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.
I admit that I did not expect to hear a Gettysburg Address quote tonight, but DeSantis said it twice, and mentioned Lincoln and Gettysburg — and Reagan and the Cold War — outright.
—Julia Azari, 538 contributor
Ramaswamy wasn't polling that well in New Hampshire — around 5 percent — but his supporters are a Trumpy group, which means a substantial number of them will move to the former president. Based on limited sample sizes, around one-third to half of Ramaswamy's voters in national and New Hampshire polls named Trump as their leading second choice. With Trump polling at 43 percent in our New Hampshire average, this might move him up a couple notches, and make it just a little harder than it already was for Haley to catch him (she's at 30 percent). Now, Haley could gain support in the next wave of polls because most surveys in New Hampshire haven't accounted for Christie's departure yet, and we know Haley is the top second choice for Christie voters. But she's set to finish third in Iowa and perhaps not get quite the glut of positive headlines a second-place showing might've produced. Overall, beating Trump was already a difficult challenge, so Ramaswamy boosting him a little more stands to make it even harder.
—Geoffrey Skelley, 538
According to the most recent Iowa polls, Haley was surging in the state, taking second place over DeSantis as of January 11, and increasing her lead over him since then. However, it doesn't appear that this surge in the polls showed up in the actual caucuses, as ABC News has now projected Ron DeSantis to finish in second place. As we wrote in 2016 and 2020, Iowa can be a difficult state to poll because the nature of the caucuses lends itself to voters making strategic decisions that may not be captured in the polls. Unless the race is essentially between two candidates, Iowa polls have historically been all over the map in terms of their accuracy. The fact that the polls got so close this time is, historically, unusual.
—Mary Radcliffe, 538
ABC News can now project that DeSantis will finish second in the Iowa caucuses. It was really by the skin of his teeth, though, with 21 percent to Haley's 19 percent. It was the absolute bare minimum performance DeSantis needed to keep his campaign alive.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
