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.
After Trump, DeSantis, Haley and Ramaswamy, the current fifth-place candidate in Iowa is not Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of the great state of Arkansas, but businessman and pastor Ryan Binkley, whom we at 538 don’t consider a major candidate. I actually interviewed Binkley last year as part of a video on what keeps long- or no-shot presidential candidates going.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
The DeSantis campaign is already zeroing in on early calls from all of the TV networks and the AP to blame for their candidate’s performance, calling it “election interference” because parts of the state hadn’t even begun caucusing when the calls came in. We know Republican voters are deeply skeptical of the mainstream media, but DeSantis’s argument that the media is “in the tank” for Trump might be a stretch for Republicans who have spent the last eight years believing the media was out to get Trump.
—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections
One thing that seems tricky right now — maybe not trickier than it has been for the whole primary contest — is that the main reason to have a Trump alternative is for a scenario in which he physically can't campaign because he's in court so much, he actually gets convicted before the RNC (unlikely, but I guess not impossible) or some other major contingency like that. Then, you'll want a Trump substitute. But Haley, for example, has been running as a Trump alternative. Nothing in the process is really conducive to such a fine distinction, even if it were clear that a critical mass of Republicans were invested in either a substitute or an alternative.
—Julia Azari, 538 contributor
To answer your question, Julia, maybe anti-Trump Republicans will coalesce around a single alternative this time (perhaps because they have no choice — it’s possible that DeSantis will drop out after tonight and Haley will be the only Trump critic left). But even if they do, I don’t think it will matter, simply because there are very few anti-Trump Republicans left in the party. Over the past eight years, that breed of Republican has largely limped into retirement or lost in primary or general elections, and the new GOP establishment that replaced them has lined up behind Trump’s campaign. He has more endorsements at this point in the cycle than all but a handful of past candidates.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
