Former President Donald Trump’s win in Iowa doesn’t end the 2024 Republican presidential race, but it does raise questions about whether it will ever truly begin.
Trump won an absolute majority of the vote and finished first by about 30 points. He appears to have come within one vote of sweeping all 99 counties.
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This was the biggest margin of victory ever in a competitive Iowa caucus, far exceeding Bob Dole’s 13 points in 1988. George W. Bush won by 10.5 in 2000. It came despite the weather, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA), organized evangelical leaders, the winnowing of the Republican field, and fears complacency would set in among Trump supporters.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) finished a distant second, blunting the recent momentum enjoyed by third-place former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
This will be difficult for Trump’s rivals to spin as a moral victory by playing the expectations game, though they will surely try. A Haley campaign memo released late Monday night argued that 49% of Iowa caucus-goers picked a candidate other than Trump and pointed to times when the former president claimed to be leading by 60 points.
But Vivek Ramaswamy has already dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. Most of his 7.7% of the vote would likely have gone to the front-runner. Some polling has suggested a fair amount of DeSantis’s support would go to Trump too.
Trump’s braggadocio notwithstanding, his win was largely consistent with what the public polling projected. He was at 52.5% in the RealClearPolitics average with a lead of 33.7, underperforming that only slightly in the actual caucus results. Trump’s biggest recent poll lead was 41 points, not 60.
DeSantis is weaker in the upcoming states on the primary calendar than he was in Iowa, though it was important for his campaign to finish second. Haley is better positioned, but her third-place showing complicates her argument that it is now a two-person race between her and Trump.
At the moment, this is a two-tiered race. Trump has the top tier all to himself while DeSantis and Haley share the second. That basic dynamic needs to change for the outcome of the Republican nomination fight to be seriously in doubt, and it’s not clear anything happened in Iowa to give either Haley or DeSantis much momentum heading into future contests.
The most obvious place for the race to become competitive is New Hampshire, where Trump is consistently below 50% and Haley polled between the mid-20s and low 30s before former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dropped out. The Granite State GOP primary electorate is more amenable to Haley’s message and independents can vote.
If Haley can beat Trump in New Hampshire, she would then have a month to try to upset him again in her home state of South Carolina, where she served as governor.
Even then there is no guarantee. George W. Bush beat the more conservative Steve Forbes in Iowa in 2000, then lost the New Hampshire primary to John McCain, before winning South Carolina and then putting himself on a glidepath to the nomination.
Bob Dole similarly won by a much narrower margin in Iowa, lost in New Hampshire, and then righted the ship in South Carolina on his way to the nomination in 1996.
Trump lost more than a dozen states in 2016, including Iowa. He still won the nomination.
But something like what Haley is hoping to accomplish in New Hampshire would have to occur for the race to enter a genuinely competitive phase. There are now just three major candidates. One is going to have to show they can beat Trump somewhere.
In Iowa, none could get particularly close.
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The fat lady isn’t singing yet, but she is warming up.
Only much different results in New Hampshire and South Carolina can delay her for long.
