Iowa caucuses 2024: Trump projected to win, DeSantis 2nd

Polling suggests that when it comes to choosing a nominee, Iowa Republicans aren’t interested in a moderate candidate, or one with bipartisan appeal. According to a September survey from YouGov/CBS News, 56 percent of likely Iowa caucusgoers say it’s more important for their nominee to motivate conservatives and the Republican base to turnout than to appeal to moderate and independent voters. And in a December survey by Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research/Fox Business that asked likely caucusgoers what candidate qualities were important in deciding who they’d support, only 41 percent said it was extremely important to have a candidate who will work across party lines, less than all but one candidate quality tested.

In the past decade or so, Iowa has gone from a competitive state in general elections to a reliable Republican stronghold. Trump won the state by eight percentage points in 2020, a wider margin than Barack Obama’s (six points) in 2012. Once represented by a split-party Senate delegation — Republican Chuck Grassley and one-time presidential hopeful Democrat Tom Harkin — Iowa has been represented by two Republicans, Grassley and Joni Ernst, since 2015. And as of last year, Republicans also control all four of the state’s House seats, representing Iowa’s first all-GOP congressional delegation since the 1950s. While no one really expects Biden to win there in 2024, Barack Obama won the state twice, and so did Bill Clinton. Iowa was even one of the few states won by Michael Dukakis in 1988!

There are many possible reasons for this transformation, but changes in Iowa appear to be part of a larger shift in rural parts of the upper Midwest — North and South Dakota, as well as northern Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota, have also become more Republican over the past decade. One piece of the story is the decline of rural Democrats who used to represent these places, often with a populist bent and a focus on agricultural issues, though that may be a chicken-and-egg conundrum — it’s not clear what’s causing what. The resonance of Trumpism with rural and Midwestern voters is also important. But here’s where Iowa politics has a twist: While Trump is the favorite to win the caucuses, his status among Iowa Republicans has been in question. Gov. Kim Reynolds has endorsed Ron DeSantis and so has prominent evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. Iowa’s turn to the right is a Trump-era development, but it appears to go beyond Trump.

Happy Iowa caucuses night! I’m Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I’m delighted to join 538 for a third presidential primary season. I study U.S. political parties, the American presidency and political communication. For me, the Iowa caucuses are all about the expectations and the post-contest spin, so I’ll be looking at how candidates perform relative to expectations, and the stories we hear in the news about what it means for the remaining candidates in the race.

When you think of a political campaign, you probably think about a candidate speaking to voters in an intimate church basement, or shaking hands in line at a coffee shop. The GOP presidential candidates have held hundreds of such events in Iowa, and, with the help of ABC News reporters on the ground, our indefatigable research team has collected data on who has held the most campaign events in the Hawkeye State (through yesterday).

By far the busiest campaigner has been Ramaswamy, who has held 332 events in Iowa since he announced his campaign. He also claims to have visited all 99 Iowa counties — a feat dubbed the "full Grassley" after Sen. Chuck Grassley — twice! By comparison, the second-busiest campaigner has been DeSantis, and he has held "only" 160 events since he jumped in the race.

Ironically, the active candidate who has held the fewest events in the state is Trump, who has held just 36. Yet he’s probably going to win the state tonight — more evidence for political-science studies that have found that campaign events don’t actually make that much of a difference.