Just thirty-one minutes into the Iowa caucuses, the Associated Press announced Donald Trump's victory. The speed is unprecedented, even if the former president's victory was widely expected. Six out of 1,657 districts had declared results. In the auditorium of Eternity Church in the Des Moines suburb of Clive, where all the candidates appeared to make a final appeal to voters, Trump had just spoken, as had Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, while Congressman Chip Roy was about to speak on DeSantis' name when the announcement came from the Associated Press.
The reaction from DeSantis, the governor of Florida, was harsh. His communications director, Andrew Romeo, wrote as he announced the outcome of the race before tens of thousands of Iowans could even vote. The media is sold out to Trump and this is the biggest example yet.”
It now remains to be seen what the tycoon's margin of victory will be: if it is above 50%, it could help consolidate his Republican nomination soon, conversely, his rivals will consider him weak and continue to fight him in the next primaries. The other real unknown is who will finish second between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. As we write at 3:20 a.m. in Italy, DeSantis is in second place, but with only 3.58% of the votes counted. The early results also show that Nikki Haley is beating Trump in districts like the one we visited in West Des Moines, where the population is college-educated and wealthy, while in areas with high levels of education, the former UN ambassador doesn't even reach 10% .