West Des Moines, Iowa – 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 to weigh in on who should be their party’s 2024 nominee.
And in Iowa, at least, the answer was clear: Donald Trump.
The Associated Press called the race for the 77-year-old former president at 7:31 p.m., a half hour after the Iowa caucuses started. Fox, NBC, and CNN joined the AP in calling the race for Trump early in the night.
The size of Trump’s win is still in question, and it’s still unclear how the rest of the results will turn out. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley have been jockeying for second place, with each hoping to emerge as Trump’s main opponent going forward.
Once viewed as the mostly likely candidate to knock Trump off his perch on top of the Republican Party, DeSantis went all in jumpstarting his fizzling campaign with a win in the Hawkeye state. A third-place finish would likely be disastrous for DeSantis.
Haley is 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. A Trump win there 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.
Trump has dominated almost every recent poll heading into the Iowa caucuses. The most recent Real Clear Politics average of polls shows Trump with over 60 percent support of Republicans nationally. It was a bit narrower in Iowa, where Trump had 52.5 percent support, and Haley and DeSantis were far behind with 18.8 percent and 15.7 percent respectively.
The most recent NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll released on Saturday showed Trump as the preferred choice of 48 percent of likely caucus-goers, 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 colder.
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,” DeSantis campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo 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 has 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.”
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 President Joe 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.