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

In response to Jacob's point about whether we're seeing the decline of retail politics, I'm of two minds. The major story of retail politics in Iowa is still Jimmy Carter in 1976, so that's quite a while ago now, and a huge transformation in how much mass media can allow candidates to reach voters. Politics has also become a great deal more nationalized, which threatens some of what makes the Iowa caucuses distinct — less emphasis on ethanol, more emphasis on culture war. So in that sense, I can see that the more traditional retail-style politics has been a weird fit for our environment for a while now.

But it seems worthwhile to point out that a former president who was also a major media figure for several decades is a bad test case for this. Of course, it's an uphill climb for politicians without national reputations (or with fairly new ones) to compete with that, even by visiting lots of counties in Iowa. I think we should be cautious about drawing too many conclusions about retail politics with a figure like Trump in the race.

—Julia Azari, 538 contributor

As Jacob pointed out, Trump is currently winning every single county in Iowa. There are a few counties where he’s notably weaker, though. Johnson County, the home of Iowa City and the University of Iowa, is his worst county: He’s leading Haley only 36 percent to 35 percent there. He’s also leading Haley just 34 percent to 30 percent in Story County, home of Ames and Iowa State University. Sensing a pattern? Trump is doing the worst in Iowa’s most college-educated and bluest counties. These were also the counties that Sen. Marco Rubio did best in in the 2016 caucuses, back when he represented the last great hope of the GOP establishment to stop Trump.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

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