The first contest was no contest at all.
Former President Donald Trump was projected to win the Iowa caucus in a blowout Monday night — confirming his standing as the clear front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.
With hundreds of caucus meetings across the Hawkeye State still in progress, media outlets called Trump as the winner with fewer than 10 precincts having reported their vote tallies to the Iowa Republican Party.
With less than 0.5% of the expected vote in, Trump had 70% support, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (15%), former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (8%) and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (6%).
If the early trends hold, the 77-year-old is on track to record both the biggest margin of victory in the modern history of the Iowa caucus, dating back to 1972, and become the first Republican candidate to get more than 50% support in a contested caucus.
The shocking outcome is a particular blow to DeSantis, who invested heavily in a ground game operation that failed to overcome the former president’s popularity among Iowa voters, particularly after Trump was hit with four criminal indictments beginning in March of last year.
Despite the result, DeSantis told reporters earlier Monday he would remain in the race even if he finished third behind Trump and Haley.
The Florida governor, 45, was scheduled to fly to South Carolina for an event Tuesday morning before heading north to New Hampshire for an evening event.
Haley, 51, had tried to avoid naming specific expectations for her performance, implying she would be happy with a top-three finish before moving on to New Hampshire — where the primary electorate is more moderate and less dominated by social conservatives and evangelicals than Iowa — and her home state of South Carolina.
“The expectations that have been set is that Donald Trump is going to win over 50% of the vote, and Ron DeSantis is going to win,” former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, a top Haley surrogate, told The Post after last week’s debate between Haley and DeSantis at Drake University in Des Moines.
“Neither of those things can happen.”
Trump’s campaign had been planning on a blowout win in the first-in-the-nation caucus, with his team rolling out a “10 for Trump” strategy relying on caucus captains to recruit new or irregular participants to put their support behind the former president.
That strategy paid off handsomely, as hats and stickers touting the former president were all the paraphernalia that could be seen at one caucus attended by a Post reporter in West Des Moines.
On the coldest caucus night on record, Iowa Republicans braved snow, icy roads, and a wind chill that made it feel like negative-30 degrees Fahrenheit.
Despite the near-dangerous conditions, the White House hopefuls had urged their supporters to show up to the in-person-only vote.
Trump and his rivals don’t have much time to digest Monday’s results, as the Republican primary calendar shifts to New Hampshire and the Jan. 23 first-in-the-nation primary — where polls have shown Haley closing a double-digit gap in support.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/15/news/trump-wins-iowa-caucuses-in-landslide-first-election-of-2024/
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