Today, Donald Trump is back in the all-important state of Iowa, and he's going on the attack. With just eight weeks left until the state's first in the nation contest for Republicans, the former President is mounting an aggressive campaign as he attempts to stop his GOP rivals from catching up to him, including former South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley.

Nikki Byrdbring. Sir, I will never, ever vote against you. You are the greatest President in my lifetime. It's not that long. She's not that old, actually. I would have preferred if she said in generations, but I know her well. She's not up to the job.

Trump's swing through Iowa comes as he faces intensifying heat from Haley in another critical state for Republicans. A new CNN poll shows Trump maintaining a significant lead among 42 % of likely voters in New Hampshire, this is the most GOP primary. But Haley has leapfrogged Trump's other rivals, moving into second place at 20 %. Now let's discuss more now with CNN's senior political analyst, and senior editor at the Atlantic, Ron Brownstein. All right, Ron, I want to get your reaction to Nikki Haley's rise in the polls. Is this a flash in the pan? Or can she mount a serious challenge to Trump?

Well, the answer to the first question is no, and the answer to the second question is TBD. Nikki Haley has two goals that she has to reach, and one of them I think she's clearly on track to do, and the other one we'll have to see. The first one is to supplant Ron DeSantis as Trump's chief rival in the race. I think she is on a pathway to do that. I mean, DeSantis's strategy, as we talked about before, has been to run at Trump almost entirely from the right. In the process, he struggled to peel away many of those hardcore Trump supporters, but alienated a lot of the voters in the center-right of the party who are the most resistant to Trump. He's left a vacuum that Haley is clearly filling in New Hampshire, even in Iowa to some extent, and certainly in South Carolina. You could imagine a scenario, Paula, where Haley can, even if she finishes third in Iowa, can finish a much stronger second and possibly even challenge Trump in New Hampshire and then get a real shot at him in South Carolina. Now to ultimately dislodge him, she's going to have to cut deeper into the voters who are now supporting him.

But I think there's no question that she has consolidated the voters. She's in the process of consolidating the voters who are most resistant to Trump, who DeSantis had an opportunity at, but so far has failed to convert by the way he has chosen to run in this race.

And as we've seen, Trump is devoting a lot of energy to Iowa, but it appears that it's really New Hampshire where he could face this threat. He lost the state twice in the general election. It also doesn't have a large base of evangelical voters he can count on. So if he loses in New Hampshire's primary or barely scrapes by, how detrimental would that be for his campaign?

Well, I think it does create the opportunity at that point for someone else to have a shot at him in South Carolina, which would be about four weeks later. The history of the Republican primary in the modern era has been remarkably consistent, and every contested race since 1980, except for one, one candidate won Iowa, a second candidate won New Hampshire, one of the two won South Carolina, and eventually became the nominee. The only exception was 2012, when Newt Gingrich won South Carolina and didn't win the nomination. I think if Haley, who clearly seems to be on a trajectory now where she is likely to be the closest finisher to Trump in New Hampshire, particularly if Governor Sunnu there endorses her, which certainly seems possible, and if Chris Christy, who is drawing largely from the same pool of voters, withdraws from the race closer to the New Hampshire date and potentially endorses her. If Haley did that, she would be in the same position that John McCain was in 2000 when he beat George W. Bush in New Hampshire. That gave him a chance to put him in the ring. They had this epic battle in South Carolina.

Ultimately, Bush won, and then he won the nomination. I think if Haley runs well in New Hampshire, she would give herself a shot in South Carolina at really emerging as a true challenger to Trump. But to do that, she's going to have to... As I said, she's in the process of consolidating that 30, 35 % of the party that is most resistant to Trump. Ultimately, she's going to have to win more of what a Republican pollster, what Ares calls those may be Trump voters who voted for him in the past but are open to an alternative now, and we'll see if she can find a way to do that, because so far she really hasn't directly confronted him to the degree that she'll have to if she's really going to make this a race.

Let's talk a little bit about those voters in the middle on the fence looking ahead to next year. What impact do you think a no-labels candidate could have on the presidential election?

Donald Trump ran twice. He did not come close to 50 %. I know there are polls now showing him at times drawing 50 %, but given the agenda that he's running on, calling his political enemies, vermin, talking about detention camps, mass deportation, deploying the National Guard into into Blue Cities, etc, it's very hard to imagine him getting to 50 % of the vote. And therefore, there's arguments and polls about whether various third-party candidates take more or less from one side or the other. In general, I think all of the third-party candidates help Trump because Biden has shown that he can get to 50 %. Democrats have gotten to 50% several times over the last generation, Republicans have only done it once since 1988 in 2004. So if you lower the number, you need to win. On balance, I think that helps Trump. It is possible that a third-party candidate or candidates could draw a significant share of the total vote. You have a lot of Americans who are dissatisfied with both Trump and Biden. They really don't want this choice. The problem for a third-party candidate is not winning a lot of votes. It's winning any states.

You have the risk. No matter how plausible a third-party campaign you have, you might come in second in the blue states of the Democrats and second in the red states to the Republicans. Russ Perot won 19 % of the vote in 1992 and didn't win a state. So no labels has to understand that it would be a spoiler. It would be a spoiler that would make it more likely that Trump would be President again, and we'll see whether they choose to go forward with that clear knowledge that that would be their likely effect.

Ron, I want to turn right now to the new speaker of the House and some comments that Mike Johnson made. Rolling Stone uncovered a prayer call that congressman, Johnson, had with a right-wing pastor, with a pastor, where they discussed American culture. Let's take a listen to what Johnson had to say.

This is an inflection point. We're at a civilizational moment. The only question is, is God going to allow our nation to enter a time of judgment for our collective sins, which his mercy and grace have held back for some time? The faith in our institutions is the slowest it's ever been in the history of our nation. The culture is so dark and depraved that it almost seems irredeemable at this point.

What do you make of him calling American culture dark and depraved, perhaps irredeemable?

Yeah, I mean, his evidence that it was dark and depraved was the large number of young people who identify as somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. His remarks were not as severe, but seemingly in the same vein of Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell after 9/11, saying it was God's punishment for America's departure from traditional morality. I wrote in 2012, and I believe since that the fundamental dividing line in American politics are between those Americans who are comfortable with the way the country is changing demographically, culturally, and economically, and those who are not. I've called it the Coalition of Transformation and the Coalition of Restoration. What you hear there from the speaker is really a core belief, I think, is what unifies and knits together the modern Republican coalition more than anything else, the belief that the country is evolving in a way that is defacing and uprooting our traditions and values. And so many of the policies that you see, whether it's abortion or same sex marriage, all flow out of this belief that what America is becoming is untrue to what it has been. I think he is a strong reflection of that, and you will see that manifest in all sorts of policies, whether it's support for a national ban on discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, or presumably a national abortion ban at some point.

That is the underlying belief that Mowdh towers that broad policy agenda.

Heron, thank you.