Before Monday, the conventional wisdom of the Republican political class in Iowa held that any day now — as the rest of the field campaigned across the first-in-the-nation caucus state — an alternative to Donald Trump was bound to catch fire.

But then came the highly anticipated Iowa Poll, the most credible assessment yet of the state of the field in Iowa. For everyone other than Trump, it was a heavy dose of cold water.

There was no magic for Trump’s rivals with the flip of a pork burger at last week’s Iowa State Fair. The state’s devout evangelical voters — believed by many Republicans to be interested in finding a more palatable nominee — are still standing behind Trump in droves. And despite marginal increases in support for some lower-polling candidates, everyone but Trump and Ron DeSantis — his closest competitor, who remains a whopping 23 percentage points behind Trump — are stuck in the single digits.

“Everything, in a way, is kind of falling flat,” said Kelley Koch, chair of the Dallas County Republican Party.

For candidates busily traversing the state, she said, “You would expect a bump.” Instead, “It’s almost like Trump’s got his grip on Iowa.”

Veteran political observers had for months awaited the release of the 2024 election’s first survey by longtime Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer, given its track record of credibility. Surveying likely caucusgoers, as opposed to merely registered voters, is inherently difficult, and earlier polls emerging from the state this cycle were taken by some strategists with a word of caution to wait for the gold standard.

But Monday’s Des Moines Register/NBC News Iowa Poll, conducted last week after most of the top Republican candidates had already appeared at the State Fair, belied any argument for Trump’s opponents that they were doing substantially better in Iowa than earlier polls had suggested. Instead, two days before the first primary debate on Wednesday in Milwaukee, the poll served as a reminder of how nationalized the 2024 race has become.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ favorability in Iowa is actually a point higher than the highly polarizing former president’s — 66 percent to Donald Trump’s 65.