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

Trump's polling lead in Iowa was more than 30 points, and preliminary entrance poll data suggested he has a large enough edge that ABC News projected he will win the caucuses. This suggests that Trump is on his way to setting a record: Prior to this year, the largest margin of victory in Iowa when the GOP didn't have an incumbent president was about 13 points: In 1988, when Bob Dole won the state and Vice President George H.W. Bush actually finished third (Bush recovered and went on to win the GOP nomination and the presidency). Trump looks likely to surpass that mark tonight.

Just one other race, the 2000 caucuses, had a winning margin of 10 or more points since the GOP started recording the statewide vote in 1980. Otherwise, it's always been a single-digit race. However, it's worth remembering that Trump's quasi-incumbency as a former president seeking his old job is unprecedented in the modern presidential primary era, which dates back to the 1970s. In light of that, it's less of a surprise that he's in line to set this record.

— Geoffrey Skelley, 538

Nathaniel noted earlier in the evening that Democrats moved their Iowa nominating contest to later in the primary season, in part because Iowa is demographically unrepresentative. And we've also noted that tonight's extremely cold weather may suppress turnout. But what is the normal turnout, anyway? In 2020, about 176,000 Iowans showed up for the competitive Democratic caucuses. That was a slight improvement over the 2016 numbers, the last year Republicans had a competitive primary, when about 15.7 percent of the Iowa voting population turned out for caucuses. That's really a small percentage of eligible voters in a small state that doesn't always vote the way the rest of the country does. But as others have noted, the first contest can help set the expectations as we progress through the rest of the primary calendar.
—Monica Potts, 538

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.