Haley finishes 3rd, Ramaswamy drops out after finishing 4th.
The first election of the 2024 presidential primaries is in the books, and former President Donald Trump was the big winner. ABC News projects that Trump finished first in the Iowa caucuses, about 30 percentage points ahead of second-place finisher Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is projected to finish third, while businessman Vivek Ramaswamy is projected to finish fourth. As a result, Ramaswamy has dropped out of the presidential race.
Throughout the night, 538 reporters broke down the results in Iowa in real time with live updates, analysis and commentary. Read our full live blog below.
We’re still a ways away from resolving second place, but ABC News is able to project at this point that Ramaswamy will finish in fourth place. A disappointing finish for the candidate who absolutely poured effort into the state, holding as many as nine events per day in the home stretch.
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.
