On the menu today: Donald Trump wins big, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley limp along, Vivek Ramaswamy calls it quits after a lot of last-minute boasting, and for some reason, Asa Hutchinson is still here, having finished behind some guy whose name you probably won’t recognize.
Iowa’s Predictable Outcome
Not exactly a shocker, huh?
With 99 percent of the projected vote tabulated, the 2024 Iowa caucuses ended with Donald Trump winning 51 percent, Ron DeSantis with 21.2 percent, Nikki Haley with 19.1 percent, Vivek Ramaswamy with 7.7 percent, and Asa Hutchinson with two-tenths of 1 percent, or 191 votes.*
Ramaswamy called it quits last night, just hours after boasting, “We WILL shock the world tonight,” and pledging, as reported by our old friend John McCormack, “I’m gonna guarantee to stay in this race through November of this year when we win the election, through January of next year when I’m inaugurated as your next president, through January of 2033 when we leave that White House after two full terms.”
Last night, Ramaswamy conceded, “There’s no path for me to be the next president.” Does anyone ever get whiplash from these sorts of announcements? Everybody’s always publicly and adamantly insisting they’re going to stay in the race until the very end, right up until the moment they call the press conference suspending their campaign.
In a development roughly as surprising as Janosz Poha endorsing Lord Vigo**, Ramaswamy endorsed Trump, just two days after declaring, “This ‘system’ won’t allow Donald J. Trump anywhere near the White House again,” and ominously predicting the system will “eliminate Trump (one way or other).”
CNN’s chart does not include Ryan Binkley, who received seven-tenths of 1 percent, or 774 votes. Ryan Binkley is not one of the characters in the Bloom County comic strip, but a pastor and businessman who looks like the kind of guy they would get to play the Republican presidential candidate in a political-thriller movie. He had enough money to run ads during the Today Show on the Des Moines NBC affiliate.
The wrinkle of controversy last night was that the Associated Press, among others, called the race for Trump 30 minutes after the doors closed and the caucus began, and while some caucus goers were still voting. The DeSantis campaign accused the media of participating in “election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote.”
This does, at first glance, appear to be a violation of the stated Associated Press policy: “Only when AP is fully confident a race has been won — defined most simply as the moment a trailing candidate no longer has a path to victory — will we make a call.”
The AP does not make projections and will declare a winner only when it’s determined no scenario would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap.
The AP will declare a winner in the Republican caucuses based on its analysis of tabulated vote data, aided by an analysis of AP VoteCast, which will survey Iowa caucus-goers in the days leading up to and through caucus day, and other available vote and demographic data. . . .
AP does not declare a winner in any race before the last polls are scheduled to close in the contest. [Emphasis added.]
Was that policy followed? If people were still voting in the caucuses, then no, the AP violated its own policy and called a race before the polls had closed.
In theory, the AP could have declared the winner when the remaining number of uncast votes was smaller than the leading candidate’s current margin of victory. (Remember, at caucus sites, they close the doors at 7 p.m. local time, and if you’re not in the caucus site, you’re not voting. There are no mail-in ballots and no absentee ballots.)
Hypothetically, if the caucus sites counted 51 percent of the total votes, and all of them were for Trump, the AP could project a winner because the remaining 49 percent could all vote for DeSantis and Trump would still win. But . . . is that what happened here? Or did someone jump the gun?
It’s extremely difficult to believe the early call of Trump’s win altered the outcome of the race in any significant way. So far, we haven’t heard about anyone leaving the caucus early or people who said they changed their vote because of the early media reports that Trump had won. And even if they had, Trump’s margin of victory alone — 32,840 votes, as of this writing — is larger than DeSantis’s vote total.
With that said, if the Associated Press has a written policy about when it can report a projected winner in a race, it ought to follow that. The mainstream media seriously undermines public faith in the process when the institution has stated rules and procedures, and then throws out those rules and procedures at the last second without telling anyone.
For weeks — months? — I have sounded like a boring broken record: “Roughly half the party is hell-bent on renominating Trump. The other half of the party is deeply divided and appears extremely unlikely to unite behind one non-Trump alternative until it is too late.” If there was ever a possibility of a unity ticket, that opportunity appears long gone, with the DeSantis and Haley camps seeming to genuinely dislike each other. Had some candidate been able to unite the two bases of support for DeSantis and Haley — “Ronki DeSantley” — that fusion candidate would have won a respectable 40.3 percent and come out of Iowa with 15 delegates to Trump’s 20.
