The 2024 Iowa caucuses

None of the GOP presidential candidates got what they wanted out of the Iowa caucuses — except for Donald Trump.

Before the caucuses, I wrote about what each candidate needed to do in Iowa to win the state’s all-important “expectations game” — the strange way this small contest can reshape the perceptions of the political world about who can win.

Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses big on Monday. The exact vote tally is still being determined, but he’ll likely end up with around 50 percent of the votes, about 30 percentage points ahead of whoever ends up in second place.

What happened in these results is the same thing that’s been happening throughout the Republican nomination contest: An opportunity slipped away for Trump’s rivals to shake up the race.

For a brief moment in January 2021, it was possible to imagine that Donald Trump’s days at the apex of American politics were over.

After all, the marriage between Trump and the Republican Party had always been one of convenience. And by the winter of 2021, the latter no longer had much use for the former. Trump had just cost the GOP a winnable election, as his historic unpopularity overwhelmed the advantages of incumbency. He’d then proceeded to put the American republic — and, more relevantly, Republican elites — in mortal danger. By January 6, the GOP had already secured its side of Trump’s Faustian bargain: its promised tax cuts and Supreme Court seats. Now the party could comfortably kick its authoritarian interloper to the curb.

The question of who will win the Iowa caucuses isn’t as simple as who comes in first place.

“Winning” Iowa doesn’t get you much except bragging rights and an insignificant number of delegates. The true importance of the contest is in how it can shape the perceptions of the political world — the media, donors, activists, politicians, and voters — of who can win.

Polls show Donald Trump as the clear favorite to win the GOP Iowa caucuses on Monday, January 15. But the true stakes of the contest are about more than just who comes in first. The political world will be watching Iowa’s results closely in an attempt to get a sense of where the GOP race is going.

The caucus results will give one early indication of whether Trump really will romp to the nomination or face a closer fight than expected. They’ll basically determine whether Ron DeSantis can stay in the race. Yet for Nikki Haley, they may not mean all that much — expectations are low for her in Iowa, since she has a better opportunity to break through in the next contest, the New Hampshire primary on January 23.

Welcome back to the Iowa caucuses — or at least, a version of them.

The caucuses, a contest in which voters gather in local meetings run by their state parties to say who they’d prefer to be their presidential nominee, have been an institution in modern presidential campaigns since the 1970s for Democrats and Republicans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has led national polls of the Democratic presidential race for the past year — and though other candidates have surged and fallen, they haven’t been able to supplant him as the frontrunner.

But this Monday, all that could change when Biden faces his first electoral test: the Iowa caucuses.