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've said from the start that the race to watch in Iowa was the race for second place, but does Trump's victory being projected only 30 minutes into the caucuses change the game? Does the speed of this projection cement Trump's inevitability as the night's main takeaway? Or could Haley or DeSantis still craft a winning narrative out of a strong second-place showing?
—Tia Yang, 538
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.
