What's propelling GOP voters to support Trump?

Former President Donald Trump moved a step closer to the Republican nomination Monday night with a dominating win in the Iowa caucuses with a roughly 30-point margin of victory as the U.S. appears to be steamrolling toward a 2020 rematch with President Joe Biden.

Monday night’s results were another indicator of Trump’s strength within the Republican Party, whose voters have enthusiastically supported him even after he left office in the days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and a series of criminal indictments.

Entrance polling from CBS found the top issues for Iowa Republican caucusgoers were immigration and the economy, which have been consistent throughout the primary race. Foreign policy and abortion were a distant second place, with 11% of voters saying they were the top issue for them.

An Associated Press VoteCast survey of Iowa voters also found immigration and the economy to be the top priorities for GOP voters. More than half the voters who ranked the two as their top priority broke for Trump, bolstering his strength in Iowa.

“He's got a very special relationship with a core group of Republican voters, there's no doubt about that. People are upset for a lot of reasons, people are angry," said Ray La Raja, a political science professor and co-director of the UMass poll. "They have grievances about political beliefs, some of them economically aren't doing too well, they're anxious about how the country is changing so fast. He expertly taps into all those qualms all those concerns, and he seems like a fighter.”

But Iowa’s Republican voters are more likely to be aligned with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement than in other states, such as the next primary state of New Hampshire where former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is polling within striking distance of the former president. While Trump won handily in Iowa, nearly half of the state also voted for one of his challengers, showing division about whether he should be their 2024 nominee.

Other issues, like abortion and democracy, are also higher on priority lists for voters in the upcoming primary states and in the general election. A Suffolk University poll conducted earlier this month found voters in New Hampshire ranked the future of American democracy as the top issue facing the country today.

Both have favored Democrats in recent election cycles as voters continue to revolt against the overturning of Roe v. Wade and blame Trump for the events leading up to and on the day of Jan. 6. Biden’s reelection campaign have seized on both in advertising and in fundraising stops.

Immigration and the economy were centerpieces of Trump’s tenure in the Oval Office and have remained there in his third run for the White House. He has made multiple pledges on immigration like deporting tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants or to finish his signature border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Both are vulnerable issues for Biden, who is trying to cut a deal with Congress on immigration measures amid a record flow of migrants entering the U.S. illegally. The economy, which is performing well by most metrics and has seen inflation fall to 3%, is also a sore spot for Biden’s reelection campaign.

Voters are frustrated with inflation and have given the president increasingly low marks on his handling of the economy despite avoiding a recession, historically low unemployment and withering inflation.

The election is likely to come down to the candidates’ performance in a handful of swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, where polling has indicated the economy is likely to be the top issue for voters come November.

But the moderate or swing voters that account for larger parts of the electorate are also more likely to view Trump’s prosecutions as legitimate and think a conviction would disqualify him from receiving their vote. A Vanderbilt University national poll released last week found 26% of Republicans said a conviction would decrease the chances they would vote for Trump, while 31% of independents agreed. With small margins likely to decide the race, losing support from either of those groups could lead to a Biden victory.

Trump also won’t be able to rely on his connection with the party’s base of enthusiastic supporters to win a general election against Biden, as they will not be enough to win Electoral College votes that are necessary to secure the White House.

“There is a shift in audience, you have to win some of the undecideds and the persuasives and that's when it comes down to some of the fundamentals about how's the economy doing? But he's sui generis, Trump, people have visceral reactions to him,” La Raja said. “If he's on the verge of being convicted, some might not vote for him but this is gonna be a difficult (election) to pick.”