Opinion | Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis Confront a Ticking Clock

They are coming at this from dramatically different places. Iowa is make or break for Mr. DeSantis, who has gone all in on the state. This makes it especially unsettling for his team that Ms. Haley has caught up with him there in recent polling. Mr. DeSantis has long benefited from the belief by many in the G.O.P. establishment that he is the party’s most electable option: Trump but competent, as the sales pitch goes. If he places behind both Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley, then limps to a second defeat in New Hampshire — where recent polling shows him in fourth place, at best — that electability argument goes splat.

The next several weeks are basically Mr. DeSantis’s last shot at breaking through, and it’s increasingly hard to see how he does so. He has tried to walk that fine messaging line of presenting himself as the MAGA choice for a new generation. But selling Trump Lite to a base still drunk on the original has proved difficult. More problematic, early signs are that the recent consolidation of the non-MAGA part of the field, especially Senator Tim Scott’s departure, will benefit Ms. Haley more than Mr. DeSantis. Then there’s the cold reality that Meatball Ron is a lousy retail politician, a real handicap in early-voting states, where people take their face-to-face schmoozing with candidates very seriously.

That said, Team DeSantis is determined not to get outworked — which is also something Iowans take very seriously. “In Iowa,” Tom Vilsack, the state’s 40th governor, once observed, “it is not the message; it is the relationship.” In October the campaign announced it was shipping about a third of its Florida-based staff to Iowa until the caucuses. In mid-November, three top players were dispatched: the deputy campaign manager, the national political director and the communications chief, according to Politico. Additional offices are being opened across the state, and more aides are expected to be dispatched in December. He scored the endorsement of Iowa’s governor, Kim Reynolds. If Mr. DeSantis is smart, he’ll be shaking hands and smooching babies in the state every waking moment between now and caucus night on Jan. 15.

Ms. Haley has sought to strike more of a balance between Iowa and New Hampshire. This makes a certain sense, seeing as how the quirky Granite State, with a large number of independents who vote in the primaries, seems more fertile ground for her brand of politics than does Iowa, whose Republican base is heavy on religious conservatives. (White evangelicals do love them some Trump.) She has been toggling between events in both places, and last month her campaign announced that starting in December, it would be running an additional $10 million in ads across the two states. She recently rolled out a list of 72 endorsements from prominent political and business figures in Iowa. Her campaign has not been scrambling to flood the zone with staff members, à la Team DeSantis, perhaps because it isn’t feeling the heat quite as much.

Ms. Haley is going hard with the message that she is the face of a new generation, unburdened by Trumpian drama and, unlike Mr. DeSantis, able to unite rather than divide Americans to get things done. (Pragmatism has been a central theme in her strong debate showings.) Playing to the coalition of Trump-skeptical Republicans and independents, she is walking a clearer, cleaner path than Mr. DeSantis.