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

With 83 percent of the expected vote now reporting, DeSantis holds about a 2-point lead over Haley for second place, 21.3 percent to 19.0 percent. That could change, but it's not hard to see why DeSantis is in that position: He's got a narrow lead over Haley in the places where we'd expect Haley to perform best. In six populous and highly educated counties that form substantial parts of the Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Davenport areas, DeSantis leads Haley by a little over 2 points, 26.8 percent to 24.6 percent. These are places that Haley needed to perform especially well in — polling has shown she tends to do better among college-educated voters — but instead she's running slightly behind DeSantis across all six. Haley actually has a slim lead over DeSantis in five of these places, but critically DeSantis is doing a little better than Haley in Polk County (home to Des Moines), which will have far and away the most votes of any place tonight.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

With 83 percent of the vote reporting, DeSantis is starting to put some distance between himself (21 percent) and Haley (19 percent). According to The New York Times’s Needle, which uses precinct results to forecast who will win (or in this place, finish second), DeSantis now has a greater than 95 percent chance of finishing second.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

It’s looking increasingly like Trump win not only dominate statewide, but will also win every single one of Iowa’s 99 counties. That might not be a traditional “Full Grassley,” of which DeSantis did one and Ramaswamy did two(!), but it’s a testament to Trump's strength as a candidate, and perhaps the decreasing importance of traditional retail politics.
—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

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