Trump flexes and the rest of the field fades: 5 takeaways from a big night in Iowa

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Eight years ago, Donald Trump left Iowa wounded, finishing second to Sen. Ted Cruz and still far from emerging as the GOP presidential nominee. Not tonight.

Given his romp here on Monday, Trump could all but end the primary next week in New Hampshire.

The former president, despite facing multiple indictments and spending scarce time engaging in retail politicking, mobilized working class voters and evangelicals with a highly professionalized turnout operation.

He didn’t just beat the rest of the field. He won by a historic margin, trouncing his chief rivals, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. One longshot contender, Vivek Ramaswamy, ended the night by dropping out and endorsing him.

With turnout expected to tally somewhere over 109,000 — significantly down from 2016’s 187,000 — Trump was on track to lock down more than 50 percent of the vote and far surpass the previous record of margin of victory for a non-incumbent Republican candidate.

"This train has left the station," said Jimmy Centers, an unallied Iowa Republican strategist, of Trump's performance. "And absent massive consolidation of the field, by the time New Hampshire starts voting, it's going to be really difficult to catch him."

In the immediate aftermath of the results, as candidates convened with supporters at various Des Moines-area hotels and venues, the path forward for Trump’s rivals looked increasingly narrow.

To veterans of the state, it was clear that Iowa had served its winnowing purpose.

“Iowa did what it was supposed to do: It narrowed the field,” said longtime Iowa Republican operative David Kochel. “[Tim] Scott dropped out. [Mike] Pence dropped out.”

Here are five things Iowa told us about the contours of the primary as it moves to New Hampshire.

Trump is in control

Trump’s victory Monday was so commanding that it’s going to be hard for any of his rivals to catch him now.

“Tonight's a very big night for what this could portend for the future,” said Rick Santorum, the two-time Republican presidential candidate who surged to win a surprise 2012 caucus victory. “If Trump has 50 percent in Iowa, plus shows in New Hampshire, it’s over.”

Months of polling data showed as much. And entrance polls also suggested most Republicans were willing to overlook Trump’s indictments.

Still, there was also a red flag for the general election — more than 30 percent of caucusgoers said he would not be fit for the presidency if convicted. In what is likely to be closely-contested general election, Republicans will need to keep GOPers skeptical of the former president in the fold.

Trump in Iowa was working toward a consolidation.

On Sunday, he received the endorsement not only of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — who performed well with Iowa’s suburban Republicans in 2016 and was backed by Haley in that year’s primary — but also North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who dropped out of the presidential primary in December after running as a pragmatic conservative.

Trump, on the eve of the caucus, also officially secured a majority of GOP congressional support, now boasting 135 endorsements from Republicans in the House and Senate — far beyond DeSantis’ five House endorsers and Haley’s single congressional endorsement.

For months, Trump’s GOP foes — particularly outside groups — have attempted to make the case that he has an electability problem.

But Republicans, the ones in Iowa included, just aren’t buying that. A CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday found that a whopping 70 percent of GOP voters nationally believe that Trump — not Haley, not DeSantis — is the party’s best hope of beating Biden. That’s despite the same poll of general election voters showing Haley outperforming Trump.

Addressing a crowd of supporters in Des Moines on Monday night, Trump spoke as if all his rivals were already getting out of the race.

“I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together,” he said from the stage.

Haley survived. Her real test is in New Hampshire.

Monday’s caucuses were not quite cause for an existential panic for Haley. New Hampshire was always supposed to be the real test for her viability.

Unlike DeSantis, Haley long benefitted from observers not thinking she stood a chance of winning Iowa. And it was only quite recently anyone expected her to come in second place here.

One of her top surrogates, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, recently predicted — and later walked back — a second-place finish in Iowa before winning the Granite State. But before that, Haley and her team had insisted that her goal was merely to do as well as she could in each of the early states, trying to keep expectations low as the nominating process began to play out.

She began to see a dramatic surge in New Hampshire, and Trump and his aligned super PAC in turn took out ads against her there.

Whether Haley is able to build upon her existing momentum in New Hampshire over the next week and significantly close the gap with Trump will be a critical test in the primary — and a bigger deal than whether Haley came in second or third place in Iowa.

"When you look at how we're doing in New Hampshire, in South Carolina, and beyond, I can safely say that tonight, Iowa made this a two-person race,” Haley said at her caucus watch party in West Des Moines.

DeSantis hangs on, barely

DeSantis is avoiding, for now, the immediate pressure to reassess his campaign’s viability that would have come with a third-place caucus finish. But he and his team are sounding increasingly frustrated with the continued trajectory of the race — and that few are taking him seriously.

DeSantis “did his job,” said Centers. He added: “One challenge that I think that the DeSantis campaign might look back at and wish they would have done differently, was managing the expectations slightly better. If they would have been clear that their goal was to be the alternative to Donald Trump and ultimately overtake him, I think they'd be sitting in a little better spot.”

Despite embarking on an aggressive 99-county tour of the state, with results not yet final, DeSantis was not expected to win any Iowa county.

Before many caucus results came in, DeSantis’ campaign cried foul on Monday, accusing news outlets of “election interference” for having projected Trump as the caucus winner before most precincts had cast their ballots.

The final results were still a massive fall from where DeSantis began this campaign, when he was widely viewed as the top alternative to Trump. But the Florida governor has been limping for months. Even before he launched his campaign or anyone from his campaign had knocked on an Iowa door on his behalf or had sent a mailer, he had cornered 30 percent of support. By Monday night, his competitors had whittled that down to around 20 percent.

It seemed to have an effect on DeSantis. In recent days in Iowa, he had begun more aggressively attacking Trump.

“He's running a campaign about putting himself and his issues first,” DeSantis said in Ankeny. “That's what he cares about. You can be the most worthless Republican in America. But if you kiss the ring, he'll say you’re wonderful.”

Expect more of that from DeSantis as he tries to regain traction in the race.

Trump got Ramaswamy out of the race

If there was one thing that was clear by the morning the Iowa caucuses arrived, it was that Trump’s patience with Ramaswamy had expired. Both he and his aides took turns whacking the biotech entrepreneur over the weekend for suggesting that Trump would not be able to win. They blasted him as “VAFAKE” and a “wasted vote.”

By Monday night, Trump had succeeded at booting his most vocal defender out of the presidential race.

Ramaswamy had failed to hit his predicted top-three finish here, though most certainly renting some of Trump’s vote share. The result was apparently poor enough to convince Ramaswamy that his longshot bid for president had run its course.

The race now pivots to New Hampshire’s very different electoral landscape

After rubbing shoulders with evangelical parishioners and hitting Iowa’s Pizza Ranches for weeks on end, what remains of the field will now face stops in New Hampshire town halls. That can force candidates into sometimes uncomfortable interactions, as Haley found out last month when she failed to mention slavery as a cause of the civil war.

Among the town hall attendees will be a trove of independents who could, as Haley put it, “correct” Iowa.Haley is in a far better position in New Hampshire than she was in Iowa, so Trump will have more of a contest there. Still, he’s up by double digits in polling averages in the state.

Even if Haley can surpass him there, it won’t guarantee anything for her as the primary heads back to states with more conservative, Trump-friendly ground. That includes her home state of South Carolina. But a good showing in New Hampshire would give Haley a serious dose of momentum, which is why Trump and his allies are spending heavily in the state to knock her down.

“One of the things I’ve been watching is does [Haley] make a pivot and focus on unaffiliated voters?” asked Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chair. “It seems to me that if she's going to be competitive here, maybe half of her vote is going to come from unaffiliated voters. To date she has not had the direct appeal to that group.”