2024 Iowa Republican Caucus takeaways

Image from New York Times. Their full report with more details here

Welcome to the start of the American election season! Here’s a brief breakdown of what happened on the cold night of January 15th, 2024 in Iowa.

Trump is calm and in control. Still dominant in the race by far, Trump won with 51% of the vote. He gave a gracious victory speech, which if your only news source is MSNBC, you probably wouldn’t have expected. He spent the first 9 minutes calling out and thanking various people, with a heavy reference to his family. Conventional stuff, as if this is from 2012, not 2024. He referred to his primary opponents in a friendly manner and didn’t really attack them, which indicates he sees this primary fight as effectively over. The rest of his speech pivoted to policy and what he vows to do in a second term. He repeated the phrase “drill baby drill”, vowing to drastically increase fossil fuel production, and likely an all-out war of climate change denial. Besides that and the usual lines of closing the border, the various lawsuits against him as political meddling, and a curious defense of his foreign policy, the final thing that is interesting is his repeating of the promise to “rebuild Washington DC”. It’s possible that he means rebuild in the same sense as the “drain the swamp” criticism of the DC establishment that is quite old news now, but he also mentioned physical renovations. This is a phrase to keep an eye out for if he keeps saying it.

DeSantis...survives? He did finish second, but he had a much heavier resource commitment than Haley in Iowa just to barely edge out second place. His concession speech was less than 4 minutes and pretty traditionally Republican, talking about liberty and taking the country back from a liberal agenda. New Hampshire, the next primary state, will be a lot less friendly to him. It’s clear Iowa didn’t give him the result he wanted, and he has signaled that his focus is now on one-upping Nikki Haley in South Carolina, which despite being her home state, is much more conservative whereas Haley is running as a moderate.

Haley takes a victory lap, despite being third. To be fair, nobody really expected her to do all that well until a week before the election, when a poll from the highly esteemed Des Moines Register showed her in a clear second place.  Coming in at a close third, Haley in her speech said it’s now a “2 person race,” obviously meaning Trump and her and ignoring DeSantis. In her speech, there is now a clear and concise argument why voters should choose her. Nikki Haley promises change. Her campaign carries the popular resentment against a Trump Biden rematch. As a standard conservative, she reminded voters in her speech of how old Trump and Biden are, and both of their tendencies for deficit spending and increasing the debt. Polls do show Haley as the Republican candidate to be able to trounce Biden more than anyone else, and she absolutely brought the point up again. The next state, New Hampshire, will be much friendlier ground for Haley, the only moderate left. Let’s see if she could close down on Trump’s margin of victory, and perhaps even edge over him to take a win by the knife’s edge there.

Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out and endorsed Trump. Asa Hutchinson dropped out and did not endorse. Chris Christie, who dropped out before Iowa started voting, still hasn't encouraged his more moderate supporters to consolidate behind Haley.