On the heels of a disappointing showing in Iowa, Trump’s rivals are in the make-or-break weeks of their campaigns.
Donald Trump’s blowout win in Iowa left both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who declared they’d continue their race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, to do their best to spin the outcomes in a positive direction.
“We got our ticket punched out of Iowa,” DeSantis told supporters. “I am not going to make any excuses and I guarantee you this: I will not let you down!”
DeSantis, who spent big in the state and traveled to all 99 counties, outperformed his polls, but the Florida governor only bested Haley by a middling two points and fell far shy of Trump at 21 percent of the votes.
“Given where DeSantis started the campaign last spring, and the time and money he spent in Iowa, his performance was devastating,” said Mark Caleb Smith, a Cedarville University political science professor.
DeSantis didn’t perform as well with white evangelicals as he had hoped, with Trump holding on to half of all votes and taking a majority of the evangelical Christian bloc.
“It is fascinating how they’ve come to put such trust and hope into Trump,” said Smith. “They’ve rationalized—justified—that Trump is the one that is kind of this instrument of God. He’s the King Cyrus, right, that’s going to ‘look out for us, even though we don’t necessarily embrace his own personal piety or lack thereof.’”
Trump’s 30-point margin was enough for two candidates to drop out. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who garnered 7.7 percent of the vote, read the political winds and, just a few hours into the night, suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump instead. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson also rolled up his campaign after winning …
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