Trump Crushes In Iowa, DeSantis a Distant Second: Live Updates

Trump got his historic margin of victory:

I just wrote about how Trump’s dominating victory on Monday night paves him a virtually unobstructed path to the Republican nomination:

Ron DeSantis was going to run to Trump’s right and peel off MAGA voters (particularly evangelicals) as a more effective and consistent champion of their various causes. And Nikki Haley was going to scoop up anti-Trump, Trump-skeptic, and electability-mad voters and roll out of Iowa and into New Hampshire with a head of steam as the only real challenger left in the race. Neither strategy worked out.

Donald Trump won half the Caucus vote against DeSantis, Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and some other random names. He carried 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties, and led in urban, suburban, and rural areas. According to entrance polls, he trounced DeSantis among self-described “very conservative” voters by a 60 percent to 28 percent margin, and beat the Floridian among evangelical voters by a 51 percent to 29 percent margin. But Trump also beat Haley among college-educated voters and independents. He carried every age category. Trump showed no real weaknesses. His roughly 30-point margin of victory was well over double the all-time record in contested Iowa Republican Caucus history, even though he may have suffered from turnout lowered by brutally cold weather and the lack of doubt about who was going to finish first (as opposed to second and third, which was indeed a close competition as predicted). He was outspent by both Team Haley ($37 million) and Team DeSantis ($35 million) in Iowa campaign advertising (Trump and his allies spent $18 million). None of it really mattered.

You can read the rest of my takeaways from Monday night, including what now awaits DeSantis and Haley, here.

She just ignored DeSantis in her speech after placing third on Monday night:

And then she was off to a place where that argument might matter more:

Notes the director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics & Public Service (who’s also a former Democratic Party strategist):

This is what passes for Trump being nice: during his victory speech he congratulated “Ron and Nikki” for “having a good time together.”

Was there a teasing tone in Trump’s voice as he noted his two distant rivals are still fighting over second place? Sure. But CNN anchors were impressed that he called DeSantis “Ron,” as he usually refers to him as “DeSantimonious” or some other nasty nickname.

Trump’s speech was unusually subdued — or at least the beginning of it was. He started by thanking and praising various staffers and family members, and shared some kind words about his recently deceased mother-in-law Amalija Knavs. He even called on people of all political persuasions to “come together and straighten out the world”:

CNN cut off the speech just as he switched back to his usual tirades about how we need to “drill baby drill” and fight the “invasion” of migrants at the southern border.

Multiple media outlets, including the Associated Press and CNN, projected Donald Trump as the winner of Monday’s Iowa caucus early in the evening — so early that a lot of Iowans hadn’t actually cast their votes. There was no way to argue that DeSantis could have overcome a 30 point deficit if only voters hadn’t prematurely been told that the caucus was a done deal, but the DeSantis campaign is nonetheless making a big stink, arguing that the early calls were anti-democratic and an indication that the dreaded “corporate media” was against them:

DeSantis mentioned it in his second-place victory speech, as well:

Others argued that the early call was bad on more general grounds:

Vivek Ramaswamy is dropping out of the presidential race following his fourth-place finish in Iowa — and you’ll never guess who he will now reportedly endorse:

According to a senior campaign official who tried to spin CNN:

They threw everything at Ron DeSantis. They couldn’t kill him. He is not only still standing, but he’s now earned his ticket out of Iowa. This is going to be a long battle ahead, but that is what this campaign is built for. The stakes are too high for this nation and we will not back down.

Good times were had by all:

Noted Semafor’s David Weigel in a pair of tweets a short while ago:

Haley’s vote trending down — she’s not as strong as Rubio was in the five counties I call the “Rubio archipelago.” Example: Rubio eked out a win in Scott County (Davenport). With most precincts in, Trump is winning it by 24 points and DeSantis isn’t too far behind Haley. [The] Des Moines Register poll raised expectations (Haley in 2nd) but if you read Selzer’s analysis, she had very soft support, needed a bunch of Trump-phobic people to show up and register as Rs tonight.

If DeSantis does hold on to second, that could end up being a double-win for Trump, at least in the near term, since Haley seemed to be the only opponent the Trump Team has taken seriously as of late:

Per the New York Times, Vivek’s caucus-night party is a ghost town:

At Vivek Ramaswamy’s watch party at the Surety Hotel in downtown Des Moines, speakers are blaring “High Hopes” by Panic! at the Disco, but few people are around to hear it. The room is mostly empty, aside for members of the media who have gathered in the back, as many people are still at their caucuses.

