Tag: US presidential polls 2024

Donald Trump notches a commanding win in the Iowa caucuses as Haley and DeSantis fight for second place

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Former President Donald Trump scored a decisive win in the Iowa caucuses on Monday, January 15, 2024 with his rivals languishing far behind, a victory that sent a resounding message that the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination is his to lose.

It was not immediately clear who would emerge as the second-place finisher in the opening contest of the Republican nomination fight, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. In what was expected to be a low-turnout affair, caucus voters endured life-threatening cold and dangerous driving conditions to meet in hundreds of schools, churches and community centers across the state.

Win in Iowa by a Republican after 24 years

The results represent the first milestone in what will be a monthslong effort by Mr. Trump to secure the GOP nomination a third consecutive time. Iowa has been an uneven predictor of who will ultimately lead Republicans into the general election. George W. Bush’s 2000 victory was the last time a Republican candidate won in Iowa and went on to become the party’s standard-bearer.

But Mr. Trump was already looking ahead to a potential general election matchup against President Joe Biden as he addressed hundreds of cheering supporters at a caucus site at the Horizon Events Center in Clive, Iowa.
“He is totally destroying our country,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Biden. “We were a great nation three years ago and today people are laughing at us.”

Mr. Biden’s team, meanwhile, announced that he and the Democratic National Committee raised more than $97 million in the last quarter of 2023 and finished the year with $117 million in the bank, an effort to demonstrate how Mr. Biden is preparing for a possible rematch while Mr. Trump is still competing in the primary.

The Associated Press declared Mr. Trump the winner at 7:31 p.m. CST based on an analysis of early returns as well as results of AP VoteCast, a survey of voters who planned to caucus on Monday night. Both showed Mr. Trump with an insurmountable lead.

Initial results from eight counties showed Mr. Trump with far more than half of the total votes counted as of 7:31 p.m., with the rest of the field trailing far behind. These counties include rural areas that are demographically and politically similar to a large number of counties that have yet to report.

DeSantis and Haley are competing to emerge as the top alternative to the former president. Ms. Haley hopes to compete vigorously in New Hampshire, where she hopes to be more successful with the state’s independent voters heading into the Jan. 23 primary. DeSantis is heading to New Hampshire on Tuesday after a stop in South Carolina, a conservative stronghold where the Feb. 24 contest could prove pivotal.

Before she left, Ms. Haley offered a subtle jab at Mr. Trump while addressing voters at a same caucus site.

“If you want to move forward with no more vendettas, if you want to move forward with a sense of hope, join us in this caucus,” she said. “I ask for your vote. And I promise you I will make sure every day I focus on what it takes to make you proud.”

Several hundred people rose to their feet in applause.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, was expected to fly to New York Monday night so he could be in court Tuesday as a jury is poised to consider whether he should pay additional damages to a columnist who last year won a $5 million jury award against Mr. Trump for sex abuse and defamation.

He will then fly to New Hampshire, the next state in the Republican primary calendar, to hold a rally Tuesday evening.

Mr. Trump showed significant strength among Iowa’s urban, small-town and rural communities, according to AP VoteCast. He also performed well with evangelical Christians and those without a college degree. And a majority of caucusgoers said that they identify with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

One relative weakness for Mr. Trump comes in the suburbs, where only about 4 in 10 supported him.

AP VoteCast is a survey of more than 1,500 voters who said they planned to take part in the caucuses. The survey is conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson were also on the ballot in Iowa, as was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who suspended his campaign last week.

Mr. Trump’s success tells a remarkable story of a Republican Party unwilling or unable to move on from a flawed front-runner. He lost to Biden in 2020 after fueling near-constant chaos while in the White House, culminating with his supporters carrying out a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. In total, he faces 91 felony charges across four criminal cases.

The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether states have the ability to block Mr. Trump from the ballot for his role in sparking the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. And he’s facing criminal trials in Washington and Atlanta for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Through it all, Mr. Trump has intentionally used his legal problems as a political asset.

National coverage

Over the last week alone, Mr. Trump chose to leave the campaign trail on two separate occasions to make voluntary appearances before judges in New York and Washington. In both cases, he addressed the media directly afterward, ensuring that national coverage of his legal drama would make it more difficult for his Republican rivals to break through in Iowa.

Mr. Trump has also increasingly echoed authoritarian leaders and framed his campaign as one of retribution. He has spoken openly about using the power of government to pursue his political enemies. He has repeatedly harnessed rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” And he recently shared a word cloud last week to his social media account highlighting “revenge,” “power” and “dictatorship.”

Mr.Trump’s legal challenges appear to have done little damage to his reputation as the charges are seen through a political lens.

About three-quarters say the charges against Mr. Trump are political attempts to undermine him, rather than legitimate attempts to investigate important issues, according to AP VoteCast.

Meanwhile, Iowa caucus participants were forced to brave the coldest temperatures in caucus history as forecasters warned that “dangerously cold wind chills” as low as 45 degrees below zero Fahrenheit were possible through noon Tuesday.

