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

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

As Nathaniel mentioned earlier, Ramaswamy is projected to come in fourth place in Iowa, so he's not a direct threat to Trump, but I think it’s enough for Trump to turn on him. Ramaswamy has essentially made it his mission to serve as a Trump surrogate in these primaries, but what happens when Trump starts to see Ramaswamy as siphoning off his votes? Over the weekend, Trump posted on Truth Social, "a vote for Vivek is a vote for the ‘other side. It's fair to assume that much of the support for Ramaswamy could go to Trump if he dropped out. These early races in Iowa and New Hampshire are about meeting or exceeding expectations to gain momentum. I’ll be interested to see how these two conspiratorial candidacies have that out, if they do.

—Meredith Conroy, 538

With DeSantis at 20 percent and Haley at 19 percent, the race for second place is still too close to call. But since the results seem to have settled around specific numbers, it does seem unlikely that either of them will get much more than 20 percent of the vote tonight. That’s a pretty anemic performance, so I’m not sure whoever does eventually finish second should be doing all that much celebrating. They really needed to put up an impressive number tonight if they had any hope of shaking up the overall nomination race.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538