Or if you prefer that news in needle:

From the fundraising email they blasted out shortly after he got all the network calls (it’s not clear which when they are referring to):

Photo: Screenshot/Email

Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is fundraising off Trump’s big victory as well. “The Iowa results are in, and it’s clear: Donald Trump is the official frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. We need to work even harder now,” the campaign said in its own email to supporters on Monday night.

While DeSantis lost badly among voters favoring a national abortion ban, entrance polls did show him trouncing the former president by a 51-22 margin among the narrow sliver of caucus-goers (11 percent) for whom abortion was the most important issue. Similarly, Nikki Haley beat Trump 47-37 among the 11 percent of voters who said “foreign policy” was the most important issue. Unfortunately for the two challengers to the front-runner, 34 percent of caucus-goers called immigration the most important issue, and Trump won 61 percent of them. And 37 percent said the economy was the most important issue and Trump won 52 percent of them. He won big on the biggest issues.

So far, there are indications fewer Iowans are participating than in caucuses past:

Ron DeSantis’s entire Iowa — and national, really — strategy was to try to outflank Trump on the right, with particular emphasis on the abortion issue. Trump had deeply annoyed anti-abortion groups by suggesting Republicans downplay the issue, and also by saying the six-week ban DeSantis (and also Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds) signed went “too far.”

So how did the two candidates fare among DeSantis’s target groups? According to the entrance polls, 50 percent of caucus-goers described themselves as “very conservative.” Trump beat DeSantis among them by a 61-26 margin (Haley only won 6 percent of them). 60 percent of caucus-goers favor “banning most/all abortions nationwide.” Trump won 54 percent of these voters, and DeSantis only 25 percent (Haley won 10 percent).

The governor’s spokesperson is not at all pleased with the almost insta-victory calls for Trump:

Longtime Intelligencer contributor (including to this liveblog) Ben Jacobs wrote a post for Slate about how the importance of the Iowa caucus is but a shadow of its former self:

[Campaigning in every Iowa county] is a ritual that politicians have long performed to demonstrate their seriousness about competing not only in the state’s more populous areas but in its rural parts, which include vast, sparsely populated tracts far from commercial airports. It’s easy to fly into Des Moines or Cedar Rapids, but showing up in Adams County or Palo Alto County requires real effort. Traditionally, this wasn’t just an effective tactic to woo rural voters—it was a message as well, an effort to convince caucusgoers that a candidate deserves their support because he is campaigning for it the right way, the Iowa way.

A candidate not doing that is Donald Trump. He won’t make it to even 20 counties by caucus night. In November, Trump held a raucous rally in a high school gymnasium in Fort Dodge, a fading factory town 90 miles northwest of Des Moines. It was an event where he did absolutely everything one is advised not to do as a politician here. He denigrated local elected officials, saying he was responsible for the 2022 reelection of Chuck Grassley, the state’s nonagenarian senator, who began his undefeated electoral streak in the state during the Eisenhower administration. Trump also took credit for the victories of the state’s other senator, Joni Ernst, as well as the governor, Kim Reynolds, whom he spoke of with scorn because of her support for DeSantis.

He was casual even about the need to attempt to campaign in Iowa. As Trump riffed on the podium—about, in this case, his desire to reoccupy Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and his insistence that the audience watch the 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate—the former president casually mentioned that he’d “be back four or five times, maybe six times before the election,” in a state where Ramaswamy had rented an apartment for the home stretch.

And Trump has now been rewarded for it. Concludes Jacobs:

[I]t all seems more homogenized and, as a result, less meaningful and less vital than the last Republican contest did even eight years ago, when voters here relegated Trump to second place behind Ted Cruz. In other words, Iowa increasingly seems less like a proving ground for candidates. Instead, it’s more like a sprawling studio where candidates can perform for cable news.

Read the rest here.

A media consortium is doing entrance polls for the caucuses (Fox News, the Associated Press, and the New York Times are doing their own, separate estimates), and while nobody’s publishing general horse-race numbers, you can figure out a lot from demographic sub-groups. For example, Trump’s pulling 52 percent of the vote among men and 48 percent among women. Stands to reason he’s getting about half the vote, and unsurprisingly, CNN has already called Trump as the winner (presumably after waiting for the very first actual results to come in). So has the AP. They have not called a second-place winner, and probably won’t for a while. The entrance polls show Haley leading DeSantis 24-20 among women and trailing him 20-18 among men.

