Trump secures win in first contest for Presidential election

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Former United States President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner candidate for President, secured a dominant win in the first contest to select the party’s nominee for November’s Presidential election. Trump was projected the winner at the IOWA caucuses, 30 minutes after results started trickling in after polls confirmed his outright favourite status in the GOP (Grand Old Party) race.  Trump’s legal woes have done little to dent his standing within the Republican Party.

His post to social media said it all – “thank you IOWA, I love you all” after coasting to a 30-point win over his two nearest rivals  Florida Governor Ron Desantis and Trump’s former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.

“This has been an incredible experience. The people have been… this is the third time we’ve won. But this is the biggest one.  And they said, well, if you win by 12%, that’s a big win. That’s going to be very hard to do. Well, I think we’ve more than doubled that. I guess a triple that maybe. I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together. We’re all having a good time together. And I think they both actually did very well. I really do. I think they both did very well.”

The IOWA caucuses essentially became a race for second place with De Santis, pipping Haley by just over two thousand votes.  The focus now shifts to the first in the nation primary in New Hampshire, next week where either of the two must put in a strong showing to put the brakes on Trump’s inevitability.

The Granite State has offered such surprises in the past, but Trump’s clear dominance would make any loss in the state a mere blip in his path to the party’s nomination.  With both challengers seeking to portray optimism despite the Trumpian headwinds they both face that will be difficult to overcome.

“When you look at how we’re doing in New Hampshire, in South Carolina and beyond … I can safely say tonight, Iowa made this Republican primary a two person race. Our campaign is the last, best hope of stopping the Trump Biden nightmare. But it’s more than that. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. That’s nothing to be proud of. We should want to earn the support of a majority of Americans,” said Harley.

DeSantis is polling a distant third behind Haley and Trump in New Hampshire which could spell the end of his campaign where he put in a poor showing.

“We represent a chance to reverse the madness that we’ve seen in this country, to reverse the decline of this country, and to give this country a new birth of freedom and a restoration of sanity. That’s what we are going to do. We have a lot of work to do, but I can tell you this, as the next president of the United States, I am going to get the job done for this country. I am not going to make any excuses and I guarantee you this: I will not let you down.”

Trump continues to cement his hold on the Republican Party.

“There’s not a thick plot line here to unearth. And I think in many ways the effort to find one by focusing on the weather, who might come out second, belies the big headline, which is Trump has a lock on, all signs point towards Trump having a lock on the nomination. Certainly, winning in IOWA. But boy, he’s got, uh, a heck of a hold on this party,”  Professor William Howell of Chicago University

And while Trump faces a mountain of legal trouble in the months ahead he’s now more than likely to face incumbent President and likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden in November in a rematch of the 2020 election that Trump has yet to concede – citing widespread election fraud that the Courts have determined was pure fabrication – after losing by more than 7 million votes nationally and by 70 votes in the electoral college.