Last week, the 2024 primary season kicked off the long-awaited Iowa Caucus. As theDes Moines Register notes, this important event represented the first test of the election cycle for Donald Trump and his remaining Republican challengers. Both Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramasaway were more concerned with the caucus than with the fact that the election happened to fall on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2024, as were several other prominent GOP leaders. As expected, Iowa Republicans voted in favor of Trump, awarding him 51% of the vote to Ron DeSantis’s 21% and Haley’s 19%. For the former president, that means 20 delegates.
At first glance, that sounds like a good night for Trump. While it certainly yielded better results for him than any of his competitors, it’s important to see the big picture. The numbers don’t lie and an important number from the 2024 Iowa Caucus is 56,260. That’s the number of votes Trump received from Iowa’s Republicans, according to TheAssociated Press. Put another way, almost all of the Iowa voters who showed up to the polls threw their weight behind one of his challengers. This makes sense when we consider that a recent poll revealed that only 40% of Iowa’s registered Republican voters stated that they identify with Trump’s wing of the party.
Republican voters celebrated Trump’s Iowa caucus win but some experts feel that these celebrations may have been premature. President Joe Biden made it clear that he isn’t bothered by results, stating he doesn’t think the caucus means anything. “The president got 50-some-thousand votes, the lowest number of votes anybody who’s won got,” he stated while addressing reporters last week.
Journalist and political commentator Lucian K. Truscott IV discussed the overall outcome, speculating that Biden could be considered the true winner of the Iowa caucuses. Truscott referenced a pre-election poll that showed that less than 48% of caucus-goers had named Trump as their first choice. In an edition in his daily newsletter published January 16, he stated:
“That number tracks fairly closely to Trump’s final vote total of 51 percent. Eleven percent of those likely caucus voters told pollsters that if Donald Trump ends up being the Republican Party nominee, they will vote for Joe Biden. Using last night’s vote totals, that is 12,132. In the same poll of likely caucus-goers, 20 percent said they planned to vote for Nikki Haley. Stunningly, among Haley’s 20 percent of the caucus voters, 43 percent said that if Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee in November, they will vote for Joe Biden. That is an incredible number when you consider that these are Republican voters.”
Truscott isn’t the only one who sees the caucus results as less-than-promising for Trump. Scott Dworkin, co-founder and executive director of The Democratic Coalition, a progressive grassroots organization shared his take in a January 19 edition of The Dworkin Report titled “Trump Delivers Epic Failure in Iowa.”
Dworkin and his organization have been conducting extensive research into Trump and the dangers he poses to the U.S. since before he took office. Shortly after his victory in 2016, the journalist published a report on Trump’s ties to Russia's government, Columnist Grant Stern provided further context on this, reporting that “Scott Dworkin’s Research Report Exposed Trump’s Russian Business Ties Before Dossier.” Like Truscott, Dworkin thinks that Trump should be concerned by the 40% of Iowa Republicans who voted against him.
“Trump folks can spin it in any way they want,” he notes, “but the bottom line is this: even though Trump won in Iowa, it was an epic failure. Especially in Trump’s mind. The two candidates who took votes away from him used to loyally do his bidding. Now they’re taking votes away from him.”
Former Republican congressman turned television personality Joe Scarborough also sees the first primary event as a potentially negative harbinger for the former president. The host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” compared Trump to Barack Obama, speculating that the former president could have finished with 90% of Iowa’s vote if he had run again after a four year hiatus. And Illinois democratic Gov. JB Pritzker described Trump’s win as a “weakness” and an “opportunity for Democrats,” because it suggests his overall support may be waning.
Since Trump secured the Iowa Caucus, both Ramamswamy and DeSantis have dropped out of the race. But if the fast-approaching New Hampshire primary results in similar turnout, it will further strengthen the increasing number of arguments that Trump’s campaign is in trouble.
This story was originally published on My Side of the Aisle.
