WASHINGTON – The coldest Iowa caucuses in history arrive on the night of Jan 15 amid expectations that Republicans in the state will put former president Donald Trump on the march to a third GOP presidential nomination.

The battle for second place, hard-fought between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Ms Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, will anoint Trump’s closest rival before the New Hampshire primary election and beyond.

The stakes for Iowans are high.

Trump is pursuing a return to the presidency despite – or perhaps because of – 91 felony counts from four criminal prosecutions, a looming fraud judgment that could decide the fate of his New York real estate empire and a pending decision on the defamation of a woman he has already been held liable for sexually abusing.

His opponents have implored Republican voters to move past the “chaos” and controversies of the Trump era and pick a different standard-bearer to go up against US President Joe Biden, who beat Trump in 2020.

Iowans will render the first verdict on those entreaties.

Here is what to watch as results roll in.

Will Trump crack 50 per cent?

Traditionally, Iowa caucuses are squeakers, so close that Democrats failed to produce definitive results in the chaotic 2020 contest.

Republicans falsely declared Mr Mitt Romney the narrow winner in 2012, depriving the actual victor, Mr Rick Santorum, the momentum that a caucus triumph can bring.

This time around, polling has consistently shown Trump well ahead, so much so that he hardly campaigned in the state.

Until the final weekend, he and his campaign were projecting confidence in a blowout victory, which has raised expectations when most campaigns seek to lower them.

If Trump exceeds 50 per cent, he will earn what he predicted would be “a historic landslide”.

Perhaps more important, Iowa will have signalled that even if the Republican field winnows down to Trump and one competitor, he still may have the allegiance of a majority of the party’s primary voters, at least in the nation’s heartland.

Who will claim second place?

Mr DeSantis officially joined the Republican presidential race in May 2023 with strong financial backing and talk that he would win Iowa and help the party turn the page on Trump while still embracing his policies.

But a campaign apparatus built around his super political action committee faltered just as Ms Haley was finding her footing. She had initially focused on New Hampshire and her home state, jumping into Iowa late.

The final Iowa Poll by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom, unsurprisingly, had Trump comfortably in the lead with the backing of 48 per cent of likely caucus-goers.

Ms Haley had 20 per cent and Mr DeSantis 16 per cent – a separation at the edge of the survey’s margin of error.

A second-place finish for Ms Haley would give her a boost ahead of New Hampshire, where she has been closing in on Trump and could benefit from the Jan 10 withdrawal of former governor Chris Christie of New Jersey from the presidential contest.

For Mr DeSantis, third place could spell doom ahead of New Hampshire, where he has slipped into single digits in polling averages, and South Carolina, which is a redoubt for Trump and is Ms Haley’s home turf.

Can Haley make electability stick?

Ms Haley’s closing argument in Iowa has been that she would not only defeat Mr Biden in the general election, but would beat him in a resounding landslide that would ring in an era of unified conservative governance in Washington.

A CBS News poll released on Jan 14 showed both Trump and Mr DeSantis leading Mr Biden narrowly, but Ms Haley beating him by 8 percentage points, 53 per cent to 45 per cent.

Many Iowa Republicans are confident that Trump is a proven commodity who can beat Mr Biden, despite the former president’s personal baggage and legal peril.

But Ms Haley’s electability argument has been persuasive with college-educated Republican voters, 39 per cent of whom backed her in a New York Times/Siena College poll released in December.

Her task in Iowa is to make it stick with a significant number of Iowans without a college degree as she tries to appeal to a wider Republican electorate that has been transformed by Trump into a bastion of voters without a college education.

Ms Haley, in the Times/Siena poll, had the support of just 3 per cent of those voters.

Who will show up to caucus?

The Iowa caucuses have never been particularly democratic. The gatherings on Jan 15 at 1,657 sites are more like party meetings.

Locals will assemble, conduct some business, hear pitches from representatives of each campaign, then finally turn in secret ballots. Caucuses can be time-consuming and public – and not particularly well attended.

In 2016, when Republicans held their last contested caucuses, 186,874 votes were cast out of 615,066 registered Republicans, a turnout of about 30 per cent.

On the night of Jan 15, temperatures will reach minus 21 deg C in much of the state, where snow is blowing across icy roads.

Mr DeSantis has bragged of a stellar get-out-the-vote operation.

Ms Haley has the door knockers of Americans For Prosperity Action, a conservative activist group funded from the fortune of brothers Charles and David Koch.

Trump has a far more organised ground game than he had in 2016, when he finished second to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. All of that will be battling the elements.

What about the other candidates?

No one has put as much shoe leather into Iowa as Mr Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and increasingly conspiracy-minded political newcomer who briefly saw a spike in support in August, only to dip back into the single digits – 8 per cent in the final Iowa Poll.

There is also former governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and a Texas businessman and pastor, Mr Ryan Binkley, both of whom came in with 1 per cent in the final Iowa Poll. NYTIMES