President Donald Trump won the 2024 Iowa Caucuses in a historic landslide, securing an unprecedented victory over his Republican primary “rivals.”
Trump’s GOP challengers have spent the better part of a year unsuccessfully urging Iowans to move on from the 45th president.
Rather than unite around a challenger, however, Iowa Republicans have thrown their support behind Trump.
Iowans have delivered Trump the strongest win by a presidential candidate in the Republican caucuses’ 48-year history.
The Associated Press called the race for Trump just 31 minutes after caucusing began at 7 p.m.
The victory was called while many sites were still casting ballots, rankling campaign officials and many Republicans.
It took nearly three hours longer to determine Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won second place.
Andrew Romeo, spokesperson for the DeSantis campaign, criticized the early calls predicting Trump as the winner on X.
“Absolutely outrageous that the media would participate in election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote,” Romeo said.
“The media is in the tank for Trump and this is the most egregious example yet.”
DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley had been fighting for the scraps that Trump had left them.
Haley finished with 19% to finish in third place behind DeSantis with 21 percent.
DeSantis’s slim 2-point margin may not be enough to catapult him into contention in New Hampshire’s upcoming primary.
The results prompted one candidate to drop out: Entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy received 8% of the vote to finish fourth.
He responded by announcing he was ending his campaign to support Trump.
“There’s no path for me to be the next president, absent things we don’t want to see happen in this country,” he told supporters.
Trump celebrated his massive win, describing it as “tremendous.”
“It really is an honor that, minutes after, they’ve announced I’ve won—against very credible competition—great competition, actually,” Trump told FOX News.
“It is a tremendous thing and a tremendous feeling.
“We have to get our country back. Our country has gone through so many bad things over the last three years and it is continuing to go through bad things.”
The victory came despite Iowa’s popular Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds endorsing DeSantis in November.
Reynolds argues that she didn’t believe Trump could win a general election against Democrat President Joe Biden.
A recent poll revealed that 61% of Iowans said that their support would not change if Trump was convicted in any of his trials.
20% said their support for the 45th president would increase if Trump was convicted.
Trump did not hold as many events as his fellow candidates, holding only 13 events since November, according to NBC News.
DeSantis and Ramaswamy have both completed the “full Grassley” of Iowa’s 99 counties named after Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who makes the trip every year.
Trump is currently polling at an average of 61% nationally and nearly 44% on average in the next primary battle in New Hampshire, according to RealClearPolitics.
Last Wednesday, Trump also revealed during a town hall on FOX News that he has picked his vice presidential running mate.
However, his campaign walked the comments back, saying that the matter hasn’t been discussed in “any great detail,” according to ABC News.
Nevertheless, if Trump has made his decision, there’s little to discuss.
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