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

By this point it should be dawning on readers that Trump is very, very likely to win the GOP nomination. Not only is he up big in the polls — by about 50 points, according to our average — but he has a very clear path to winning a majority of delegates to the Republican National Convention in July.

What we can now add some hard data to is the question of why. Preliminary entrance poll data from ABC News show that 66 percent of Iowa caucusgoers think Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 presidential election — the de-facto top issue of Trump's campaign. And 63 percent said that Trump is qualified to be president even if he's convicted of a crime (vs. 32 percent who said no). Given the significance of this issue to Trump and his voters, the split leaves little path to a majority for Haley — at least if this holds.

What's more, Haley's electability pitch — she keeps saying she's up 17 points on Biden in the general, which is not quite right — seems to have fallen flat. According to the preliminary entrance polls, just 12 percent of caucusgoers said that it was most important to them that a candidate "can defeat Joe Biden." By comparison, 74 percent said they wanted a candidate who "shares my values" or "fights for people like me." Trump is running, for all intents and purposes, as an incumbent president and presumptive nominee. No other candidate is going to beat him at the "candidate like me" game.

—G. Elliott Morris, 538

We've said from the start that the race to watch in Iowa was the race for second place, but does Trump's victory being projected only 30 minutes into the caucuses change the game? Does the speed of this projection cement Trump's inevitability as the night's main takeaway? Or could Haley or DeSantis still craft a winning narrative out of a strong second-place showing?

—Tia Yang, 538

Trump's polling lead in Iowa was more than 30 points, and preliminary entrance poll data suggested he has a large enough edge that ABC News projected he will win the caucuses. This suggests that Trump is on his way to setting a record: Prior to this year, the largest margin of victory in Iowa when the GOP didn't have an incumbent president was about 13 points: In 1988, when Bob Dole won the state and Vice President George H.W. Bush actually finished third (Bush recovered and went on to win the GOP nomination and the presidency). Trump looks likely to surpass that mark tonight.

Just one other race, the 2000 caucuses, had a winning margin of 10 or more points since the GOP started recording the statewide vote in 1980. Otherwise, it's always been a single-digit race. However, it's worth remembering that Trump's quasi-incumbency as a former president seeking his old job is unprecedented in the modern presidential primary era, which dates back to the 1970s. In light of that, it's less of a surprise that he's in line to set this record.

— Geoffrey Skelley, 538

Nathaniel noted earlier in the evening that Democrats moved their Iowa nominating contest to later in the primary season, in part because Iowa is demographically unrepresentative. And we've also noted that tonight's extremely cold weather may suppress turnout. But what is the normal turnout, anyway? In 2020, about 176,000 Iowans showed up for the competitive Democratic caucuses. That was a slight improvement over the 2016 numbers, the last year Republicans had a competitive primary, when about 15.7 percent of the Iowa voting population turned out for caucuses. That's really a small percentage of eligible voters in a small state that doesn't always vote the way the rest of the country does. But as others have noted, the first contest can help set the expectations as we progress through the rest of the primary calendar.
—Monica Potts, 538