Exactly 30 minutes after the doors closed on the Iowa caucuses, both CBS and Fox News called a (likely blowout) victory for former President Donald Trump in the first presidential primary contest of the 2024 election. While the networks could not yet call whether former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had surged to second in recent polling in the Hawkeye State, had actually beaten Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), the former president’s stunning dominance on Monday night dealt the de facto fatal blow to the Florida governor’s campaign.
The extent to which DeSantis staked his entire campaign on Iowa cannot be overstated. DeSantis sacrificed his early second-place standings in New Hampshire and South Carolina to barnstorm Iowa, visiting all 99 counties and scoring the crucial endorsements of the state’s governor, Kim Reynolds, and its historic kingmaker, evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. DeSantis’s fundraising behemoth spent some $31 million on ad buys, nearly three times what Trump spent, on top of what DeSantis supporters claimed was the most extensive and intensive ground game in caucus history.
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And yet Trump won, apparently with a large enough margin that news networks are able to call his victory 30 minutes after the doors closed. By the end of the night, he may post the largest winning margin in the race’s history. Worse for DeSantis, all this proves that the months of painful polling have actually been proven right. There are no hidden masses waiting to stick it to Trump, and if they did once exist, DeSantis failed to win them.
The absolutely best case scenario for DeSantis is that he beats Haley, who wasn’t supposed to even be able to challenge him in such a conservative electorate. But there’s no way to spin the fact that Trump won, and everyone else has lost, decisively.