DES MOINES, Iowa — Voters had their say for the first time in the 2024 presidential campaign cycle Monday — and the result was an emphatic win in the GOP’s Iowa caucuses for former President Trump.
Trump stormed to victory by roughly 30 points.
Much of the tension in the run-up to the caucuses revolved around the fight for second place. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won the consolation prize, edging out former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
The caucuses winnowed the field, as they often do, with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy suspending his campaign after a lowly fourth-place showing. Ramaswamy endorsed Trump, as expected.
The weather was a major factor in this year’s caucuses, as a polar vortex plunged Iowa temperatures well below zero. Monday appears to have been the coldest caucus day ever.
Somewhere around 112,000 Iowans caucused, well shy of the record of approximately 186,000 set in 2016.
Here are the winners and losers from Monday night.
WINNERS
Former President Trump
The night could hardly have gone better for Trump.
He won by the resounding margin polls had been predicting, with no signs of softening or complacency among his supporters.
He appears to have cleared the 50-percent mark, which robs his rivals of the argument that a majority of caucusgoers were against him.
Just as importantly, the close result between DeSantis and Haley likely keeps both in the race for some time to come — ensuring the non-Trump vote remains divided.
Trump was unusually conciliatory, by his standards, in his roughly 20-minute victory speech to supporters here. He gave a modicum of praise to his rivals, saying that they had all been “having a good time together,” and that Haley and DeSantis “both did very well.”
He also contended it was “time now for everybody to come together” — a remark that will appear incongruous to the critics of the most polarizing president of modern times.
But the mild tone was part of a general push from Team Trump to nudge his rivals to step aside.
Kari Lake, the Trump loyalist who lost her bid to become governor of Arizona in 2022 and is now a Senate candidate in the state, told The Hill that the other candidates’ bids were now “vanity projects.”
“They don’t have a chance to win,” Lake said. “For them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Iowa and New Hampshire to try to bring down an incredible candidate … would be unfortunate. I hope they take a little break, do a little soul-searching and recognize that President Trump is the man to help save America.”
Pollsters
Pollsters take enormous flak when they get things wrong, but they had a solid performance in the Hawkeye State.
That’s no mean feat in caucuses, which are inherently difficult to poll, and in this case the savage weather introduced another element of uncertainty.
Trump’s 30-point lead, with 98 percent of the vote counted, was squarely within the range of most pollsters’ predictions.
Critics will note that Haley had overtaken DeSantis for second in several of the final polls before the caucuses.
But, to be fair, some of the best pollsters had placed caveats around those results because of an apparent lack of passion from some of Haley’s supporters.
J. Ann Selzer, the driving force behind the highly regarded Des Moines Register poll, said two days before the caucuses that there was “underlying weakness” to Haley’s level of support and that “a disproportionate share of her supporters might stay at home.”
That appears to be exactly what happened.
The Iowa caucuses
The Iowa Republican Party can breathe a sigh of relief now that the caucuses themselves went smoothly despite challenging circumstances.
The turnout was admittedly fairly low — but it still hit a creditable level, given the weather conditions.
There were no reports of significant irregularities nor did any candidate question the results.
This was all the more important after the debacle of the Democratic Party’s Iowa caucuses four years ago.
On that occasion, the system for reporting the results failed catastrophically. Ultimately, the Democrats stripped Iowa of its first-in-the-nation status in their primary process.
Mixed
Ron DeSantis
The bottom line: DeSantis survived.
If he had fallen to third place, there would have been a chorus of calls for the Florida governor to quit the race — especially as he heads into the less hospitable territory of New Hampshire, where he is third in polls, and Haley’s home state of South Carolina.
By coming second, DeSantis can claim to have outperformed expectations. During his caucus night speech to supporters, he said that “in spite of all of that they threw at us, everyone against us, we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa.”
The DeSantis camp was also infuriated by the early calls of the race by media organizations. The Florida governor’s allies have a legitimate case to make that this could have depressed his vote.
For all that, a distant second in Iowa isn’t much to boast about for a candidate who at one point believed the state was ideal terrain upon which to upset Trump.
The road ahead is enormously difficult, but the Florida governor lives to fight another day.
Losers
Nikki Haley
Haley’s campaign is eagerly making the case that the Iowa result was a moral victory for her.
It really wasn’t.
The candidate herself contended, in her post-caucuses speech, that “tonight Iowa made this Republican primary a two-person race.”
It’s a good spin. But it’s not a hugely persuasive argument when the candidate has just come third, lagging roughly 32 points behind the winner.
Deeper analyses of the result also seem to show a persistent problem: Haley’s supporters are overwhelmingly voters with a college education, in a party where those people are outnumbered by voters without college degrees.
Haley isn’t out of the race by any means.
She might well come back strong in New Hampshire. It is easier to lay out a hypothetical path to the nomination for her than it is for DeSantis.
But she was a loser in Iowa simply because she badly wanted a second-place finish and didn’t get it.
Media projections
The media is in another furor of its own making after projecting Trump as the winner of the caucuses roughly a half-hour after they began.
The calls came before many Iowans had voted.
The Associated Press and several TV networks based their calls on a combination of voter surveys and the very earliest returns.
But there had previously been a generally accepted guideline that projections of a result are not made while the polls are still open. The rule of thumb was broken Monday.
Ken Cuccinelli, a founder of the main super PAC supporting DeSantis, told The Hill in a text message that the early calls were “absolutely outrageous.”
“The networks were calling the race when the polls opened,” he protested.
Of course, the DeSantis camp has a vested interest in making the argument that his vote could have been higher.
But, by any reasonable standard, the super-early projections amounted to another questionable media moment.
Vivek Ramaswamy
He’s out.
There was no path forward for Ramaswamy after he trailed in fourth with about 8 percent of the vote.
The outcome showed what polls had long indicated — for all the ardor of his online fan base, Ramaswamy had extremely limited appeal. Indeed, the share of voters viewing him unfavorably actually climbed during his campaign.
Ramaswamy offered Trump his “full endorsement” as he withdrew from the race.