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

In 2016, Trump finished a close second in Iowa with 24 percent of the vote, trailing Cruz's 28 percent. But since then, Trump has won over much of the very conservative and more religious voter base that backed Cruz while holding onto the more populist parts of the party. Understandably then, we see a fair bit of alignment with tonight's vote and how Trump and Cruz performed combined at the county level in 2016. Based on 27 counties where we have at last 85 percent of the expected vote, there's a fairly strong correlation of 0.72 between Trump's vote tonight and the Trump+Cruz 2016 caucus showing.

Correlation isn't causation, but we can see in the preliminary entrance poll data how Trump has captured much of the Cruz wing of the GOP. Among voters who identified as "very conservative," who made up half of the electorate, Trump won 60 percent. In 2016, Cruz won 44 percent of the vote among very conservative voters in a more crowded race, while Trump only won 21 percent.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

With 53 percent of the estimated vote reporting, Trump is currently at 53 percent, DeSantis at 22 percent, Haley at 20 percent and Ramaswamy at 8 percent. Those results could still shift, but so far, they are very close to the final polls. Our final polling average of Iowa was Trump 53 percent, Haley 19 percent, DeSantis 17 percent and Ramaswamy 6 percent.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

Entrance polls in Iowa shows the economy was a top concern for voters. All Americans have felt glum about the economy since Biden took office, despite the economy doing well by many measures. Part of this is an accident of when Biden took office, during the tail end of the COVID-19 economic slump. Biden's going to campaign on Bidenomics finally turning into results for the middle class and recent efforts to revive student loan forgiveness, but most voters say they trust Republicans on the economy.
—Monica Potts, 538

Four years ago, the Iowa caucuses came under fire because of a malfunctioning tabulation app, which delayed Democratic results. There’s also been some skepticism about the importance of a single state, and, as the presidential selection process has received more scrutiny, caucuses may be in for some criticism. The early call for Trump might feed into these perceptions. I want to be careful how I say this, because we don’t have any evidence that anything unusual happened. And it’s not that there’s a realistic case that another candidate might have won, given what we know. But news sources calling the race before people vote does have the potential to be a bad look, even if it was done according to accepted practices. It’ll be interesting to see if this becomes one of the big stories of the night, further undercutting the idea of the Iowa caucuses.
—Julia Azari, 538 contributor