DES MOINES, Iowa — Within a half hour of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, it was becoming clear who Monday night’s big winners and losers were going to be.
Former President Trump marched out of the frigid Iowa night with a historic victory, a strong case for inevitability, and a jet plane of momentum heading into the second GOP presidential nominating contest in New Hampshire in a week.
The night’s biggest loser was arguably the life-support notion that Republicans en masse are looking for an alternative to Trump in what’s shaping up to be a rematch of 2020 and that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are such “viable alternatives.”
A close second in the loser column was the Democrat Party of Iowa, ignominiously forced to sit out the opening caucuses for the first time in 52 years and watch their GOP counterparts operate a functioning caucus — something state Democrats had a hard time doing four years ago.
Trump hammered his remaining rivals, winning by a record-smashing 51 percent of the vote. DeSantis finished a distant second, with roughly 21 percent support of caucusgoers. Haley, a former South Carolina governor who served as Trump’s U.N. ambassador, looked to finish in third with about 19 percent of the vote.
Ohio biotech entrepreneur and political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy received less than 8 percent support, finishing a faraway fourth. Ramaswamy announced he was ending his campaign for the White House and backing Trump, the man the millennial Ramaswamy has frequently called the greatest president of the 21st century.
Trump walked away with the brunt of the Iowa Republican delegates — 20 — and a more convincing argument to clear the field.
“I really think this is time now for everybody, our country, to come together,” the former president told a raucous crowd of supporters at a victory party in downtown Des Moines. He was uncharacteristically magnanimous in his speech, congratulating DeSantis and Haley for “having a good time together” and describing the GOP competitors he’s frequently bashed as “very smart people, very capable people.”
But Trump made it clear he believes playtime is over. In recent days, Trump and a long list of surrogates have made clear they wanted Iowa to send a message that the former president is the undisputed Republican candidate for 2024. A big victory in the Hawkeye caucuses would make a compelling argument that the time to clear the field is nigh.
And it was a big night in Iowa for Trump. In a telerally just a few hours before the caucuses began, Trump told supporters to take nothing for granted, not to worry about the polls that have shown the front-runner to be far ahead of his opponents. “Assume we’re 1 point down,” he said. At the same time, Trump asked his backers to deliver 50 percent support, a threshold no GOP candidate has ever hit in Iowa’s Republican caucuses.
The Trump army came through, braving negative temperatures and painful windchills to exceed expectations.
Ultimately, the final NBC New/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll released a day before the caucuses tracked pretty closely with Trump’s victory. The former president garnered 48 percent support from respondents in that survey. Haley was a distant second, at 20 percent, followed by DeSantis at 16 percent. Ramaswamy trailed in fourth, at 8 percent.
The DeSantis campaign had put much of its resources and time into Iowa, betting on victory and positioning DeSantis as the Republican candidate who could beat Democrat President Joe Biden. While that narrative has been undercut by the polls and his performance Monday night, the popular Florida governor fended off a much-reported Haley surge in recent months to slip into a second-place finish.
DeSantis, who has spent the past couple of weeks trying to lower expectations in Iowa, sounded like a wounded warrior as he claimed triumph against mounting challenges.
“Because of your support, in spite of all that they threw at us, everyone against us — we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa,” he said as the final caucus results were filtering in.
Team DeSantis complained about The Associated Press declaring Trump the victor just a half hour into the caucuses, with a fraction of the vote tally in.
“Absolutely outrageous that the media would participate in election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote,” DeSantis campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo howled on his X account.
The DeSantis camp’s complaints may ring hollow to the former president, who has faced actual election interference in the left’s efforts to remove him from primary ballots. He’s also had to legally battle a politically weaponized U.S. Department of Justice targeting Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in this November’s presidential election, with a hefty list of criminal charges.
The DeSantis and Haley campaigns, and the well-heeled political action committees backing them, have dumped a lot of money into Iowa for a disappointing return on investment. Haley in particular, criticized by conservative grassroots as the “establishment” candidate, now must lick her wounds and move on to New Hampshire where she’s polling in second, 14 percentage points behind Trump but leading DeSantis by more than 20, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls.
“Thank you, Iowa! You’re faithful, patriotic & hardworking, and I’m grateful to each of you!” the candidate wrote on her X account, holding on to her fraying narrative that she’s better positioned to beat Biden than Trump. “Now it’s on to New Hampshire, where this campaign is the last best hope of stopping the Trump-Biden rematch that no one wants.”
The Iowa Democrat Party looked especially bad.
While the state party claimed it was holding its caucus Monday night, the meeting was a sad shell of the first-in-the-nation nominating caucus Iowa Democrats rolled out in 1972. They met to set party platforms, but they won’t announce the winner of their “preference vote” until March 5 — Super Tuesday. That’s because the Democratic National Committee took away the state party’s kickoff caucus status. Iowa, so sayeth the DNC, is too white. The DNC demands diversity in the party’s tireless pursuit of wokeness. So the Democratic Party of Iowa, running afoul of state law, kissed the DNC’s ring and opted for a mail-in preference vote between Jan. 15 and Super Tuesday to decide how Iowa delegates will vote at this summer’s Democratic National Convention.
The demotion follows the spectacular fiasco that was Iowa’s 2020 Democratic caucuses. “Considerable flaws” in the party’s reporting system created confusion, long-delayed results, and charges that the process was rigged.
In fact, the last two Iowa Democrat caucuses have come under widespread criticism, featuring eyebrow-raising shenanigans against Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. But the Democrat Party machinery has been much more interested in a coronation than a contest.
The Iowa GOP, on the other hand, was being widely praised for its cool, crisp handling of the 2024 installment.
It’s now on to New Hampshire, and radio silence for Iowa. Gone are the wall-to-wall campaign ads. The barrage of candidates. The national press trucks and nosy reporters.
Iowa, the epicenter of presidential politics for the better part of a year, is about to be ghosted like a bad date.
M.D. Kittle is an award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism.
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