Trump wins Iowa caucus landslide as DeSantis pips Haley to second place

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Donald Trump won a landslide victory in the Iowa caucuses, the first race of the 2024 Republican primary, as Ron DeSantis beat Nikki Haley to a distant second place.

Mr Trump, the former president, won more than half of votes in the state, confirming predictions that he would begin his third presidential campaign with a crushing victory in Iowa.

Mr DeSantis, the governor of Florida, came second, winning slightly more than 20 per cent of the vote and declaring that his opponents had failed to knock him out of the race despite throwing “everything but the kitchen sink” at him.

The result is a boost for Mr DeSantis, who had faced speculation that he would be forced to suspend his campaign if he could not beat Ms Haley in the Hawkeye State.

At a victory party on Monday night, Mr Trump delivered a conciliatory speech, describing his opponents as “talented” people and calling for the party to “come together”.

“I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together,” he told a crowd of supporters in downtown Des Moines.

“We’re all having a good time together. I think they both actually did very well. I really do.”

As US news outlets declared that Mr Trump had won the state, Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds blared through his speakers, and his allies said it was time for his Republican rivals to drop out of the race.

Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman, told The Telegraph: “It is time now to unite around Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party”.

Alex Pfeiffer, from the Trump-aligned Make America Great Again super PAC, said: “Every dollar spent by president Trump’s primary losers is a dollar that could be fighting Joe Biden.

“It’s time for Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy to face reality and stop wasting time and resources.”

Despite its small population and few delegates to the Republican National Convention, Iowa is considered especially important in the Republican primaries because it sets the pace of the campaign and indicates which candidates are likely to perform well in later races.

Mr Trump is leading aggregated Republican primary polls nationwide by more than 50 points, with the support of around 61 per cent of voters.

Earlier on Sunday, Ms Haley overtook Mr DeSantis in the polls, with surveys showing 11.9 per cent of Republicans support her White House bid, compared with Mr DeSantis’s 11.6 per cent.

Mr Ramaswamy, a firebrand anti-establishment candidate who visited all 99 counties in the state twice, finished in fourth place and suspended his campaign.

In a press conference before the count had finished, Mr Ramaswamy said he was “a little surprised by what happened tonight” and that his plan to draw first-time caucus-goers “proved too difficult to actually translate into meaningful results”.

Mr DeSantis’s campaign took aim at the media for a decision by the Associated Press news agency and some US broadcasters to call the result of the caucus for Mr Trump before voting had finished in some precincts.

Andrew Romeo, Mr DeSantis’s communications director, criticised what he described as an “absolutely outrageous” example of “election interference”.

Mr DeSantis also criticised the press, telling a crowd at his results party: “The media was against us. They were writing our obituary months ago.

“They even called the election before people even got a chance to vote. They were just so excited about the fact that they were predicting that we wouldn’t be able to get our ticket punched out of Iowa.”

Although the result is a victory for the Florida governor, his share of the vote was not as high as his supporters had hoped and has created some anxiety about his campaign in forthcoming races in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Iowa was considered an especially promising state for Mr DeSantis’s campaign, which is designed to appeal to more socially conservative Republicans. His performance suggests many of his target voters instead backed Mr Trump.

Ms Haley’s placement behind Mr DeSantis is in line with what most pundits had initially expected, although her campaign had seen an increase in expectation in recent weeks.

Polls, including a survey by Ann Selzer, a respected pollster, found that she would place second behind Mr Trump.

As the results came in, Ms Haley congratulated Mr Trump on his victory but warned that both he and Joe Biden “lack a vision for our country’s future because both are consumed by the past, by investigations, by vendettas, by grievances”.

Early indications on Monday night suggested turnout was relatively low, amid a polar vortex storm that sent temperatures plunging to -20C around 7pm, when the caucuses began.

While the majority of roads in the state were safe on Monday, some major routes around Iowa City in the east of the state remained completely covered in snow and ice.