CNN, NBC News, ABC News, the Washington Post, and others have all made the same call, all based on entrance polls. This is not a surprise, but we don’t know the margin of his victory yet.

Two precincts in Urbandale, a pleasant and prosperous Des Moines suburb, are holding their caucus in a vacant shop that used to hold a lumber store. The room is divided with a black curtain. The caucus chair in precinct 12 of Urbandale, Eric Turner, said he anticipated roughly 300 people showing up to caucus. While candidates are entitled to have speakers on their behalf, he had only heard from representatives of Trump, DeSantis and Haley with minutes to spare.

Photo: Ben Jacobs

There was one potential hiccup he was worried about: Each precinct in the room had a separate PA system to allow people to hear what was being said and black curtains are not exactly soundproof.

One of the most closely watched demographic features of tonight’s results will be the relative performance of the candidates — especially Trump and DeSantis–among evangelicals voters, who are a sizable majority of GOP Caucus attendees (they represented 64 percent of Republican caucus-goers in 2016, the last competitive nomination fight). Ted Cruz, whose 2016 campaign was to a considerable extent the model for Ron DeSantis’s 2024 Iowa effort, solidly beat Trump among Iowa evangelicals (with Marco Rubio not far behind Trump) in 2016. This time Trump is expected to romp in this demographic. According to Ann Selzer’s final Iowa Poll, Trump led DeSantis by a 52-21 margin among likely evangelical caucus-goers (Nikki Haley had only 12 percent).

That’s notable because DeSantis appealed aggressively to evangelicals, emphasizing in particular his backing of a six-week abortion ban in Florida, even as Trump essentially suggested the issue was a loser for Republicans. DeSantis was also endorsed by the man often called an “Iowa Kingmaker,” Bob Vander Plaats, president of the powerful evangelical Family Leader organization.

None of that seems to matter a lot, as Trump is breaking a lot of the alleged rules and still sweeping the evangelical vote if the polling is accurate. A very good place to look at how the Iowa evangelical vote is breaking is northwest Iowa, former congressman Steve King’s stomping grounds, where a profoundly conservative (and significantly Dutch-American) vote is located. If Trump is beating DeSantis there, then it will be clear DeSantis’s strategy of out-Trumping Trump among Iowa evangelicals has failed.

Trump never could lose:

Reports CNN:

Win or lose, Nikki Haley’s campaign feels it has met its goals for Iowa, according to three sources close to the former South Carolina governor’s campaign.

If Haley comes in No. 2 in Iowa, she will have exceeded expectations, the sources said. But if she comes in No. 3, the campaign does not see that as damaging because it did not substantially invest in the state compared with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump.

“It is not do or die for us,” said a source familiar with the campaign’s thinking. 

Vivek Ramaswamy is still doggedly stumping in Iowa with a full campaign schedule and an array of conservative influencers in his orbit.

However the hedge-funder has been taking significant criticism from Trump allies, who now see him as a detriment. While Ramaswamy has been a convenient proxy for Trump in launching attacks on both Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, that’s changed in recent days as Ramaswamy has closed with the message “Save Trump, Vote Vivek” as seen here:

This has prompted an unyielding assault on Ramaswamy from Trump and his allies. Ramaswamy has taken it without flinching though. In a post on Twitter today, he responded to Trump’s attacks by praising the former president — and going after Nikki Haley:

Ben Carson is setting expectations at a biblical level:

“They’re trying desperately to suppress the vote by saying you have it in the bag.”

That’s what the former president’s son told supporters at a small event in Iowa on Monday. He also refused to rule out a 2028 presidential run, per Axios, telling an audience member who asked:

“I’m not going to say no, because if you do, they say ‘liar!’”

Like every other candidate running in Iowa, Rollan Roberts II is expecting to surprise tonight. But unlike even Ryan Binkley or Asa Hutchinson, he is not even on the ballot.

Roberts, the son of a West Virginia state senator, cited his support among immigrants and people of faith in particular. He told me he would be campaigning in South Carolina next, despite not appearing on the ballot there either, to help build towards his strategy of emerging from a contested convention.