“Ronki DeSantley” could run a genuinely competitive race against Trump, but as of now, that candidate only exists in the Amalgam Universe. In this dimension, DeSantis did just well enough to not feel enormous pressure to drop out, Haley’s heading into her best early state, and only 40 delegates have been decided. But both challengers face the difficult question: Just which state are they actually going to win? You can’t win the nomination if all you do is string together meh-to-respectable second-place and third-place finishes.
(Between DeSantis and Haley, we see little or no effort to unite or woo supporters of the other. There’s just this assumption that once either DeSantis or Haley is left standing, everyone will simply obediently line up behind the remaining non-Trump candidate. I wouldn’t count on that!)
This is not a breathlessly exciting primary. It is a forced march that apparently was over before it started, likely to be remembered for how inconsequential it was. . . .
A narrow DeSantis win [in Iowa] would require both his support to be about 15 percentage points higher than in current polls and Trump’s support to be about 15 percentage points lower. It’s extremely hard to overcome a 30-point deficit in a matter of weeks, and if DeSantis pulls it off, it will rank among the most incredible comebacks in U.S. political history. . . .
He visited all 99 of Iowa’s counties, a milestone nicknamed the “full Grassley” after Chuck, the state’s very senior senator. You’d rather have the endorsement of Iowa governor Kim Reynolds than not have it. But there’s no sign it did anything for DeSantis at all. . . .
[Haley’s] on course for third place in what is functionally a three-candidate race in Iowa.
When that was published, DeSantis fans kept asking how I could write off their man when not a single vote had been cast yet. There was polling, there were reports of internal conflict, there were high-profile departures from his super-PAC.
By the way, can we now all agree that the approach both DeSantis and Haley took in that last debate didn’t do either one of them much good? Too negative, too petty, too dark.
For telling you, fairly consistently, that Trump was on pace to win and win big, I’ve been told to get out of my hotel room more, and that when the results are proven different from yesterday’s headline — “Why Donald Trump Is Probably Going to Romp in Iowa Tonight” — I’ll need to change my perspective and reporting on the race.
Sorry, guys. The handwriting has been on the wall for your preferred candidate for a while now. Don’t get mad at me for telling you things you don’t want to hear, or more specifically, when I tell you things you don’t want to hear, don’t claim that I’m lying or part of some nefarious plot to sandbag your preferred candidate.
“The polls are always wrong!” No, they’re not. You just remember the outliers that were unusually wrong; you don’t remember the ones that were right because no one cares when a poll projects an incumbent winning by 25 percentage points and he wins by around that margin. When a candidate is consistently up by 30 points or so — and there has been no shortage of polling in Iowa — that guy usually wins comfortably.
I could sit around and give you happy talk. There are writers, columnists, pundits, talking heads, and social-media influences who are happy to do that, and they will give that inaccurate, unrealistic optimism to a bigger audience. And then, when their candidate who they insisted would win finishes a distant fourth and withdraws from the race, they mutter, “This didn’t age well.” No kidding.
But I think you’re better off knowing how the race is actually going, instead of mentally residing in a dream world where your preferred trailing candidate is always on the cusp of pulling off the comeback of the century.
Donald Trump is on pace to cruise to the nomination. We’ll see if New Hampshire amounts to a speed bump or a genuine obstacle.
*For perspective, Hutchinson finished just 191 votes ahead of you and me, and we didn’t even run. Oh, and Hutchinson didn’t file the papers for South Carolina or Nevada. There’s determination in the face of long odds, and then there’s a strange addiction to shaking hands in diners and hosting sparsely attended town halls. None of us are obligated to play along with the bizarre little delusions of these men.
**(Thanks, Stephen Miller.)
ADDENDUM: Michael Brendan Dougherty:
I cannot think of a time when politics was as denuded of issue-substance as it is now. Neither party is even pretending to offer a suite of policies aimed at solving our pressing problems. Instead, the election is turning into a raw contest of two aged men: Trump vs. Biden, which somehow represents the rawest of all political contests: us vs them.