Eight years after losing the Iowa caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), former President Donald Trump won them in what may prove to be the widest margin in the history of the contest. The former president’s dominance was so substantial that networks ranging from CBS to Fox News called his victory just 30 minutes after the doors closed.
Based on the early returns, it’s not hard to see how decision desks could quickly come to the obvious conclusion. According to NBC News, just 130,000 Iowans turned out for this cycle’s caucuses, down from the 187,000 who turned out in 2016, and the mathematics of election projection all come down to localities. Just as networks were able to call shocking victories for President Joe Biden the moment the polls closed in the Virginia and Massachusetts primaries in 2020, even as mail-in ballots remained outstanding, decision desks do not need all the caucus sites to post final polls or even for all of them to have began.
That hasn’t stopped DeSantis’s campaign from whining that the media is somehow rigging the caucuses for Trump in real time.
“It’s 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,” said Andrew Romeo, the campaign’s communications director. “The media is in the tank for Trump.”
Nobody should doubt that the media executives aren’t salivating at the dollars to be made on a third Trump nomination and that liberal activists in the press corps aren’t thrilled that the historically weak Biden could be staring down the candidate he already beat in an election, fair and square. But calling elections comes down to raw math, not the media’s desires.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
How exactly would the early media call for Trump’s victory actually change the overall results? The polls indicating Trump would win handily have been proven correct, and it’s hard to imagine that the few Iowans who actually did trek through the coldest caucus day in decades would change their mind just because CNN said that Trump won the overall caucuses. Caucuses are intentionally local, and campaigns engage caucus-goers to pledge to one candidate long before the day in question. If support is so soft that the media reporting a quantifiable fact — in this case, an accurate projection — undercuts a candidate’s entire campaign, that’s probably not a campaign worth continuing.
From Russiagate to Jan. 6, claiming lost elections were actually rigged is just poor sportsmanship, and on day one of voting in the 2024 election, it’s just as pathetic.