by Donald J. Trump won the Iowa caucuses on Monday, a crucial first step in his bid to regain the Republican nomination for a third consecutive election. as voters braved the bitter cold, overlooked their growing legal danger and embraced their vision of vengeful disruption.
The victory, announced by The Associated Press on Monday night just 31 minutes after the caucuses began, accelerated Trump’s push toward a potential historic rematch in November with President Biden that could play out both on the campaign trail and in the courts.
In a state that had rejected him in the caucuses eight years ago, Trump finished ahead of two of his main rivals, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who were locked in a race for second place. It was unclear who won second and who third.
The result was a setback for both Republicans, who had spent as much time and money fighting each other in Iowa as they had on the frontrunner. Mister. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, had previously predicted victory in Iowa, and both he and Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, have argued that a strong second place would better position them as Trump’s main rival in the future.
Trump is the first former president in the modern era to attempt a return to the White House. On Monday he hoped to break the Republican record for the largest victory ever in a contested caucus, which was just under 13 percentage points. Despite Trump’s quick declaration as the winner, it was still unclear whether he would win an absolute majority of more than 50 percent, a critical psychological barrier for those in the party still hoping to stop him.
A spokesman for DeSantis, Andrew Romeo, said in a statement that Trump’s early declaration of victory was “absolutely outrageous.” He borrowed a phrase from Trump to accuse the media of engaging “in election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote.”
Whatever comes next, Trump’s victory in Iowa amounts to a remarkable resurrection of a political career that once seemed in tatters. He was charged in the final days of his first term in the White House for his role in inciting the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. His subsequent acquittal by the Senate left open the possibility of this return campaign.
Trump has spent the last three years methodically consolidating his power to prepare for his own restoration. Even his four felony indictments and his status as the only former US president to have faced criminal charges have united many Republicans behind his claims of “election interference” and victimhood at the hands of Democrats and the “deep state.”
Now the Republican calendar will focus on New Hampshire, where polls show Trump is expected to face a strong challenge from Haley in a state where independent voters can also vote. Trump’s campaign and his super PAC ally have already been blanketing that state with anti-Haley advertising, a sign of his competitiveness ahead of the Jan. 23 primary.
DeSantis had entered 2023 as the party’s clear alternative to Trump. But initial struggles, both financial and electoral, forced him to make cuts and fight back in Iowa, where he won the backing of the state’s popular Republican governor and a key evangelical network. His super PAC knocked on more than 935,000 doors statewide.
Even with Trump well ahead, Haley’s allied super PAC spent more than $22 million attacking DeSantis in Iowa alone, hoping to crush his candidacy in the first state (the group had spent nothing opposing Trump in Iowa, according to federal records). Heading into the caucuses, DeSantis had pledged to run a “long” and “rough” campaign regardless of the outcome and symbolically decided to fly directly to South Carolina after Iowa instead of New Hampshire, a state where he has been voting in the single digits.
Trump’s team believes that a series of early victories (first in Iowa, and then in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina) will position him for a landslide victory on Super Tuesday, all but securing the nomination for March, when many of the delegates are at stake. But he worries that an early defeat could lead to a longer fight.
In Iowa, harsh winter conditions had altered turnout expectations and preparations for all campaigns in recent days. First, a snowstorm forced the cancellation of a series of events. Then, freezing temperatures and a wind chill on Monday prompted warnings of “Life-threatening cold” of the National Meteorological Service.
But supporters of Trump, who describes his followers as part of a broader “MAGA movement,” came anyway, buoyed by his dark portrait of a nation in decline and his apocalyptic rhetoric about wresting a country controlled by the left from the left. the left. edge. Trump’s promises to exact retaliation against his political enemies have earned him warnings from academics and Democrats about a trend toward authoritarianism, but they have won plaudits from his enthusiastic crowds.
In many ways, Trump’s victory represented a repudiation of the rituals of campaigning in Iowa, a state that has previously rewarded candidates who expose themselves to close scrutiny, undergo tough questioning or visit every one of the 99 counties. of the state, as Mr. DeSantis did.
Trump did little of that, visiting only a fraction of the state’s counties and appearing at only one in-person rally in the final week of the campaign, citing icy conditions for some cancellations. He did indulge in some traditions: He stopped by a Casey’s gas station over the weekend to pick up a pizza that he then delivered to the firefighters. But he more often than not took advantage of his unique status as a former president to travel in a Secret Service motorcade and capture national attention from anywhere, including a court appearance and a news conference in New York last week.
His approach reflected the increasing nationalization of American politics, where cable news appearances are often as persuasive as small-town meet-and-greets. Still, Trump, bitterly remembering how his lack of political organization had hurt him in the 2016 caucuses, invested early and heavily in the state, building a strong staff and recruiting more than 1,800 people as “caucus captains” for the most of 1,600 districts in the state.
Among Trump’s most significant decisions was his refusal to even debate his rivals.
His absence in the most watched moments of the primaries forced his rivals to fight among themselves and robbed them of any opportunity to make a dent in their advantage. And so while Iowa has traditionally played a key role in selecting candidates, that happened this cycle before voting even began. Former Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Tim Scott and former Governor Chris Christie all bowed out after failing to make any significant gains. Another former Republican rival, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, endorsed Trump on Sunday.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman who has largely funded his own career and who has spoken mostly positively about Trump while traveling extensively in Iowa, struggled to gain momentum. After something of a truce for most of the campaign, Trump and his advisers clashed with Ramaswamy in the final two days before the caucuses, and the former president’s team saw him as siphoning off potential votes.
Well before the caucuses, Biden had begun focusing his re-election bid on portraying Trump as an existential threat to American democracy, citing his predecessor’s refusal to accept the results of the last election and his impediment to the peaceful transfer of power in 2020.
A special prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department, Jack Smith, indicted Trump for his role in that post-election period, accusing him of attempting to subvert the will of the people. The case could go to trial this year, before the general election.
The election subversion case is just one of four indictments Trump faced in 2023, along with charges covering his handling of classified documents, his hush payments to an adult film actress during his 2016 campaign, and his attempts to to reverse the 2020 campaign. Election results in Georgia.
If Trump becomes the nominee, the 2024 campaign will have few modern parallels.
He is willing to split his time between the election campaign and his criminal cases, as well as additional civil cases. And soon, the Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the basic question of whether states can outright ban Trump from participating in the election over his role in the Jan. 6 riot. A different case making its way through federal courts will test Trump’s claim that he should be immune from prosecution.
Haley has made the uncertainty and turbulence that Trump’s nomination would bring to the race a central part of her speech. “Chaos,” she has said, “follows him.”
