Iowa caucuses 2024: Trump projected to win, DeSantis 2nd

Which way will Iowa’s evangelical voters go in the caucuses? Trump has spent the last several years wooing those voters, and is currently winning them in Iowa — 51 percent of evangelicals support him, according to a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll from December. It’s a sign of how far he’s come with these voters after closely losing to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a more traditional religious conservative, in 2016. But an influential evangelical leader, Bob Vander Plaats, endorsed DeSantis in November, hoping to unseat Trump’s leadership in the state.

Since that endorsement, and despite it, DeSantis has been falling in the polls, in the state and nationwide. But Vander Plaats stands by it, telling Politico that DeSantis stands the best chance of ultimately beating Biden and saying he doesn’t believe the polls that show Trump winning. Vander Plaats’s endorsees have won Iowa in the past, including Cruz in 2016.

But Trump has been courting evangelicals in Iowa, and those across the country have remained solidly behind Trump. Tellingly, even Vander Plaats’s statements endorsing DeSantis tend to include the disclaimer that he isn’t endorsing "against'' Trump and that he’s long been "friends" with the former president — a sign that Vander Plaats is well aware of Trump’s popularity with evangelicals and Iowans broadly. Trying to win the evangelical vote in Iowa might be DeSantis’s best chance at overperforming in the state, but if Trump wins, it’ll show he still has the group locked down.

Polling suggests that when it comes to choosing a nominee, Iowa Republicans aren’t interested in a moderate candidate, or one with bipartisan appeal. According to a September survey from YouGov/CBS News, 56 percent of likely Iowa caucusgoers say it’s more important for their nominee to motivate conservatives and the Republican base to turnout than to appeal to moderate and independent voters. And in a December survey by Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research/Fox Business that asked likely caucusgoers what candidate qualities were important in deciding who they’d support, only 41 percent said it was extremely important to have a candidate who will work across party lines, less than all but one candidate quality tested.

In the past decade or so, Iowa has gone from a competitive state in general elections to a reliable Republican stronghold. Trump won the state by eight percentage points in 2020, a wider margin than Barack Obama’s (six points) in 2012. Once represented by a split-party Senate delegation — Republican Chuck Grassley and one-time presidential hopeful Democrat Tom Harkin — Iowa has been represented by two Republicans, Grassley and Joni Ernst, since 2015. And as of last year, Republicans also control all four of the state’s House seats, representing Iowa’s first all-GOP congressional delegation since the 1950s. While no one really expects Biden to win there in 2024, Barack Obama won the state twice, and so did Bill Clinton. Iowa was even one of the few states won by Michael Dukakis in 1988!

There are many possible reasons for this transformation, but changes in Iowa appear to be part of a larger shift in rural parts of the upper Midwest — North and South Dakota, as well as northern Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota, have also become more Republican over the past decade. One piece of the story is the decline of rural Democrats who used to represent these places, often with a populist bent and a focus on agricultural issues, though that may be a chicken-and-egg conundrum — it’s not clear what’s causing what. The resonance of Trumpism with rural and Midwestern voters is also important. But here’s where Iowa politics has a twist: While Trump is the favorite to win the caucuses, his status among Iowa Republicans has been in question. Gov. Kim Reynolds has endorsed Ron DeSantis and so has prominent evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. Iowa’s turn to the right is a Trump-era development, but it appears to go beyond Trump.

Happy Iowa caucuses night! I’m Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I’m delighted to join 538 for a third presidential primary season. I study U.S. political parties, the American presidency and political communication. For me, the Iowa caucuses are all about the expectations and the post-contest spin, so I’ll be looking at how candidates perform relative to expectations, and the stories we hear in the news about what it means for the remaining candidates in the race.