WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump scored the first victory of the 2024 presidential primary season Monday with a sweeping and broad-based win in the Iowa Republican caucuses. The Associated Press declared the former president the winner based on an analysis of initial returns as well as results of AP VoteCast, a survey of voters who planned to caucus on Monday night. Both showed Trump with an insurmountable lead.
Initial results from eight counties showed Trump with far more than half of the total votes counted as of 8:31 pm. ET, significantly ahead of the rest of the field. These counties included rural areas that are demographically and politically similar to the large number of counties that had yet to report.
The Associated Press has also determined that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will finish in a distant second, ahead of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. With an estimated 10% of ballots remaining to be counted, DeSantis led Haley by approximately 2,300 votes or about 2 percentage points. With votes reported in all but one of Iowa’s 99 counties, Haley isn’t doing well enough anywhere to catch DeSantis, based on the number of outstanding votes.
In traditional primaries, AP does not declare a winner in any race before the last polls are scheduled to close in the contest. It’s sometimes possible to declare a winner in those races immediately after polls close before any vote results are released. AP does so only when its VoteCast survey of voters and other evidence, including the history of a state’s elections, details about ballots cast before Election Day and pre-election polling, provide overwhelming evidence of who has won.
AP
