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

Trump, as we know, has a massive advantage among voters without a college education. According to preliminary entrance polling those voters make up about half of the electorate tonight, and Trump had 65 percent of those voters in his corner. But among voters with a college degree, who make up the other half of voters, Trump is still winning, albeit by a much narrower margin, with 35 percent to Haley’s 29 percent and DeSantis’s 25 percent. Any path for a viable challenge to Trump in a GOP primary would require serious strength among college-educated voters, and neither DeSantis nor Haley are showing much of that tonight. The New York Times had a good read on Trump’s resurgence among college-educated Republicans a few days ago.

My general rule of thumb is not to report results until at least 10 percent of the expected vote is reporting, but I’ll make an exception here since people are already sharing them on social media. With 2 percent of the expected vote reporting, Trump has 55 percent of the vote so far, DeSantis has 19 percent, Haley has 19 percent and Ramaswamy has 7 percent. But this is based on a grand total of about 3,000 votes, so there is PLENTY of time for these numbers to shift.

Preliminary entrance poll data suggests there won't be much of a gender gap in Trump support in Iowa. Those polls show him running equally well among men and women. But Trump might do better with men if Ramaswamy wasn't in the race, something his campaign may start to address. The preliminary entrance poll data shows 12 percent of men, but just 5 percent of women, saying they will support Ramaswamy.

I’m not sure, Julia. In ABC News’ preliminary entrance poll data, only 2 percent of caucusgoers said they identify as Democrats. That doesn’t seem like enough to really change the state of things, especially since we can’t be sure that all of those voters will caucus for the same candidate.

Looking at the preliminary entrance poll data from another angle, 87 percent of caucusgoers identified as conservative, compared with 13 percent who identified as liberal or moderate. So I think we can expect that this isn’t going to be the race where crossover voters make a big impact. Perhaps next week… ??