Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses in a landslide on Monday, giving the former president his first victory in the contest for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and solidifying his status as the race’s clear frontrunner.
With most of the votes counted from precincts across the Midwestern state, Trump was on course to win more than 51 per cent, with Ron DeSantis narrowly beating Nikki Haley to secure a distant second place, with just over 21 per cent support. Haley came in third, with around 19 per cent.
“I really think this is time now for everybody, our country, to come together,” Trump said in front of his supporters at a post-caucus party in downtown Des Moines.
Instead of attacking DeSantis and Haley as he had repeatedly done throughout the campaign, Trump held out an olive branch, describing his Republican rivals as “very smart people, very capable people”.
Trump’s victory was the largest ever vote share in a contested Iowa caucus, beating the 41 per cent won by George W Bush in 2000. It showed his continued grip on the Republican party, with voters backing a man facing dozens of federal criminal charges.
The result left DeSantis and Haley each claiming to be in a head-to-head contest with Trump. Both candidates had hoped to emerge from Iowa as the most plausible challenger to Trump for the Republican nomination.
In his speech to supporters DeSantis, the governor of Florida, made clear he would continue. “They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us,” he said. “Despite all of that they threw at us . . . we got our ticket punched out of Iowa.”
Haley also vowed to keep fighting for the nomination after her third-place finish, saying America “deserves better” than a rematch between Trump and incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden.
The former US ambassador to the UN said her campaign was the “last best hope of stopping the Trump-Biden nightmare”, and claimed her performance in Iowa, coupled with strong poll numbers in New Hampshire and South Carolina, meant she was in a “two-person race” with Trump.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, dropped his bid for the nomination after winning less than 8 per cent of the vote in the caucuses. He endorsed Trump in a speech in Iowa after announcing his exit from the race.
Trump, DeSantis and Haley were all expected to shift their campaign focus swiftly to New Hampshire, which holds its primary election on January 23. Haley has focused her campaign efforts largely on New Hampshire in an effort to win over the more moderate Republican and independent voters there.
Trump’s victory in Iowa was sufficiently clear for the Associated Press to call the race barely 30 minutes after Iowans began debating in their caucuses, local events at which voters discuss the candidates before casting ballots.
Caucus-goers at a church in the Des Moines suburb of Clive were taken aback by the AP’s early call, with voters receiving news alerts on their phones even as they were still listening to speeches about the candidates.
The AP’s early declaration of Trump’s victory drew a sharp rebuke from DeSantis, whose campaign said it was “outrageous” that media organisations would “participate in election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote”.
Trump’s victory in Iowa came despite a storm that brought brutal winter conditions to the state and raised questions about whether his supporters would still show up. The Iowa state party said about 100,000 Republicans participated in the caucuses on Monday, compared with roughly 186,000 who took part in 2016.
(ft.com)
