Trump won 52% of voters in the first round of the Republican primary in Iowa (French)
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump's easy victory in Iowa on Monday night underscores that there is no real race for the Republican nominee this year. Trump received 52 percent of voters in the first round of the Republican primary.
Florida Governor Ron Decentis received 21 percent, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Healy 19 percent and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy 7.7 percent of the vote. Ramaswamy dropped out of the race yesterday and declared his support for Trump.
The failure of Trump's Republican rivals reflects how insurmountable the former president's power is within the party, and Trump has not only defeated them, but also all the institutional forces that support them within the Republican Party, and the conservative forces supporting the party.
Republican nominee and Trump rival Nikki Haley won 19 percent of Iowa voters (Reuters)
Opposition stream
A number of major GOP funders, through a massive network overseen by billionaire Charles Koch, backed candidate Nikki Healy, while Iowa's famous evangelical leader Bob Vander Platts and Republican Governor Kim Reynolds backed candidate Ron Decentis.
The current opposed to Trump within the Republican camp reflected strong financial and ideological forces with firm ideological commitments, and yesterday's voting pattern reflected a test of voter preferences and not just the selection of candidates' personalities.
Voters in Iowa, a state where the Republican nominee is guaranteed to win the November election, expressed indifference to the criminal cases against Trump and his face more than 90 charges, mostly federal, New York and Georgia.
Trump repeats that these trials are a political game against him, and Republicans in the state showed yesterday that they agree with that.
Iowa, on the other hand, reflects a general picture of the GOP's status at the beginning of 2024, a conservative state that votes Republican, predominantly white and without college degrees.
The outcomes of the Iowa primary are expected to represent a picture of the pattern and preferences of Republican voters in the rest of the presidential race within the Republican camp.
Blow and hopes
It's hard to think of any other state where the governor of Florida was expected to perform better than yesterday in finishing second behind Trump, ahead of Haley, because of the huge support he received that allowed his campaign to spend more than $35 million from January 1 to 12, while Trump's campaign spent only $18 million in the same period.
Haley's campaign also spent $37 million in the same period, and all of that money did not affect the preferences of Republican voters in Iowa, more than half of whom chose to vote for Donald Trump.
Haley's hopes of a strong primary performance in New Hampshire next Tuesday's election are being pinned and allows non-Republicans to vote.
Decentis hopes his second-place win in Iowa will convince anti-Trump Republicans that he is the best option rather than fragmenting votes among several rival Trump candidates.
Despite the significant support and funding for the campaigns of Decentis and Healy, their strength as candidates with strong political experience has strong support from several currents in the Republican Party, with which it cannot be said that Trump's victory over them came because of their division or weakness.
Iowa's results confirmed that even strong rivals cannot threaten Trump's control of the Republican Party.
Trump won on strong support among evangelical Christians without college degrees. Despite taking conflicting positions on the abortion issue, many of them questioning his degree of conservatism, Trump still enjoys more than twice the popularity of Decentis and Haley among evangelical Christians.
"Rooted Force"
But Gary Bauer, a longtime social conservative leader and former Republican presidential candidate in 2000 who now serves on the Trump campaign's religious advisory board, says that "the four years of Trump's presidency, and while some things haven't been accomplished, Trump has always strived to do so."
Many observers agree that Trump's power among evangelicals is less rooted in his commitment to political dogma on a long list of traditional social issues, let alone in his embodiment of personal values that cultural conservatives say they revere.
Instead, they agree that Trump benefits because many among conservative evangelicals see him as a fighter against a range of interconnected forces — Democrats, the federal government, and the liberal media — that they see as steering the American people away from their traditional religious values.
In the end, Trump did not miss the chance of winning the Iowa election, and immediately after the results were announced, Trump's campaign sent an email asking its base for financial donations "to confront the rabid far left that hopes and begs that they can do anything to stop us."
"But because of you, we are victorious, and if our work is not finished yet, every victory that goes forward will be because of what you are doing here, now donate. And if you've voted for me before, I ask you to come in and proudly say, 'We stand with President Trump.'"
Source : Al Jazeera