The 2024 race for the White House is officially underway with the Iowa Caucuses giving Donald Trump his first victory in vying for the Republican nomination over challengers who trailed significantly behind the former president. The Democrat candidate, President Joe Biden, did not have a caucus challenge.
Trump’s victory in the first-in-the-nation contest gives him a leg up as the preliminary elections head to New Hampshire. Trump friend-turned-foe Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, finished second in Iowa and former U.N. Ambassador under the Trump administration, Nikki Haley, placed third. The fourth-place contender, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, dropped out of the contest and endorsed Trump. Coming in a distant fifth was Texas Pastor Ryan Binkley, and at sixth was former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who also exited the race.
Turnout was lower than normal as Iowa voters braved dangerously cold and icy weather to support Trump, handing him a record 30-percentage point win exceeding that of Bob Dole’s 13-point victory in 1988. He outperformed his second-place finish in the 2016 caucus, where he was bested by Senator Ted Cruz.
After the vote in the Granite State, the candidates are off to South Carolina, the state where Biden turned the tide on his way to the Democrat nomination the last go around. Given the president’s deteriorating mental condition and dismal poll ratings, there is speculation that he will drop out of the race, leaving the Democrat nomination up to delegates at the party’s August convention in Chicago. Names mentioned to replace him on the Democrat ticket are California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michelle Obama, wife of the former president. Vice President Kamala Harris, also suffering from poor poll numbers, is not seen as a contender in the presidential sweepstakes.
Trump is running under the Make America Great Again platform, a governing philosophy that propelled him past Hillary Clinton in 2016. On the campaign trail, the former chief executive excoriates Biden for the record inflation suffocating the nation, his premature withdrawal from Afghanistan leaving behind a massive airbase and billions in armaments, an open border that has seen millions of illegal aliens flood into the country, and his son, Hunter, receiving millions in payments from China, Russia, and other countries seen as threats to America. Biden faces reelection with the Ukraine war breaking out under his watch, a full-scale military assault on Gaza after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, Houthi rebels firing missiles at U.S. warships and other vessels in the Red Sea, and Iran-backed militants bombing troops in Iraq and Syria.
The incumbent president is running for another term on the strength of “Bidenomics” and charges that Trump would be a “dictator” and a “threat to Democracy” if he were returned to the Oval. Meanwhile, the Democrats have pulled out all stops in unprecedented legal maneuvers to stifle Trump’s 2024 bid. Prosecutors in four jurisdictions have leveled a laundry list of charges against him that could lead to 700 years in prison. Judges in Colorado and Maine have thrown him off the primary ballot and news comes out practically every day that the election interference has been coordinated with the White House. Many of the court actions, including the primary decisions, are expected to be settled in the U.S. Supreme Court.