Trump wins Iowa; DeSantis and Haley scrap for second
Ex-president easily wins most caucus delegates in first balloting of year
Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses on Monday, a crucial first step in his bid to reclaim the Republican nomination for the third consecutive election as voters braved the bitter cold, looked past his mounting legal jeopardy and embraced his vision of vengeful disruption.
The victory, called by The Associated Press on Monday night only 31 minutes after the caucuses had begun, accelerated Trump's momentum toward a historic potential rematch in November with President Joe Biden that could play out on both the campaign trail and in the courtroom.
In a state that had rejected him in the caucuses eight years ago, Trump finished ahead of two of his main rivals, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, both of whom were locked in a race for second place. It was unclear who had won second and who had won third.
The result was a setback for both Republicans, who had spent as much time and money battling each other in Iowa as the front-runner. DeSantis, the Florida governor, had previously predicted victory in Iowa, and both he and Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, have argued that a strong second-place finish would better position them as Trump's chief rival going forward.
Trump is the first former president in the modern era who has sought to return to the White House. On Monday, he was hoping to shatter the Republican record for the largest victory ever in a contested caucus, which was just under 13 percentage points. Despite the quick declaration of Trump as the winner, it was not yet clear if he would win an outright majority of more than 50 percent, a critical psychological barrier for those in the party still hoping to stop him.
A spokesman for DeSantis, Andrew Romeo, said in a statement that the early declaration of Trump's victory was “absolutely outrageous.” He borrowed a phrase from Trump to accuse the media of participating “in election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had
a chance to vote.”
Now, the Republican calendar will turn to New Hampshire, where polling shows Trump is expected to face a strong challenge from Haley in a state where independent voters can also cast ballots. Trump's campaign and allied super PAC have already been blanketing that state with anti-Haley advertising, a sign of its competitiveness ahead of the Jan. 23 primary.
Even with Trump far ahead, Haley's allied super PAC spent more than $22 million on attacks against DeSantis just in Iowa, hoping to squash his candidacy in the very first state (the group had spent nothing opposing Trump in Iowa, according to federal records). Heading into the caucuses, DeSantis had pledged to run a “long” and “scrappy” campaign regardless of the result and symbolically decided to fly directly to South Carolina after Iowa instead of to New Hampshire, a state where he has been polling in the single digits.
Trump's team believes a string of early victories — first in Iowa, then in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — will position him for a blowout on Super Tuesday, all but locking up the nomination by March, when many of the delegates are up for grabs. But they worry an early loss could lead to a more protracted fight.
In Iowa, harsh winter conditions had scrambled turnout expectations and preparations for all the campaigns in recent days. First, a blizzard forced a slew of event cancellations. Then, subzero temperatures and a numbing windchill on Monday spurred warnings of “lifethreatening cold” from the National Weather Service.
But supporters of Trump, who describes his followers as part of a broader “MAGA movement,” nonetheless turned out, animated by his dark portrait of a nation in decline and apocalyptic rhetoric about wresting a country controlled by the left back from the brink. Trump's vows to exact retribution on his political enemies have earned warnings from academics and Democrats of a drift toward authoritarianism yet have won cheers from his rapturous crowds.
In many ways, Trump's victory represented a repudiation of the rituals of campaigning in Iowa, a state that has previously rewarded candidates who expose themselves to upclose scrutiny, submit themselves to tough questioning or who visit each of the state's 99 counties, as DeSantis did.
Trump did little of that, visiting only a fraction of the state's counties and appearing at only a single in-person rally in the final week of the campaign, citing icy conditions for some cancellations. He did indulge in some traditions — stopping by a Casey's gas station to pick up pizza that he then delivered to firefighters this weekend. But more often, he leveraged his unique status as a former president to travel in a Secret Service motorcade and command national attention from anywhere, including a courtroom appearance and news conference in New York in the last week.
His approach reflected the increasing nationalization of American politics, where cable news appearances are often as persuasive as meet-and-greets in small towns. Still, Trump, remembering bitterly how his lack of political organization had damaged him in the 2016 caucuses, invested early and heavily in the state, building out a robust staff and recruiting more than 1,800 people as “caucus captains” for the more than 1,600 precincts in the state.
Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who has heavily funded his own run and who has spoken mostly positively about Trump while traveling exhaustively across Iowa, struggled to pick up momentum. After something of a truce for most of the campaign, Mr. Trump and his advisers laced into Ramaswamy in the last two days before the caucuses, with the former president's team seeing him as siphoning off potential votes.