Donald Trump wins Iowa in US presidential race

Donald Trump has been declared the winner of the first Republican presidential nominating contest.

Donald Trump has claimed a commanding victory in the Republican Party’s first contest to nominate its presidential candidate, kickstarting his bid to reclaim the White House this year.

With only a few hundred votes counted in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night (local time) – out of about 100,000 statewide – the former president was almost immediately projected as the victor by the Associated Press and CNN.

By 11pm, with 93 per cent of the votes in, support for Mr Trump hovered at 51 per cent. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley were locked in a tight battle for second place, with both receiving about 20 per cent of the votes.

Mr Trump said he was “greatly honoured” by the early call, despite complaints from Mr DeSantis’s campaign team.

“It is a tremendous thing and a tremendous feeling,” he said.

Former US president Donald Trump speaks to voters during a visit to a caucus site at the Horizon Event Centre in Clive, Iowa. Picture: Getty Images

He told his victory rally that it was “time now for everybody, our country to come together”.

“We are a nation in decline … We are going to turn it around so fast,” Mr Trump said, as he blasted President Joe Biden as “the worst president we’ve had in the history of our country”.

About 100,000 Iowans voted at 1657 precincts across the state, half the expected turnout as a freezing snowstorm made it the coldest caucus night in history.

Mr Trump had predicted it would be a “tremendous night”, although his advisers had sought to temper expectations, noting that the previous record winning margin in a contested Republican caucus was 12.8 percentage points.

In an unusually positive victory speech, the former president said both Ms Haley and Mr DeSantis “both actually did very well”.

Before the results rolled in, Mr DeSantis rejected suggestions that a poor result would force him out of the race, despite having promised for months that he would win Iowa.

“We’re going on with this … We’ve been built for the long haul,” he said.

His campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo blasted the quick decision by media outlets to call the race, saying it was “absolutely outrageous” given tens of thousands of Iowans had not voted.

Ms Haley had told voters in her final pitch that it was time for a “new generational leader”.

“We can’t have a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos … We won’t survive it. You don’t defeat Democrat chaos with Republican chaos,” she said.

But Mr Trump blasted his former UN ambassador, saying she could “never win in the general election” because she was not part of his “Make America Great Again” movement.

The next nominating contest is next Tuesday in New Hampshire, and Mr Trump’s team believes he could wrap up the nomination shortly after the Super Tuesday primary extravaganza in early March.

Vice President Kamala Harris said that if Mr Trump was the eventual Republican candidate – setting the stage for a rematch of the 2020 election against Mr Biden – then “we’ve beaten him before and we’ll beat him again”.

In a sign of the legal jeopardy surrounding the candidacy of Mr Trump, who is facing 91 criminal charges including over his effort to overturn his 2020 defeat, the former president was set to head straight to New York after the caucuses for a new civil trial to determine how much he would pay in damages to a woman who accused him of sexual assault.

Originally published as Donald Trump wins Iowa in US presidential race