Sensemaker Daily
Trump wins every county in Iowa except one with the biggest margin ever seen in a competitive caucus
Donald Trump was declared the winner of last night’s Republican caucuses in Iowa about 30 minutes after they began.
So what? Trump’s margin of victory was so big that news outlets called the win before some Iowans had cast their vote. The race to the White House has officially begun and Trump’s hold on the Republican party looks stronger than ever.
By the numbers
1 – Iowa has been the first state in the presidential primary calendar for Republicans since 1976.
99 – counties in Iowa. Visiting all 99 is called a “Full Grassley”, named for Chuck Grassley, the state’s senior US senator. DeSantis did the Full Grassley; Trump attended fewer than 30 events.
98 – counties Trump won in last night’s caucus, with Trump and Haley tied for Johnson county.
$100 million – amount of money Republican campaigns, PACs and other outside groups have spent on political advertising in Iowa this cycle, according to data collected by the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
30 – Trump’s margin of victory in percentage points, the largest ever in a competitive caucus in the state.
-30°C – The wind chill temperature in northwestern Iowa yesterday, leading to the lowest turnout since 2000.
24 – years since the Iowa caucus correctly predicted the eventual Republican nominee.
Trump secured 51 per cent of the vote, with Florida governor Ron DeSantis coming a distant second on 21 per cent and Nikki Haley on 19 per cent. Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, dropped out of the race after winning less than 8 per cent of the vote and quickly endorsed Trump.
Next, New Hampshire. The next contest is the New Hampshire primary on 23 January. The real prize up for grabs in both Iowa and New Hampshire isn’t delegates – it’s momentum.
An unexpectedly bad showing in one or both of the early states isn’t necessarily fatal to a strong favourite – Joe Biden came fourth in Iowa in 2020 – but any serious challenge to a frontrunner must almost certainly start with a win or otherwise strong finish in Iowa, New Hampshire or both.
Last night’s result looks particularly bad for DeSantis, who bet the house on a strong Iowa finish while Haley will place her bets on New Hampshire.
Trump. FiveThirtyEight analysed polling data from every presidential primary since 1980 and found that Trump has more support at this point in the process than every candidate except for George H W Bush in 1992.
- No candidate with a national polling average above 40 per cent on the eve of the Iowa caucuses has ever lost the nomination, and Trump is currently sitting around 62 per cent.
- In fact, if his decisive win last night suggests anything, it’s that the polls are on the right track.
Haley or DeSantis. For either Haley or DeSantis to win the nomination at this point, Trump’s lead would have to be much more fragile than it appears. Two things to keep an eye on:
- Second choices – Whether Haley or DeSantis could become a viable alternative to Trump largely depends on where each candidate’s voters would go if they dropped out. Polling on second choices is tricky because so much of it depends on hypothetical future scenarios, but recent surveys suggest that DeSantis voters would mostly move to Trump, and Haley voters would mostly be looking for someone other than Trump.
- Wildcards – “We have a former president … who has 91 criminal charges against him, who’s erratic, unpredictable, chaotic,” says Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the US and Americas programme at Chatham House, a think tank. “Anything could happen when your top candidate is Donald Trump. So you need to have backup.” In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, almost a quarter of Trump voters said he should not be the party’s nominee if he was found guilty of a crime, something that could happen before the end of the primary. The former president’s federal election interference trial is due to begin in March, one day before Super Tuesday when 16 states and territories pick their nominee.
Final thought: In between celebrating in Iowa and heading to campaign rallies in New Hampshire, Trump is expected to appear in a New York courtroom for the start of a defamation damages trial brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of rape.
Must read: Bret Stephens in the New York Times on the case for Donald Trump: “You can’t defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable.”