As expected, it was a big night for Donald Trump. He won just over half of the 110,000 votes cast in Iowa. Due to the weather, the turnout was very low. Ron DeSantis finished second (21.2%) and Nikki Haley was third (19.1%). Vivek Ramaswamy finished a distant fourth and then suspended his campaign. It is now a three-person race heading into New Hampshire next Tuesday (January 23).
Ron DeSantis was pretty upbeat in his speech last night. I am not sure what world DeSantis is living in, but his campaign has nowhere to go. He is polling very low in New Hampshire and has no chance in South Carolina where Trump has a huge lead and Nikki Haley was the former governor.
Haley was also upbeat in her speech. According to one poll she is seven points behind Trump in New Hampshire. If she doesn’t beat him in the Granite State, this whole thing is over and we have another Trump-Biden showdown in November.
Meanwhile, Trump is in court today where he will learn how much money he must pay E. Jean Carroll, a woman he sexually assaulted and then defamed.
In my view, Trump’s thirty point victory in Iowa is especially egregious because the state has so many evangelical voters. I understand why my fellow evangelicals voted for Trump. I wrote a book about it. But we cannot grow numb to the fact that so many American evangelicals are rallying around a guy who is a major threat to democracy, inspired an insurrection, seeks to undermine an election, invokes Nazi language about blood poisoning, and may end up in jail. Can all the criminal charges against Trump be part of a witch hunt? Is Trump guilty of nothing, as he claims? Trump is facing 91 felony charges. Simple math says that at least one of these charges is going to stick.
In a recent interview, court evangelical Robert Jeffress said that evangelicals have “developed an immunity” to voices on the left who claim that they are hypocrites for voting for Donald Trump.
Immunity? More like a seared conscience.