Waukee, Iowa: Here are the results for my caucus at Sugar Creek Elementary near Des Moines:
Ryan Binkley – 2
Vivek Ramaswamy – 8
Nikki Haley – 28
Ron DeSantis – 33
Donald Trump – 64
DeSantis camp is predictably livid:
DeSantis Campaign Statement on the Media’s Election Interference
DES MOINES, Iowa – The DeSantis campaign released the following statement:
“It is absolutely outrageous that the media would participate in election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote. The media is in the tank for Trump and this is the most egregious example yet.”– Communications Director Andrew Romeo.
There are many votes left to count, but the question looms larger by the minute: Can Ron DeSantis come back from a third-place finish in Iowa? I doubt it.
DeSantis entered this race with high expectations, prohibitive support among Republican donors, and a conservative record in office second to none. He squandered all those advantages in spectacular fashion. In 2028, DeSantis will be term-limited out of office, and his star will likely have been eclipsed by new players in Republican politics over the next four years. He will need a new issue set and no platform to secure one. As the Florida governor learned with the lack of receptivity to his message on Covid, salience is a fleeting thing.
DeSantis is a talented politician, and he was right to make the most of his moment. But he had to make the most of it, if only because it is a rare thing to get a second bite at the presidential apple.
Waukee, Iowa—None of the caucus-goers I’ve interviewed in the past few minutes are surprised national outlets have already called the race for former President Donald Trump
The good news for Haley? She won voters who decided in the last few days, narrowly edging out DeSantis 30-29. The bad news? Eight in 10 voters decided before that, and they went overwhelmingly for Trump.
@dmclaughlin Except it’s not like Florida in 2000 because that was actually close. This isn’t. It’s not clear to me why so many commentators are acting surprised that the election was called this early. Every poll showed Trump running away with this. Unless there was any significant evidence to the contrary from early returns, it makes perfectly fine statistical sense to call the race for Trump. There wasn’t, so they called it. All a race call does is say who will finish with the most votes. It doesn’t say by how much, and it doesn’t say what the rest of the running order will be. That’s a much trickier question that we will have to wait for more information to see. But yes, Trump will get the most, and there’s no reason to pretend we don’t know that at this point.
And this is the hour where confident predictions like Ron DeSantis saying, “we’re going to win Iowa!” and Ramaswamy’s rallying cry, “shock the world!” hit a brick wall at high speed. I get that candidates need to exude confidence, but for the past few months, there’s been an insistence that the polling was wrong, that the polls are always wrong, that there’s no reason to believe that Donald Trump had such a commanding lead, etc. Well, go figure, when every pollster saw a huge Trump lead, it wasn’t some sinister conspiracy. Trump really did have a commanding lead.
Waukee, Iowa—There’s a lot of chatter about which Republican candidate has the best ground game in Iowa this cycle. Conventional wisdom holds that Trump’s ground game is much stronger here than it was in 2016, and obviously the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down has spent millions on infrastructure here, knocking on nearly a million doors up until caucus day.
A field operator for the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, which endorsed Nikki Haley in late November, insists its own ground game shouldn’t be underestimated.
“It’s one thing to stand up an operation because you’re running a presidential campaign,” says Drew Klein, who has served as AFP’s Iowa field director since March 2012. “It’s another thing to be part of an organization that’s had permanent infrastructure in states throughout the country for more than a decade.”
Given that a number of Senators endorsed Trump in the run up to Iowa (Cotton, Lee, Rubio) I would expect the floodgates to open now.
It really is a scandal for the national political press to call the outcome while people are still voting. A replay of calling Florida for Gore while people were waiting on line in the panhandle in 2000. They are just far too eager to coronate Trump.