The 2024 Iowa caucus was over before it started.
Former President Donald Trump solidified his position as the leading Republican presidential candidate on Monday when he secured victories in nearly every county in the Hawkeye State.
Not only did Trump break the 50 percent threshold among the grassroots voters who turned out despite an arctic blast, but he won big across all demographics.
How candidates fare during the Iowa caucuses is often used to gauge their chances of winning their party’s nomination. Trump’s landslide victory on Monday indicates there’s only one candidate Iowa voters, who were skeptical of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, trust to take on the Democrat regime up for re-election in November.
Trump went into the first official ballot tally of the 2024 election cycle with a double-digit lead on his primary opponents, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Less than one hour into the state’s ballot collection, Fox News, the Associated Press, CNN, CBS, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and others confirmed by calling Iowa for the former president that his on-the-ground performance matched the polls.
Since he announced his candidacy in November 2022, Trump never once lost his lead in the Republican primary. Even when Haley and DeSantis’ popularity margins grew 5 points over the last six months, Trump’s did too.
“The basic structure of the race has remained unchanged,” the Washington Examiner’s Byron York noted in his Monday morning newsletter.
The only fluctuation polls ever measured when it came to Trump was after Democrats made indictments and lawfare the center of their campaign. What began as a strategy to scare voters away from the Republican turned out to be the very reason his grip on voters tightened.
The real threat to Trump was never DeSantis, Haley, or any of the other soon-to-be GOP dropouts who complained that he refused to debate people who were dozens of percentage points behind him. It was always the regime that abused its presidential and bureaucratic power to indict its political enemies and wage a war on wrongthink.
Trump winning the majority in Iowa confirms he is best equipped to face off with Biden in the general election.
Trump understands this, which is why he sought to court general election voters with “moderate” positions on top issues like abortion, even though it elicited criticism from the pro-life people and groups who helped him win the 2016 primaries. It’s also why he was the only Republican presidential candidate to focus his campaign on the destruction of the deep state.
Biden and Democrats are guilty of weaponizing federal law enforcement, cheapening impeachment, fueling polarization, normalizing political violence and rioting, undermining election integrity, rejecting election results they don’t like, encouraging the collapse of our Southern border, and advancing extreme, unpopular agendas such as unlimited abortion, banning voter ID, colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans, targeting Jan. 6 protesters, and leading the political prosecution of their 2024 rival.
Trump’s call for accountability for these heinous actions resonates with voters, a majority of whom recognize the Biden regime’s definition of “justice” as a sham and want the Democrats’ allies at the FBI castigated for trading true accountability for partisanship.
The question going into Iowa was never “Will Trump survive?” on a campaign diet of calling out Democrats’ political persecution. It was always “Who will get second place?”
Now that the Iowa numbers are in, it’s time for the other Republican candidates to put the whining, quibbling, and online trolling about Trump behind them and focus on pointing voters to winning the general election battle ahead. After all, the future of democracy depends on it.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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