In his view, “the division [in the United States so great] and, and in both parties that hardcore Republicans and hardcore Democrats don’t even recognize their own party. And so there must be disruption.”

So far, his campaign has raised over a million dollars — almost all of which has come from a loan from the candidate — and spent a mere $38,000.

The Atlantic’s McCay Coppins thinks every politically engaged American should go to a Trump rally this year — in order to counter the “preconceived notions and outdated impressions” that have formed many people’s understanding of the former president and his campaign. Coppins also offered his own observations after recently taking his own advice:

If one thing has noticeably changed since 2016, it’s how the audience reacts to Trump. During his first campaign, the improvised material was what everyone looked forward to, while the written sections felt largely like box-checking. But in Mason City, the off-script riffs—many of which revolved around the 2020 election being stolen from him, and his personal sense of martyrdom—often turned rambly, and the crowd seemed to lose interest. At one point, a woman in front of me rolled her eyes and muttered, “He’s just babbling now.” She left a few minutes later, joining a steady stream of early exiters, and I wondered then whether even the most loyal Trump supporters might be surprised if they were to see their leader speak in person.

My own takeaway from the event was that there’s a reason Trump is no longer the cultural phenomenon he was in 2016. Yes, the novelty has worn off. But he also seems to have lost the instinct for entertainment that once made him so interesting to audiences. He relies on a shorthand legible only to his most dedicated followers, and his tendency to get lost in rhetorical cul-de-sacs of self-pity and anger wears thin. This doesn’t necessarily make him less dangerous. There is a rote quality now to his darkest rhetoric that I found more unnerving than when it used to command wall-to-wall news coverage.

Even with a clear frontrunner WAY in front for the entire race, the GOP candidates and their allies have spent more than $120 million on ads in Iowa. CNBC reports:

The battle to win the Republican Iowa caucus is the most expensive on record, with over $120 million spent on ads by the campaigns and their affiliated political action committees in the Hawkeye State, according to data provided to CNBC by AdImpact. … Around $84 million of the $120 million total ad buys came from campaigns and allies of the top three candidates, Trump, Haley and Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to the data. The figure includes television, radio and digital spots. Among the top three, Haley and her allies have spent the most: $37 million in Iowa alone.

Another analysis, CNBC notes, indicates that Team Trump has run 21,000 television spots in Iowa, while Team Haley has aired about 22,000.

Semafor’s David Weigel expects a lot of margin-of-victory spin:

Haley methodically avoided setting any expectations, which got tougher after the DMR poll showed her moving into second place; today, her campaign put out a compilation of Trump describing polls that put him “60 points” ahead. (He was usually referring to national polls, as he never led by that much in Iowa.) DeSantis and top endorser Gov. Kim Reynolds have predicted an upset victory many, many times, and the candidate showed his ground game to reporters at this weekend’s rallies — carfulls of supporters who have been calling voters for months.

The conventional wisdom from Republicans who don’t want Trump is this: If he falls below 50%, he’ll look weak. If a majority of voters don’t support the president they mostly voted for in 2020, they can speculate anew about an anti-Trump coalition. A win by more than 13 points would break every GOP caucus record, but the race that they’d prefer to think about is 1984, when Walter Mondale won by a landslide, but Gary Hart’s 15% was good enough for second place, building enough momentum to win New Hampshire.

One candidate on the ballot in Iowa tonight has received almost no national attention despite running a dogged campaign in the state.

Ryan Binkley, a CEO and pastor from Texas, was the first candidate to stump in all 99 counties of the Hawkeye State and has spent extensively on television. In fact, as of the latest FEC report in the fall, Binkley has spent nearly $7 million on his campaign. Further, the longshot candidate has mounted a strong effort to get on the ballot in states that hold contests later in the calendar that has been more successful than other more well known candidates. Binkley managed to make the ballot in Illinois, which Vivek Ramaswamy failed to do, and he’s on far more ballots than former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson.

Binkley is not likely to do well tonight. The Des Moines Register poll had him at 1 percent, but the near total obscurity in which he has campaigned says something about how much politics has changed even in the past four years. After all, in 2020, fringe obscure candidates like Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson campaigned their way onto debate stages and national attention. Four years later, Binkley, following the same approach, is too unknown to even be a punchline.

