Republican former President Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus by around 30 points over his closest rival, setting a new record for victory margins in the Iowa Republican caucus.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came in a distant second, followed closely by former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy ended his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump after coming in fourth.
The final results hewed relatively closely to polling averages in recent weeks, but Trump outperformed expectations by crossing the 50% threshold.
Haley underperformed, after polls showed her in second place heading into the caucus.
Extreme cold and snow blanketed Iowa, tamping down turnout. Total caucusgoers reached around 110,000, down from around 186,000 in 2016, the last time a Republican nomination was competitive.
The next contest in the GOP presidential race is the New Hampshire primary, on Jan. 23.
With 95% of the ballots counted, Trump appeared to have won around 51% of caucusgoers. He also won 98 of the state’s 99 counties, NBC News projected.
By the end of the night, the path for any Trump challenger had grown narrower. And Trump’s hold over the Republican base appeared stronger than ever.
Trump calls for unity in victory speech
Trump called for unity, and even offered a hint of praise for his rivals, in a victory speech that seemed to regard the rest of the primary, and his selection as the Republican nominee, as a foregone conclusion.
It’s “time now, for everybody, our country, to come together,” Trump told a crowd of his supporters in Des Moines following NBC News’ projection that he would easily win the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses.
“I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together,” he said of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former United Nations Amb. Nikki Haley. Trump noted that the second-place results were still yet to be determined.
Trump then cycled through a generalized laundry list of policies and issues he planned to address if reelected to the White House, including a plan to “seal up” the U.S.-Mexico border and “rebuild our cities.”
He also once again gave oxygen to the false conspiracy claim that his 2020 election loss was rigged, as he vowed to “straighten out our elections” and advocate for the use of paper ballots.
He had no magnanimity to spare for President Joe Biden, his likely competitor in the 2024 general election, calling him the worst president to ever to hold the office.
Trump was joined on the Des Moines stage by North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a one-time Republican primary rival who endorsed Trump a day earlier, along with some of his family members and other supporters.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes second in Iowa GOP caucuses, NBC projects
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will finish second in the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses, NBC News projects.
Former United Nations Amb. Nikki Haley will take third place, NBC projects.
Vivek Ramaswamy suspends campaign, endorses Trump
Vivek Ramaswamy suspended his GOP presidential candidacy and immediately endorsed Donald Trump.
Ramaswamy’s decision came after a fourth-place performance in Iowa’s caucuses.
“As of this moment, we are going to suspend this presidential campaign,” Ramaswamy told supporters. “There is no path for me to be the next president, absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country.”
“We’re going to do our part now going forward to make sure that America First lives on, to make sure that Donald Trump is successful as the next President of the United States,” he said.
Caucus turnout around 100,000, Iowa Republican party reports
Roughly 100,000 Iowans turned out to the Republican caucuses Monday evening in the face of blizzard conditions and subzero temperatures, he Iowa GOP said.
NBC News initially expected 150,000 caucusgoers to show up. The 2016 Republican caucus was 186,874.
“Iowans braved record-low temperatures after a blizzard blanketed their state just days earlier to deliberate with members of their community about the future of our country and participate in true, grassroots democracy,” the Iowa GOP said in a statement.
The Republican caucuses have no remote option so anyone who wanted to participate on Monday evening had to brave the extreme cold to do so.
Trump wins Iowa caucus despite spending less than rivals on Meta ads
Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus despite spending only around $44,000 on advertisements targeting Iowa voters on Facebook and Instagram in the week ahead of the caucuses, according to data from the Meta ad library reviewed by CNBC.
The sum is slightly less than the $45,000 spent by businessman Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign on Meta ads that same week.
Americans for Prosperity Action, a super PAC that has backed Nikki Haley, put up around $43,000 for Meta ads in Iowa starting Jan. 7.
This was just a small slice of the $419,000 total that AFP Action spent nationwide that week on Meta ads to help Haley.
59% of GOP caucusgoers support federal abortion ban
A solid majority of caucusgoers would support a federal law to ban most or all abortions.
NBC News’ entrance poll found that 59% of Iowa Republican caucus attendees would be in favor of a “federal law banning most or all abortions nationwide.”
Another 36% of respondents said they opposed such a federal law.
Nonetheless, only12% of caucusgoers said abortion was the most important issue facing the United States.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned its ruling in the case Roe v. Wade, which for a half-century established a constitutional right to abortion. Since then, the power to restrict or permit abortions has been effectively left up to individual states.
But abortion rights since has also proved to be a fraught issue for Republicans politically in a number of states.
Voters in favor of abortion rights in seven states, four of them solidly Republican, won ballot initiatives related to abortion restrictions.
Support for abortion rights also was seen as a deciding favor in the re-election of Kentucky’s governor, Democrats winning control of both legislative chambers in Virginia, and liberals winning a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
‘Stop wasting time and resources,’ pro-Trump PAC tells GOP rivals
A super PAC backing former President Donald Trump is urging his remaining Republican primary rivals to give up, in the wake of Trump’s swiftly projected victory in Iowa.
“Every dollar spent by President Trump’s primary losers is a dollar that could be fighting Joe Biden,” said Alex Pfeiffer, communications director for Make America Great Again Inc., in a statement.
“Once the DC RINOs are finished crying in their cocktails over tonight’s results, it’s time for Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy to face reality and stop wasting time and resources,” Pfeiffer said.