Iowa caucuses 2024 results: Trump, Haley and DeSantis plead for turnout in brutal weather

The Iowa caucuses start at 7pm CST on Monday 15 January.

Results are expected to start rolling in from the smaller precincts around half an hour later, consultant Patrick Stewart told The Des Moines Register.

The outcomes from larger precincts likely to take longer to count and arrive a few hours later.

That means that we will not have a complete picture of how the candidates have done until well into the night.

Volunteer precinct chairs will be required to enter the results for each candidate into an online system twice to ensure any counting errors are noticed before state party officials check over and approve each precinct’s results one by one before they are sent to the GOP website for public consumption.

Donald Trump’s rally in Iowa was briefly derailed on Sunday when he was heckled by a protestor calling him out for accepting millions of dollars from foreign businesses while he was president.

Boos from the crowd drowned out the woman before the former president taunted: “Go home to Mommy! Your mommy’s worried.”

Mr Trump later criticised the protestor, calling her “young and immature,” only to come face to face with even more heckling and booing that broke out when another protester could be heard calling Mr Trump a “climate criminal”.

He completed the “Full Grassley,” named for Iowa’s long-serving Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, where he visited all 99 counties in the state. He made the hard sell at Iowa’s State Fair. He received the endorsement of Kim Reynolds, the state’s governor, and Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Iowa Family Leader and a kingmaker in the state whose support of Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz all played a role in their victories in the caucuses.

Eric Garcia and Gustaf Kilander report on what is at stake today:

The latest poll out of Iowa found that nearly half of Nikki Haley supporters would vote for President Joe Biden over Donald Trump should the election ultimately come to a rematch from 2020.

It showed that if Mr Trump and Mr Biden are pitted against each other in November, 43 per cent of Ms Haley’s supporters said they would support the latter.

The surprising statistic underscores Ms Haley’s success in drawing support from independents.

A man in Iowa stood up at a recent town hall and told Ron DeSantis he had an “easy” question: how would the Florida governor address abortion when it’s sure to be a big issue in the coming 2024 presidential election?

DeSantis said he’d talk about it “the same way I did in Florida. I just articulated kind of, you know, where we were, what we do.”

He continued for nearly four minutes without using the word “abortion.” He instead criticized his rival Donald Trump for failing to appear in debates and Nikki Haley for her campaign trail gaffes.

Abortion has largely been absent as an issue in the lead-up to this year’s Iowa Republican caucuses, a remarkable change in a state that has long backed religious conservatives vowing to restrict the procedure. Part of the change is because Republicans achieved a generational goal when the Supreme Court overturned a federally guaranteed right to abortion. But it also underscores a pervasive fear among Republican candidates and voters alike that vocalizing their desire to further restrict abortion rights in 2024 has become politically dangerous.

Democrats outperformed expectations in the 2022 midterms and several state races last year campaigning on the issue. And President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign plans to make abortion rights central to its strategy this year.

After the final pre-caucus poll in Iowa put her at just 20 per cent of the vote (compared to Donald Trump’s 48 per cent), Nikki Haley insisted she isn’t breaking a sweat.

The presidential hopeful told Fox News on Sunday: “I’m not a political pollster. I’m not gonna worry about the numbers. What I am gonna say is the momentum and the energy on the ground is strong. We feel it. We know that this is moving in the right direction.

“The only numbers that matter are the ones that were going up, and everybody else went down.

“I think Iowans will decide intensity tomorrow. We’re just excited that tomorrow’s the day. It’s go time and we’re gonna keep crisscrossing the state. We’ve done that for days, now we’re going to keep doing it and I think the intensity will show tomorrow.”

All eyes will be on the race to secure the Republican nomination, with front-runner Donald Trump expected to cement his commanding lead over his rivals in the polls as the likes of Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy seek to make an impact and prove they have the support to mount a meaningful challenge.

For Democrats, the matter is much more straightforward: they will simply gather in gyms, schools, libraries and churches across the state’s 1,657 precincts (spread over 99 counties) to elect delegates to send to the county conventions in March, the next step to selecting the delegates that will attend the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.

Despite sub-zero temperatures and snow being forecast, the state Republican Party chair Jeff Kaufmann has insisted: “We have done everything humanly possible to ensure that this caucus comes off without a hitch.”

So when can we expect to find out the results?