The poll everyone watches the weekend before the Iowa Caucuses is the gold-standard Iowa Poll from local celebrity J. Ann Selzer, which this time around was sponsored by the Des Moines Register, NBC News, and Mediacom. But two other public polls dropped after Saturday’s release of Selzer’s survey. They don’t in any way contradict the polling consensus that Trump is going to win and Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are battling for second place, but there are a few differences worth noting.

The Emerson College survey, like Selzer’s, shows Haley opening up a small lead over DeSantis, with 21 percent as compared to the Floridian’s 15 percent. But the poll shows Trump at an overwhelming 55 percent, with a greater percentage of his supporters than those of others saying they are firmly decided. Trafalgar Group and Insider Advantage collaborated on a poll showing Trump at exactly the 52 percent he commands in the RealClearPolitics polling averages, with DeSantis (at 19.3 percent) holding a tiny 0.8 percent lead over Haley (at 18.5 percent) for second place.

I wrote about the previous final polls, as of Sunday morning, here.

It’s not surprising that it is cold in Iowa in mid-January, but it is surprising though that it is THIS COLD. The thermometer has been permanently stuck well-below freezing for days. That comes after the state experienced two consecutive snowstorms, the second of which blanketed the state with powdery snow that still flies up all over the road days after it fell.

Des Moines has been literally colder than Siberia. (Although it has warmed slightly, the forecast in Novosibirsk has a high of -3, whereas Des Moines is a relatively temperate -1 today).

The weather has forced the cancellation of a number of candidate events, not to mention prompted countless complaints from out-of-state visitors. It seems unlikely, however, that the deep freeze will cause much of an impact on turnout. Caucus-going Iowans who drive small less winter-friendly sedans live in urban areas where the roads are better. Those who live on gravel roads out in the country have pickup trucks.

A Monday afternoon event with Donald Trump Jr. was delayed for hours after the presidential scion had trouble getting back to the Hawkeye State. That left a cavernous event space in the Des Moines suburbs filled with bored reporters, bored political tourists, and even a stray bored Iowa caucusgoer or two. The New York Times had three different staffers at the event while various foreign media outlets interviewed Brick Suit, a MAGA personality who has gained attention for wearing a brick patterned suit and tie at Trump rallies. (The bricks of course are a tribute to the wall that the former president has pledged to build on the border with Mexico.)

Shawn McCreesh reports from the Des Moines hotel where media and MAGAworld got snowed in together over the weekend:

The few reporters who’d managed to get the last flights out of Washington and New York sat by the fake fireplace Friday afternoon losing their collective minds. Too early for bourbon. Too cold to smoke. And there was nowhere to go. It was far below freezing, and the Iowa Department of Transportation issued warnings about “treacherous” highway roads. Meanwhile, apparitions from the recent political past — Kari Lake, Donald Trump Jr., Jason Miller — wandered the hotel’s halls in high spirits. Trump’s victory here feels like a frostbitten fait accompli.

In 2016, he lost the Iowa caucuses by just 6,000 votes and one delegate (and promptly cried fraud). But that was when he was relying on a ragtag operation of political neophytes. “This time around, it’s different,” said Chris LaCivita, one of his top advisers now. “We have a team of professionals who’ve been doing this a while.” He was the strategist behind the Swift Boat ads that sunk John Kerry. Together with Republican operative Susie Wiles, a Florida power broker who turned against Ron DeSantis, they are ready to vanquish all Republican pretenders and prepare for the main event. “We’re enjoying it, we’re having fun, and, you know, the boss makes it fun,” said LaCivita.

Read the rest of Shawn’s dispatch here.

Intelligencer’s Ed Kilgore pens an explainer on how the caucus will work, and what to expect, including regarding the results:

Barring a seismic upset, Donald Trump is going to win the Iowa caucuses handily. He’s leading in the RealClearPolitics averages of Iowa polls by 33.8 points; he’s at 52.5 percent, followed by Nikki Haley at 18.7 percent and Ron DeSantis at 15.5 percent. By most accounts, Trump abundantly addressed the organizational deficiencies that led to his loss to Ted Cruz in the 2016 caucuses. The question most pundits are asking about Trump’s performance is whether he can actually win a majority of caucusgoers. But even if he doesn’t top 50 percent, his win will probably be historic: the largest margin of victory in any contested Iowa Republican caucuses was Bob Dole’s 12.8 percent in 1988.

Read the rest of Ed’s walkthrough here.