Former President Donald Trump has won the Iowa Republican Caucus, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis placing second and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley placing third.
According to results posted by The New York Times, as of Tuesday morning, with over 95% of the votes in, Trump won with 56,260 votes (51%) of the vote. DeSantis received 23,420 votes (21.2%), while Haley got 21,085 votes (19.1%).
Multiple media outlets and The Associated Press had called the first in the nation state race for Trump before the first votes were even counted, with many taking issue with the early announcement.
“Are you kidding me?” stated Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a DeSantis supporter, as quoted by the NY Times. “They haven’t even started voting yet and heard all the speeches and AP calls it?”
For its part, the AP justified its early call by explaining that results taken from eight counties had shown Trump “significantly ahead of the rest of the field” and that the counties surveyed “included rural areas that are demographically and politically similar to the large number of counties that had yet to report.”
“In traditional primaries, AP does not declare a winner in any race before the last polls are scheduled to close in the contest,” the AP added.
“The Iowa caucuses are different. There are no ‘polls’ and no fixed time when all the voting ends. Instead, there is an 8 p.m. ET deadline for caucus voters to arrive at their location, at which point deliberations among caucusgoers begin behind closed doors.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessman who placed fourth place with 8,449 votes (7.7%), announced Monday evening that he was suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump. Ramaswamy was the only candidate to visit Iowa’s 99 counties at least twice, some three or four times, according to his campaign. He held 323 events, the most of any candidate seeking the presidential nomination, according to the Des Moines Register’s Candidate Tracker.
“We’ve looked at it every which way, and I think it is true that we did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight,” said Ramaswamy. “There’s no path for me to be the next president.”
“I am very worried for our country. I think we are skating on thin ice as a nation. … Now going forward, [Trump] will have my full endorsement for the presidency.”
Despite coming in third behind DeSantis, Haley expressed optimism about the next state level races, including the New Hampshire primary, which is scheduled for Jan. 23. She claimed that the race is now between only two candidates: herself and Trump.
“I’ll be back in the great state of New Hampshire,” Haley told her supporters. “And the question before Americans is now very clear. Do you want more of the same, or do you want a new generation of conservative leadership?”
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