‘There’s just no excitement’: Retail politics takes a nosedive in a Trump-dominated campaign

If the Republican presidential primary this year is putting you half to sleep, you’re not alone. And it’s not just because Donald Trump is running away with the nomination.

Operatives and party activists in key early voting states say they can’t recall a recent cycle in which they had such little interaction with candidates.

There are the anecdotes: Over the Labor Day weekend, the unofficial start of the fall campaign, not a single candidate stepped foot in Iowa. Several weeks later, the first weekend of autumn passed with zero candidates making a stop in any state.

And there are the numbers: GOP candidate events in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state, are down nearly 50 percent this election cycle, compared to the same point in 2015, according to a review of campaign event trackers in early states. In New Hampshire, the first primary state, the candidates’ roster of September events was a fraction of those eight years ago. And hardly anyone is making the trek to Nevada.

In a lopsided election year, retail politics is flatlining.

“I’m truly stunned. It’s way down,” said Chad Connelly, a former South Carolina Republican Party chair whose faith-based organization Faith Wins holds frequent meetings with pastors in the early nominating states. “I don't think anybody would say this is a normal cycle.”

The decline of retail in 2024 is the product of several factors, all of them accelerated by Trump. First, rival candidates waited for months to see if the former president would run and then, once he did, if he would implode on his own. When they eventually did get in the race, they were confronted by a tightened calendar, reducing their time on the trail. Meanwhile, to qualify for a summer debate, lower-polling rivals were forced to focus more heavily on national TV appearances, social media and small-dollar fundraising to meet polling and donor thresholds.

And even when they did have time to press the flesh, the payoff was always going to be low in a primary nationalized by Trump’s legal entanglements, drawing more cameras to courtrooms in Miami, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and New York than the Pizza Ranch in Cedar Rapids.

The effect has been to further paralyze the race and cement Trump’s substantial lead — cutting off an avenue once relied on by lower-polling, lesser-funded candidates to shake up the field.

Twelve years after Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, rode a Chevy Malibu and a relentless schedule of small campaign appearances from 4 percent in the October polls to a caucus victory in Iowa, his retail-politics fairytale has never looked more out of style.

“I don’t know if that’s possible anymore,” said Matt Beynon, Santorum’s former aide who acted as his press secretary, body-man and driver while the pair pounded the pavement in Iowa on a shoestring budget. “The landscape has changed, from cable news to social media. Everything is national now.”

Fergus Cullen, the former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, hasn’t seen a single presidential campaign yard sign yet while driving and running around Dover, the state’s fifth-largest city. What he has seen is a noticeable drop-off in events compared to the last open GOP presidential contest.

“Donald Trump won the 2016 primary without doing town hall meetings and without taking questions from voters and without shaking hands,” Cullen said. “It raised the question of, to what extent was the value of all that grassroots stuff a myth?”

In the summer and fall of 2014, Republican presidential candidates were already swarming Iowa, unencumbered by the political plans of a faux-incumbent frontrunner. By mid-October 2015, each Republican had, on average, already held 68 events in the state, according to a POLITICO review of campaign stop data compiled by the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s most prominent newspaper. This time around, over the same period, that average is 35.

And over the 2015 Labor Day weekend in New Hampshire, Lindsey Graham, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Scott Walker and John Kasich, all zig-zagged the state. This year, though other candidates dropped in on the holiday Monday, just one candidate spent that Saturday or Sunday courting voters.

“It is a little bit puzzling to me, I guess,” said Steve Scheffler, the Republican National Committeeman for Iowa, of this year’s relative lull in on-the-ground action. “Most all the campaigns didn’t set down roots and a permanent ground game early, and they’re now making up for lost time.”

Or as David Kochel, a veteran of Iowa Republican campaigns, put it, “This campaign is so freaking boring.”

Kochel was referring to the lack of “dynamism” in the race and little movement, after months of campaigning, in polls.

There’s time for campaigning to pick up, he said, and candidates are still making appearances in Iowa. Even Trump, whose lead is over 30 points in the state, has held several events there in recent weeks, passing out pizzas at a restaurant and autographing a farmer’s John Deere combine between scheduled rallies.

“Trump has obviously upped his schedule in Iowa,” Kochel said. “[Ron] DeSantis is in the middle of a 99-county tour. [Nikki] Haley is growing her campaign here.”

But the frequency of campaigning is far less in Iowa than it was in previous years. And it’s hardly more dynamic elsewhere.

In the early-voting state of Nevada, among prominent Republican candidates, only Trump, DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have appeared at events. And from the start of the year through September in South Carolina, the Republican presidential candidates have made a total of just over 50 campaign appearances in the state, according to the Charleston Post and Courier.

In the longer history of presidential campaign cycles, the intensity of campaigning in the year before an election has ebbed and flowed. Despite Republicans hitting the trail in early states more than two years ahead of the 2016 election, Drew McKissick, chair of the South Carolina Republican Party, recalled things were much different when he first got involved in politics in 1988.

George H.W. Bush and Pat Robertson didn’t launch their campaigns until the October before. Bob Dole, meanwhile, waited until November to announce his bid.

This year, though, candidates got in far earlier than Bush or Dole. “We’ve had maybe a slower start” compared to 2016 or 2012, McKissick said. In his view, “that might be a good thing.”

But surveying Republican activists across the early states, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t see 2024, so far, as a dud.

Gwen Ecklund, a longtime Crawford County, Iowa Republican activist, said “It’s quiet right now, or it has been. Although we’re starting to see a few more come around.”

Karen Fesler, another veteran GOP activist in Iowa, who worked as Santorum’s caucus coordinator, said “it seemed like we peaked back in 2012 and 2016” in terms of candidate activity.

And even when the candidates are coming around, it isn’t like it was before. In New Hampshire, where several candidates flocked late last week for a series of in-person campaign stops and a cattle call, DeSantis told reporters that “voters resent being taken for granted” — in his first swing through the state in seven weeks.

Sean Van Anglen, a New Hampshire political consultant and Trump-turned-DeSantis supporter, said it “just seems like this cycle has been very bland.”

He added, “There’s just no excitement.”

Madison Fernandez and Sally Goldenberg contributed to this report.