The conditions, according to the National Weather Service, could lead to “frostbite and hypothermia in a matter of minutes if not properly dressed for the conditions.”

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Secular religions of race, sex and climate have put U.S. in chokehold: Vivek Ramaswamy

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Three secular religions — race, sex and climate — have put the U.S. in a chokehold today, Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy has said.

Addressing his fellow conservative Republicans, Mr. Ramaswamy also proposed disruptive ideas of dismantling the Department of Education along with the FBI and banning American companies from doing business with China if he is elected as the president of the country in 2024.

“The Declaration of Independence of today is our declaration of independence from China. If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, that is the Declaration of Independence he would sign. That is the Declaration of Independence I will sign if I am elected as your next president,” Mr. Ramaswamy, 37, said.

Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and one of the Founding Fathers of the U.S. He served as the third president of the U.S. from 1801 to 1809 and was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Ramaswamy, who announced his decision to enter the 2024 race to the White House last week, noted that he was inspired by former president Donald Trump, 76, and his “America first” vision.

It is time to identify the issues and work aggressively towards them, Mr. Ramaswamy said during his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — the top annual event of the Republican Party and its support base— on Saturday.

It was his first major address from the national stage of the CPAC.

In his 18-minute speech, Mr. Ramaswamy said “three secular religions have America in a chokehold today”.

The first of them is this “woke racial religion” that says someone’s identity is based on his skin colour.

“That if you are black, you are inherently disadvantaged. That if you are white, you are inherently privileged no matter your economic background or your upbringing. That your race determines who you are and what you can achieve in life,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.

This has created “this new culture of fear in America”, combined with the “second secular religion” that says the “sex of the person you are attracted to has to be hardwired on the day you were born” but your “own biological sex is completely fluid over the course of your lifetime”.

“It makes no sense unless it is a religion. It does not match up to reason, it matches up to religion. And then it makes the same move as the first religion,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.

The third one is the climate religion in America that says that “we have to fight carbon emissions at all costs in the United States while we shift those same carbon emissions to places like China,” the Indian-American entrepreneur said.

“…Even if you believe in this religion, you would have embraced nuclear energy, which is the best form of carbon-free energy production known to mankind”.

“And yet these people oppose nuclear energy. What is really going on is that the climate religion has about as much to do with the climate as the Spanish Inquisition had to do with Christ, which is to say nothing at all. It is about power, dominion, control, punishment and apologising for what we have achieved in this country and the modern West as we know it,” Mr. Ramaswamy said amidst applause from the audience.

The U.S., he said is in the middle of a national identity crisis.

“Take it from me. I am 37 years old. I am a millennial. I was born in 1985. I will tell you this, my generation, really every generation of Americans today, we are so hungry for a cause.

“We are hungry for purpose and meaning and identity at a point in our national history when the things that used to fill our hunger for purpose, faith, patriotism, hard work, family — these things have disappeared,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.

He said this is an opportunity for the Republican Party and for the conservative movement to rise to the occasion and fill that void with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes woke “poison” to “irrelevance”.

Mr. Ramaswamy said he is all in on the “America first” agenda.

“Believe me, I am an ‘America first’ conservative. I will not apologise for it. But to put America first, we now need to rediscover what America is. And that is why last week I announced my run for US president to deliver a national identity that we are missing in this country,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.

“This means that you believe in merit, that you get ahead in this country, not on the colour of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions. And that is why as the US president, I have pledged to get rid of affirmative action in this country once and for all. It is national cancer on our soul,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.

‘Ban U.S. companies from doing business in China’

Mr. Ramaswamy said he would ban U.S. companies from doing business in China.

“I think it is important to be honest. If we want to declare independence from China, that means we got to be willing to ban most U.S. businesses from doing business in China until the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) falls or until the CCP radically reforms itself. Because there is no easy way out other than taking that band-aid and ripping it right off,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.

“I am sorry Henry Kissinger. We are done with your experiment. In America, it is the only way out. We got to start thinking on the time scales of history, not the time scales of electoral cycles,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.

Kissinger served as U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

“We do not need (Arthur Neville) Chamberlain, we need a little bit of (Winston) Churchill in this country. If you are willing to make a sacrifice, the chances are you will never have to make it because the other side will fall first,” Mr. Ramaswamy asserted.

Dismantling Department of Education

In his speech, Mr. Ramaswamy also called for dismantling the Department of Education and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

“I have already said last week, the first agency we will shut down and need to shut down in the United States is the U.S. Department of Education. It has no reason to exist. Never should have existed.

“And today, I am ready to announce the second government agency that I will shut down in this country we should have done this at least 60 years ago,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.

It has hurt Republicans and Democrats alike, he added.

“We are going to get it done as finally, it is time to shut down the FBI in America and create something new to take its place because we are done with the J. Edgar Hoover legacy to let this be a self-governing nation again,” Mr. Ramaswamy said, referring to the American law-enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the FBI.

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