Iowa Republicans showed up on 15 January in force for Donald Trump, voting overwhelmingly in the nation’s first primary for the former president, whose grip on his party has only deepened as he weathers numerous lawsuits and 91 felony charges relating to his business dealings and involvement in attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The Iowa caucuses confirmed polls that have consistently shown Trump carrying a comfortable lead ahead of the remaining Republican challengers.
Before the caucuses, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, repeatedly reminded voters and the press that he had toured all of Iowa’s 99 counties. Trump won 98 of them. With the exception of college graduates and voters under 30, who for the most part caucused for DeSantis or the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, most other demographic groups reported strong support for Trump this year.
Even young Republican voters favored Trump slightly more strongly this year than in the 2016 Iowa caucuses: CNN entrance polls showed a modest 3% jump in caucus-goers under 30 who support Trump, while his share of supporters over the age of 30 nearly doubled across the board.
Since 2016, Trump has consolidated support among evangelical Christian voters, a key block in Iowa. Just over 20% of Trump’s Iowa supporters in 2016 self-reported as evangelicals or born-again Christians; evangelicals made up 53% of his supporters in 2024 Iowa polling.
Support for Trump among evangelical Christians can be chalked up to “transactional politics” said Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.
Their support may be puzzling on the surface – Trump, a philandering and corrupt adulterer twice divorced who is not particularly religious, would seem an unlikely candidate for wide support from the devout. But behind the scenes, leaders in the evangelical movement, including influential members of the Southern Baptist church, struck a deal with Trump in 2016. In exchange for the support and endorsements of church leaders, Trump would afford evangelicals institutional power in his administration. Through an evangelical advisory board, they would help set social policy and do whatever they could to end the legal right to abortion.
Leaders in the church, in exchange, crafted a message that would make Trump more palatable to members.
To evangelicals, “Trump was not a man of God,” said Nelson. “He was an instrument of God, like King Cyrus, the Persian king in the Bible.”
The bargain held: Trump won the support of evangelical voters and then delivered to them a supreme court that overturned Roe v Wade, erasing nearly 50 years of legal precedent that guaranteed the right to abortion.
And despite political divisions among prominent pastors in Iowa, support for Trump among evangelical voters increased this year.
The Iowa primary may be a reasonable bellwether for evangelical support for him – and as far as it served as a litmus test for Republican party polling, the polling held up. But Iowa’s primary is atypical.
Iowa is more racially homogeneous than the rest of the US – more than 85% of Iowans identify as white, and Black people make up only about 4% of the population, compared with the national average of 71% and 12%. While Black men across the US have increasingly reported supporting Trump in polling, there were so few non-white Republican caucus-goers that entrance polling did not register them as a statistically significant bloc.
The Republican caucuses are also party meetings, requiring party membership to participate and consisting of an exclusively in-person vote.
The time commitment, the fact that caucuses also involve Republican party business, and even the extreme cold in Iowa this week probably affected turnout, which was estimated at 110,000 voters, significantly lower than 2016.
“The proportion of rank-and-file Republicans who are going to participate in the caucuses would be fewer than in a typical primary,” said Barbara Trish, a professor of political science at Grinnell College in Iowa.
“The smaller the core of participants, the more likely they are to be more ideologically extreme, or more, on average, experienced and active in the party.”
The next stop to test the strength and growth of Trump’s base is New Hampshire, which is also demographically less diverse than most of the country and thus not representative of what the US election as a whole will look like.
Even so, Trump is predicted to win the state, further cement his monopoly of the party, and box out those who threaten it.
