Trump Won the Only Real Ticket Out of Iowa

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s two surviving rivals for the Republican presidential nomination had distinct strategies going into the first actual competition in the 2024 race: the Iowa caucuses. Ron DeSantis was going to run to Trump’s right and peel off MAGA voters (particularly Evangelicals) as a more effective and consistent champion of their various causes. And Nikki Haley was going to scoop up anti-Trump, Trump-skeptic, and electability-mad voters and roll out of Iowa and into New Hampshire with a head of steam as the only real challenger left in the race. Neither strategy worked out.

Donald Trump won half the caucus vote against DeSantis, Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and some other random names. He carried 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties and led in urban, suburban, and rural areas. According to entrance polls, he trounced DeSantis among self-described “very conservative” voters by a 60 percent to 28 percent margin and beat the Floridian among Evangelical voters by a 51 percent to 29 percent margin. But Trump also beat Haley among college-educated voters and independents. He carried every age category. Trump showed no real weaknesses. His roughly 30-point margin of victory was well over double the all-time record in contested Iowa Republican caucus history, even though he may have suffered from turnout lowered by brutally cold weather and the lack of doubt about who was going to finish first (as opposed to second and third, which was indeed a close competition as predicted). He was outspent by both Team Haley ($37 million) and Team DeSantis ($35 million) in Iowa campaign advertising (Trump and his allies spent $18 million). None of it really mattered.

Most important, Trump now leaves Iowa with his opponents weakened and divided. DeSantis has barely survived by edging Haley in the state where he concentrated almost all his resources, leaving his campaign in other early states in disarray. He’s indicated he will now go charging into Haley’s home state of South Carolina next, but that’s probably because he’s in such a bad position in New Hampshire (currently at 6.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling averages there), where the vote is just eight days away. And above all, his grand strategy of out-Trumping Trump has signally failed in its first test. What will he do now? Reinvent himself? Go after Trump personally after refusing to do so for over a year? Ramp up his attacks on Nikki Haley as Trump watches doubled over in laughter? There’s just no path to victory for him.

Though she failed to knock DeSantis out of the race in Iowa, Nikki Haley at least has two states just ahead where she’s running second. She has a remote prayer of knocking off Trump in New Hampshire, a state almost perfectly designed for her (lots of relatively moderate Republicans, not that many Evangelicals, and a primary where independents play a big role), and where she has been closing the gap on the front-runner in recent weeks (she trails him in the RCP polling averages by a mere 14 percent). But Vivek Ramaswamy’s withdrawal from the race and endorsement of Trump will help the former president in New Hampshire and beyond. If he wins either New Hampshire or South Carolina — where he’s being backed by both Governor Henry McMaster and senior U.S. senator Lindsey Graham — that probably means curtains for Haley. And the road just gets tougher after South Carolina, where a vast national landscape of expensive primaries will await in March, to be followed by many winner-take-all contests massively favoring the front-runner. Haley’s current base of support among Never-Trump Republicans won’t take her far in a Trump-loving party.

So could Trump possibly lose the nomination? It seems very unlikely, though a combination of gaffes (which don’t typically hurt him), bad general-election polls (he hasn’t really had any lately), adverse U.S. Supreme Court rulings affecting his access to the ballot (very unlikely), or immunity from prosecution (important, but probably not until the general election) could make him more vulnerable than he looks right now. But these are all remote contingencies.

The old saying is that in contested presidential nominations, there are “three tickets out of Iowa.” Technically, that’s true today with DeSantis and Haley limping out of the caucuses with campaigns on life support. But the only real ticket-winner in Iowa was the 45th president, who has more paths to the nomination than you can count. After the convention in Milwaukee, though, it’s a brand-new game.