Trump wins Iowa caucuses in landslide first election of 2024

DES MOINES, Iowa — The first contest was no contest at all.

Former President Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus in a blowout Monday night — confirming his standing as the clear front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

With 97% of the expected vote in, Trump had 51.1% support, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (21.2%), former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (19.1%) and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (7.7%), who ended his campaign and gave Trump his support as the result became clear.

The 77-year-old Trump recorded the biggest margin of victory in the modern history of the Iowa GOP caucus, dating back to 1976, and become the first Republican candidate to get more than 50% support in a contested caucus.

The former president won or led in 98 of the Hawkeye State’s 99 counties as of midnight Tuesday, with only Johnson County — the home of the University of Iowa at Iowa City — narrowly denying him a clean sweep by barely going for Haley.

“I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together. We’re all having a good time together,” a notably low-key Trump said in his victory speech in Des Moines. “I think they both actually did very well. I really do. I think they both did very well.”

The 45th president then paid tribute to his late mother-in-law, Amalija Knavs, who died Jan. 9 — saying she was “up there, way up there, she’s looking down and she’s so proud of us” — and made a call for unity among Americans.

“I really think this is time now for everybody in our country to come together. We want to come together — whether it’s Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative,” said Trump, one of the most polarizing politicians in US history. “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.”

With hundreds of caucus meetings across the Hawkeye State still in progress, media outlets called Trump as the winner at 8:30 p.m. ET, with fewer than 10 precincts having reported their vote tallies to the Republican Party of Iowa.

The early projection of a Trump victory, which happened after caucus meetings had begun but before many actual votes had been cast, infuriated the DeSantis camp, which accused the press of unduly influencing the outcome.

“I spoke before [approximately] 400 Iowans today at a caucus site and DeSantis won,” the Florida governor’s campaign manager James Uthmeier wrote on X. “However, they were getting news alerts of a ‘trump [sic] victory’ before speeches concluded or voting began.

“The media wants to taint this process and it’s sad for America. Wake up everyone.”

DeSantis, who invested heavily in an Iowa ground game that failed to overcome the former president’s sheer popularity among voters, also referenced the early projection in his remarks to supporters in West Des Moines.

“They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us,” he said. “They spent almost $15 million attacking us … They even called the election before people got a chance to vote.”

“I am not going to make any excuses,” DeSantis added, “and I guarantee you this: I will not let you down.”

Trump’s popularity was reflected in a pre-caucus AP-NORC survey of more than 1,500 Iowa Republicans, many of whom are in the mood to shake things up in Washington again — with 88% saying they wanted either “substantial change” in the way the US is run or “total upheaval.”

The survey also showed that immigration, not the economy, was the top issue on Iowa GOP voters’ minds. With a migration surge threatening to overwhelm border authorities and big cities across America, 40% of Iowa Republicans said immigration was their top issue in this cycle, compared to 33% who said the state of the economy or jobs was their main concern.

Republican Hawkeye Staters also made no bones about how they felt about new arrivals, with three-quarters of respondents saying they felt immigrants did more to hurt than help the US, with just 22% saying the opposite. About 71% of GOP voters said they “strongly” supported building a wall along the US-Mexico border, the signature promise of Trump’s three consecutive presidential campaigns.

Despite the efforts of DeSantis and Trump’s other rivals, about 7 in 10 Iowans who caucused for the former president on Monday night said they had known all along that they would do so.

Trump performed strongly in small towns and rural communities, where about 6 in 10 Republican caucus-goers said they live. He won with white evangelical Christians, who are nearly half of the GOP attendees. He also excelled among those without a college degree.

While the former president performed less strongly in Iowa’s suburbs, Trump still held off Haley and DeSantis to win a plurality of support there.

The Florida governor, 45, was scheduled to fly to South Carolina for an event Tuesday morning before heading north to New Hampshire for an evening event.

Haley, 51, had tried to avoid naming specific expectations for her performance, implying she would be happy finishing anywhere in the top three before moving on to New Hampshire — where the primary electorate is more moderate and less dominated by social conservatives and evangelicals than Iowa — and her home state of South Carolina.

“As we head to New Hampshire, I have one more thing to say,” Haley told her supporters late Monday. “We’re going to win.”

“Underestimate me,” she added, “because that’s always fun.”

Ramaswamy, who had promised a “shock” result up until the last possible moment, was quick to see the writing on the wall Monday night.

“We’ve looked at it every which way, and I think it is true that we did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight, and I think that that’s just a hard fact that we’re going to have to accept,” he told supporters.

“As of this moment, we are going to suspend this presidential campaign,” added Ramaswamy before announcing that Trump had “my full endorsement for the presidency.”

Trump’s campaign had been planning on a blowout win in the first-in-the-nation caucus, with his team rolling out a “10 for Trump” strategy relying on caucus captains to recruit new or irregular participants to put their support behind the former president.

That strategy paid off handsomely, as hats and stickers touting Trump were all the paraphernalia that could be seen at one caucus attended by a Post reporter in West Des Moines.

On the coldest caucus night on record, Iowa Republicans braved snow, icy roads, and a wind chill that made it feel like negative-30 degrees Fahrenheit.

Turnout was well below the record 186,932 who showed up to the Republican caucus in 2016, when Trump was defeated by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and projected to be more in line with the 121,501 GOPers who turned out in 2012 to give former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) a narrow win over eventual nominee Mitt Romney.

Trump and his rivals don’t have much time to digest Monday’s results, as the Republican primary calendar shifts to New Hampshire and the Jan. 23 first-in-the-nation primary — where polls have shown Haley closing a double-digit gap in support against the 45th president.

With Post wires