Former President Donald Trump is on track to win Monday’s Iowa caucus by about 30 points. In other words, he’s set to smash Bob Dole’s record from 1996.
Plus, Trump won the Iowa caucus in nearly record time. The Associated Press called the race for Trump at 7:31 local time, only 31 minutes after the deadline for caucusgoers to arrive at their caucus sites.
But rival candidate Ron DeSantis wasn’t happy about the call.
AP reportedly called the race for Trump after seeing results from only nine of Iowa’s 1,600 precincts.
The AP’s 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.
In 2020, by comparison, AP declared Trump the caucus winner at 8:25 p.m. ET. At the time, Trump was the incumbent president.
Declarations have taken longer in more closely contested races. In 2016, AP was not able to name Texas Sen. Ted Cruz the winner over Trump until 10:26 p.m. ET.
The DeSantis campaign blasted the AP on Monday for calling the race too early. The DeSantis campaign faulted the AP’s call for encouraging some caucusgoers to leave.
One DeSantis staffer even accused the AP of election interference.
“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,” Andrew Romero, a DeSantis operative, tweeted Monday. “The media is in the tank for Trump and this is the most egregious example yet.”
Take a look —
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. The media is in the tank for Trump and this is the most egregious example yet.
— Andrew Romeo (@andrewromeo33) January 16, 2024
In traditional primaries, AP does not declare a winner in any race before the last polls are scheduled to close in the contest.
The Iowa caucuses are different. There are no “polls” and no fixed time when all the voting ends. Instead, there is an 8 p.m. ET deadline for caucus voters to arrive at their location, at which point deliberations among caucusgoers begin behind closed doors. Some caucus sites might complete their business in a few minutes, while others can take some time to determine the outcome.
For that reason, AP followed its past practice and did not make a “poll close” declaration of the winner on Monday night. Instead, AP reviewed returns from caucus sites across Iowa and declared Trump the winner only after those results made it unquestionably clear he had won.
Plus, AP wasn’t the only organization to call Monday’s race so early. Fox News and NBC News both called the race before 9 p.m.
One commentator for The New York Times exclaimed, “Only 11:15 local time, this is earlier than we’d expected a few hours ago!”
Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are each projected to nab around 20 percent of Iowa’s caucusgoers. Under Iowa’s winner-take-most rules, Trump looks likely to win 20 of Iowa’s 40 delegates to the Republican National Convention, with DeSantis pulling nine and Haley winning eight.
The Associated Press determined at 11:17 p.m. CST that DeSantis finished a distant second to Trump. 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 wasn’t doing well enough anywhere to catch DeSantis, based on the number of outstanding votes.
Trump offered a rare message of unity in his victory speech.
“We want to come together, whether it’s Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative,” he said. “We’re going to come together. It’s going to happen soon.”
Neither Haley nor DeSantis looks poised to exit the race yet.
The GOP contest moves swiftly to New Hampshire, which will hold the first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 23. A shrinking field will compete there after conservative entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy suspended his campaign after a disappointing fourth place finish and endorsed Trump.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.