For the first time since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and was then criminally indicted for trying to overturn the results, Republicans got the chance on Monday night to weigh in on who should be their party’s 2024 nominee.
And in Iowa, at least, the answer was clear: Donald Trump.
As expected, the 77-year-old former president who is facing four indictments and 91 criminal charges, dominated the Iowa caucuses, winning 51 percent of the vote with 95 percent of returns in. The win helps to cement Trump’s status as the clear favorite to be the Republican nominee for the third presidential cycle in a row.
Speaking just before 10 p.m. in Iowa, Trump talked not just like the winner in Iowa, but like the presumptive nominee. He called for the country to come together, which he said is “going to happen soon.”
“It would be so nice if we could come together and straighten out the world, and straighten out the problems, and straighten out all of the death and destruction that we’re witnessing. It’s practically never been like this. It’s just so important,” Trump said.
He also congratulated Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor — or “Ron and Nikki” as Trump called them — for “having a good time together. We’re all having a good time together.” He also said Vivek Ramaswamy did a “hell of a job” in winning about 8 percent of the vote. Ramaswamy suspended his campaign Monday night and endorsed Trump.
In the muddled race for second place, DeSantis narrowly edged out Haley with about 21 percent of the vote to her 19 percent. Neither seems to have performed strongly enough on Monday night to make the case that Trump is a vulnerable front-runner.
Virtually every recent poll showed Trump with a commanding lead in Iowa.
The Associated Press called Iowa for Trump at 7:31 p.m., a half hour after voting started and while it was ongoing. Fox, NBC, and CNN joined the AP in calling the race for Trump early in the night. The AP said it made its call based on an analysis of early votes and a survey of voters who planned to participate in the caucuses.
DeSantis’s campaign called the media’s early call for Trump, before many voters had even cast a ballot, an “absolutely outrageous” form of “election interference.”
“The media is in the tank for Trump and this is the most egregious example yet,” DeSantis campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo said in an email.
Despite finishing 30 points behind Trump, DeSantis vowed to stay in the race, telling his supporters at around 10:30 p.m. that “in spite of all of that that they threw at us, everyone against us, we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa.”
“They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us,” DeSantis said to chants of “Ron, Ron, Ron.”
“They spent almost $50 million attacking us,” he said. “The media was against us. They were writing our obituary months ago. They even called the election before people even got a chance to vote.”
It’s still unclear how long DeSantis will be able to continue. Once viewed as the mostly likely candidate to knock Trump off his perch on top of the Republican Party, DeSantis’s campaign fizzled almost from the start. He went all in on jumpstarting his campaign in the Hawkeye state, receiving several prominent endorsements, including from the state’s popular governor, Kim Reynolds.
But after losing big to Trump on Monday, DeSantis’s path to winning the nomination seems increasingly unclear.
Haley is still hoping to stop Trump’s momentum in next week’s first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire, where she’s been rising in the polls. She had hoped a strong second place showing in Iowa could boost her chances there. A Trump win in New Hampshire would seemingly make his goal of being the Republican nominee all but inevitable — barring a prison sentence or some other unexpected development later this year.
Speaking to her supporters on Monday night, Haley seemed to dismiss being edged out by DeSantis. “When you look at how we’re doing in New Hampshire and South Carolina and beyond, I can safely say tonight Iowa made this Republican primary a two-person race,” she said.
She framed herself as the best alternative to both Trump and President Joe Biden, calling her campaign “the last best hope of stopping the Trump-Biden nightmare.”
The most recent Real Clear Politics average of polls showed Trump with over 60 percent support of Republicans nationally. It was a bit narrower in Iowa, where Trump had 52.5 percent support, close to where he ended up on Monday. The most recent NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll released on Saturday showed Trump with the highest support for a front-runner ever recorded in that poll.
The candidates’ turnout teams worked to draw out supporters in the frigid cold — the evening temperatures in Iowa hovered just below zero degrees, but wind chills made it seem much colder.
Entrance polls from CNN showed Trump winning a majority of born-again or evangelical Christian voters, Republican voters who consider themselves to be “very conservative,” voters who don’t believe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate, and voters who said immigration was their top issue. The polls showed Haley doing well with Republican voters with advanced degrees and winning with the minority of Iowa Republican voters who are moderates, and voters who believe Biden’s win was legitimate.
Ahead of the contest, the three leading candidates all tried to lower expectations.
Trump has frequently bragged about polls showing him with a massive lead in the state, but last week his campaign adviser said they would consider a win as narrow as 12 points a success.
Despite betting big on Iowa and campaigning in all of it’s 99 counties, DeSantis and his allies tried to frame DeSantis as the underdog in Iowa and to make the case that it was Trump and Haley who had “sky-high expectations” there.
“DeSantis has been counted out by the press and pundits in every single race he has run and shattered expectations every time,” Romeo, the DeSantis spokesman, said in a Monday morning email. “DeSantis tonight is in a position to prove the doubters who have already written his obituary wrong again.”
For their part, Haley’s team downplayed Iowa’s importance and argued that they expect her big moment to come next week, when she hopes to topple Trump in New Hampshire. That Northeast state has a less Trump-friendly electorate and “undeclared” voters can cast ballots in the Republican primary.
Haley has climbed in the polls in New Hampshire, where she has 29.3 percent support and is approaching striking distance to Trump, who has 43.5 percent support, according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages. She’s hoping a win there will expose Trump as vulnerable, and give her momentum heading into her home state of South Carolina next month.
Despite his ongoing legal troubles and often extremist rhetoric, Trump continues to have broad support in the Republican Party, which he has reshaped in his populist image over the last decade. Playing to his supporters’ grievances with the political class, Trump has promised in this campaign to be their “retribution.” As he did in 2016, Trump has also promised to crack down on the chaos at the southern border, vowing during Fox News town hall last week to finish building a border wall and to create the “largest deportation effort in the history of our country.”
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill, right away. We’re going to seal up the border, because right now we have an invasion of millions and millions of people who are coming into our country,” Trump said Monday night.
Mainstream news outlets have repeatedly warned that the former president has authoritarian impulses. But his attempts to downplay those accusations have only ratcheted up concerns.
In an early December interview with Sean Hannity on Fox, Trump said he wouldn’t be dictator, “other than on day one.” If re-elected, he said, on his first day back in office “we’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”
Last week, DeSantis, a longtime critic of the mainstream press, took aim at conservative outlets that he said “don’t hold [Trump] accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers, and they don’t want to have ratings go down.”
Heading into the Iowa caucuses, Haley argued that she would be the most formidable Republican in a matchup with Biden. While a new CBS News/YouGov poll shows Trump and DeSantis with narrow leads over Biden in head-to-head matchups, it shows Haley with an eight-point lead over the 81-year-old president. “The only way we’re going to win the majority is if we elect a new generational leader and leave the negativity and the baggage behind,” Haley said in a campaign speech on Sunday.