the longest stretch since the post–Civil War era of Republican dominance. Today, the United States is in an extended period of exceptional balance between the two major parties, which have each held the presidency for exactly half of the 21st century and shared control of Congress as often as not.

But the most important difference between 1948 and 2024 is the identity of the likely Republican nominee. Yes, Dewey was a repeat nominee as Trump will be, having run a respectable if losing campaign against FDR in 1944. But Dewey, who was the governor of New York, was as remote from Trump in his temperament and ideological inclinations as is possible to imagine. The living embodiment of the Republican Establishment of his day, Dewey was relatively progressive on domestic-policy issues (he famously debated his most formidable primary opponent, Harold Stassen, on the single topic of Stassen’s proposal that the Communist Party should be outlawed, strongly opposing the idea) and resolutely internationalist in foreign policy. In sharp contrast to the perpetually turbulent MAGA movement founder, Dewey ran a quiet, even complacent general-election campaign that heavily relied on the poll-driven belief that he would win easily. And while Truman did indeed run a strongly partisan campaign attacking the opposing party, most of his fire was trained on congressional Republicans rather than Dewey himself.

There is zero question that Biden is staking his reelection prospects on making 2024 a referendum on Trump as much as on his own performance as president. And while the kind of sharp improvement in perceptions of the economy that helped rescue Truman would also enormously benefit Biden, he may not have to become all that popular to win.

In his essay on 1948 and 2024, Cohn hints at one factor that was crucial in 1948 and could be equally important this year: a national craving for “normalcy.” He doesn’t go into this issue in detail, but it’s clear in retrospect that Republicans had high expectations of victory in 1948 in no small part because they assumed voters wanted calm and stable governance after the excitement of the Great Depression and World War II (much as British voters rejected Winston Churchill’s long-governing Tories at the very end of that war). One reason Truman won is that he successfully warned swing voters that a Republican administration would junk Democratic policies (not just wartime price controls but, crucially, farm price supports) they had come to rely on as a normal part of economic life.

One of the big intangibles about 2024 is whether swing voters ultimately perceive a Trump comeback as auguring a return to the pre-pandemic status quo ante (especially in terms of prices and interest rates) as less fearful than another term for an octogenarian incumbent thought to be less than fully in control — or instead make the same calculations many did in 2020 when Biden offered a safe alternative to the perpetually alarming 45th president. I’d say the odds of the latter contingency are pretty high so long as the economy continues to improve even modestly. It’s far too early to predict happy days will be here again for Democrats, but it’s no time for excessive pessimism either.

You think a lot of voters are tired of politics this year? Just wait until a few more months have gone by, as I explained at New York:

Back in the days when presidential nominees were chosen by elites at national conventions rather than in mass-participation caucuses and primaries, general elections were pretty brisk affairs. Traditionally, the campaigns kicked things off around Labor Day and conducted a real sprint to early November. Candidate debates didn’t happen before 1960, and then they were generally held in late September or October.

Even in recent years, at least one of the major-party nominees often wasn’t known until well into the election-year calendar. In 2016, for example, Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination on May 26, and Hillary Clinton didn’t nail down the Democratic nomination until June 7. And while Trump’s renomination in 2020 was a given, Joe Biden wasn’t an absolute certainty as his opponent until June 5.

At this point it appears the 2024 match-up will be known much, much earlier. Barring some health crisis, President Biden will again be the Democratic nominee. And barring a huge upset in an early state, Trump will again be the Republican nominee. Trump could have the delegates he needs by early March. He may even be the last candidate standing on February 24, when he is favored to win the South Carolina primary, which is crucial for both Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.

In all likelihood, then, we’ll soon be dealing with an eight-month general election, the longest since John Kerry ran against George W. Bush in 2004 (Bush was an unchallenged incumbent; Kerry clinched his nomination in March).

The race is going to feel a lot longer than the 2004 election because it’s a rematch. For months, polls have been showing that Americans don’t particularly want to see these two men on their ballots again. They are universally known, and at present, quite unpopular. According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, Biden’s ratio of favorability to unfavorability is 39.2 percent favorable to 55.3 percent unfavorable, while Trump’s is 39.9 percent favorable to 55.4 percent unfavorable. Biden and Trump are a matched pair of ugly socks in the national leadership drawer. How will another eight months of their omnipresence wear on voters, after their domination of news for the last eight years (or longer in Biden’s case, given his eight years as Barack Obama’s sidekick)?

Yes, it’s possible the condition of the country and the world will make Biden more or less popular as an incumbent, and tempestuous legal dramas are likely to affect perceptions of Trump. But will voters simply get more fatigued with them as presenting a choice they don’t particularly want to make?

If so, that could have a dampening effect on 2024 general-election turnout. And it could also stimulate already-high interest in minor-party or independent candidacies. These typically lose altitude late in a general-election cycle as voters realize they aren’t going to be successful. But that might not be the case in this seemingly eternal battle between two very old men who have been lobbing grenades at each other for such a very long time.

Perhaps something will spice up and refresh the general-election contest. It probably won’t be the conventions, themselves a tired ritual lacking all real drama for decades now. It probably won’t be political ads, which are more relentlessly, predictably negative than they’ve ever been. And it probably won’t be debates, assuming they even occur; any debate involving Trump will be a mud fight. It would be nice if new issues emerged in the course of 2024 that could elicit something we’ve haven’t heard again and again.

More likely than not, however, both campaigns will need to devote even more resources than usual to voter mobilization, as voters are tired of a contest that few can barely remember beginning. One truly useful thing the two major parties could do is to convince Americans their vote will be truly consequential, which won’t at all be a lie or an exaggeration: The 2024 contest will likely be very close, and the stakes — particularly if the resolute anti-constitutionalist Trump wins or again refuses to accept a defeat — could be epochal. Indeed, eight months probably isn’t long enough to cure the electorate of the cynical tendency to believe elections don’t really matter. But it’s one goal Biden and Trump and their supporters ought to be able to share each and every day.