Iowa voters handed President Trump a landslide victory and also rewarded Ron DeSantis’s effort in the state, but New Hampshire now offers a challenge to both.
DES MOINES, Iowa—Former President Donald Trump claimed a huge victory in the Iowa caucuses, cementing his place as the prohibitive favorite in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
The night wasn’t a total loss for others, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed a second-place finish, scoring well above his recent standing in the polls, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley finished third, falling below expectations based on recent polls that showed her in second place.
The tally with 97 percent of votes counted showed President Trump at 51 percent, Mr. DeSantis at 21 percent, Ms. Haley at 19 percent, and Vivek Ramaswamy at just under 8 percent.
Trump’s Big Win
President Trump proved the polls correct, winning the Iowa caucuses with 51 percent of the vote and establishing his dominance in the race for the Republican nomination.
The former president consistently polled around 50 percent of support from likely Republican caucusgoers, a finding that Mr. DeSantis had dismissed as misleading.
In the end, the voters slightly exceeded the polling in their preference for President Trump, who mounted a formidable ground game, enlisting some 2,000 precinct captains, who committed to bring 10 people each with them to support President Trump on caucus night. The campaign gathered more than 50,000 commit-to-caucus cards, nonbinding agreements to support the former president.
President Trump’s 30-point victory is the largest in the history of the Iowa caucuses.
The front-runner is now expected to parlay this decisive win into momentum in the next presidential-preference contests in other states.
A big victory for President Trump “would likely blunt momentum that Haley has in New Hampshire,” Thomas Hagle, a professor at the University of Iowa, told The Epoch Times before the caucuses.
“If Trump wins Iowa, New Hampshire, and then in South Carolina, it would seem to be very difficult to stop him unless some extraneous event shakes up the race,” he said.
