Iowa caucuses 2024 live: Trump ramps up attacks on Haley and DeSantis; Harris says Republicans pose ‘profound threat’ to freedom | Iowa

Sam Levine

The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, just wrapped up his final pitch to voters here in at a bar in Cedar Rapids, saying their vote for him on Monday could change the trajectory of the United States.

“You’re never gonna have an opportunity to have your vote pack as much of a punch as it will tonight,” DeSantis said in remarks that lasted about 15 minutes. “We don’t know how many people are going to be able to turn out given the weather.”

The comments were part of an effort by DeSantis to keep enthusiasm high after a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll showed him with the support of 16% of likely GOP caucusgoers. That trails Nikki Haley, who has the support of 20% of likely caucusgoers and Donald Trump, who has the support of 48% of likely caucusgoers.

“We live in a country now where the media thinks they should just be able to pick candidates,” he said. “I think the people should be able to pick the candidates.”

A year ago, DeSantis was considered a serious contender in Iowa and a threat to Trump’s chances of winning the nomination. His poll numbers have faded, even as he’s campaigned heavily in Iowa.

“I’m proud we’ve done Iowa right in terms of how you’re supposed to approach this caucus,” he said. “I visited all 99 counties. We did events in all 99 counties. We took questions from people all up and down this state.” While he didn’t mention them by name, it was a dig at Haley, whom DeSantis has criticized for not being as open with Iowa voters and Trump, the latter of whom has not campaigned as extensively in the state.

Listening in the audience was Steve Kessler, a 65-year-old retired engineer from Coralville. He said he hasn’t made up his mind about who he’s caucusing for yet. He said DeSantis gave a “good talk here” and he likes what he’s done in Florida.

“Vivek – I like the change he’s talking about. Very specific, very forceful and very knowledgable,” he said. “Nikki’s got quite a bit of horsepower behind her right now.

Kissler said he would not be caucusing for Donald Trump.

“He’s too flamboyant. And he distracts from the message,” he said.

Trump is in Iowa, where he expects to see a sizable victory tonight. The former US president, who is running for a second term, was pictured leaving a meeting with advisers in Des Moines – hours before caucus votes were due to begin.

On Saturday, when he arrived, he acknowledged he worried that the weather could affect turnout, though he noted that Trump supporters were passionate.

He rallied supporters on Sunday night in Indianola, Iowa, telling them they needed to show up Monday no matter what.

“You can’t sit home,” Trump said. “If you’re sick as a dog, you say ‘Darling, I gotta make it.’ Even if you vote and then pass away, it’s worth it.”

The caucuses are set to begin in two hours, kicking off the 2024 election season in the US. Trump is expected to win handily, though the weather will prove the ultimate wild card.

Here’s where things stand:

• It is very cold. The frigid, snow-filled state has seemed dormant the last few days, mostly because people are quickly running in and out of buildings to escape the cold. Candidates still hosted events around the state on Monday to snag last-minute votes.

• The caucus begins at precinct sites around the state at 7pm CT (8pm ET). Voters will stream into their local school gyms or community centers, where caucus captains volunteering for candidates will try to whip voters to their side. Results will be posted on this website as they come in.

• Who’s going to show up? The extreme cold could affect whose voters turn out to caucus. Some parts of the state still have snow-covered or icy roads. Low turnout could boost candidates polling lower if Trump supporters think their votes won’t be needed to ensure a victory.

• After former president and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump attacked Republican candidates Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy on Monday, Haley called Trump’s insults “fake news” while Ramaswamy refused to insult the former president in return.

• Democrats – including Illinois governor JB Pritzker and Minnesota senator Tina Smith – held a press conference in Iowa with Joe Biden re-election campaign surrogates, who denounced the Republican candidates as extremists.

• Vice-President Kamala Harris spoke in South Carolina, Democrats’ first primary state, at a Martin Luther King Jr day event, where she recalled King’s words and said Republicans served as a threat to freedoms like reproductive rights and access to education.

• It is MLK day, a federal holiday honoring the civil rights leader. Republicans set their caucus date without regard for the holiday, though the Iowa GOP leader said he believes holding the caucus on the holiday honors King.

• This is the true start of the 2024 election. Depending on tonight’s results, some Republican candidates could decide to end their campaigns and throw their support toward someone else. Or they could all continue, discounting the role of one rural midwestern state in the country’s politics.

Donald Trump Jr and Kimberly Guilfoyle are in Ankeny, Iowa, telling voters they need to show up tonight to support Trump Sr, despite the frigid weather.

Guilfoyle laid out the high stakes for the election, saying Trump is the only choice to get the country back on track and that the country will be unrecognizable if Trump doesn’t take back the White House.

Trump Jr took jabs at Nikki Haley, Trump’s closest competitor, and said people needed to vote tonight despite Trump polling well ahead.

“They’re trying desperately to suppress the vote by saying you have it in the bag,” he said.

Sam Levine

Ron DeSantis is set to make a closing pitch at Jersey’s pub and Grub in Cedar Rapids as Iowans prepare to head to their caucus sites Monday evening.

Wyatt Landuyt-Kruger, 22, is plans to caucus for DeSantis and said he’s going straight from this event to his caucus site. The caucuses are at 7pm and people aren’t let in if they arrive late.

“He’s principled, he’s got good conservative values,” he said.

He added that he doesn’t believe the polls, which show DeSantis with the support of 16% of caucusgoers, trailing Nikki Haley (20%) and Donald Trump (48%).

“I don’t listen to the polls at all,” he said. “I think the polls elevate Trump because they know Trump would get beaten by Trump in a general election.”

Kevin Rigdon, another DeSantis supporter here, said he started following the Florida governor and was impressed with how he ran the state during the Covid-19 pandemic.

David Smith

Donald Trump Jr and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle are running very late for a campaign stop at a bar in Ankeny, Iowa. “Do you think we’ll still make it to the caucus?” one anxious supporter asked the Guardian.

Patiently hanging on is Blake Marnell, 59, who works in sales and lives in San Diego, California. He is one of the peculiar characters thrown up by the Trump era: he is wearing his trademark brick-patterned suit, a symbol of his support for Trump’s border wall, along with a “Maga” cap signed by Trump.

He says the suit was marketed in Britain for stag parties and he bought it off the internet. “These are suits made for bachelor parties in London where the lads all want to go out for a night drinking but the dress code at the club says you must wear suits, so there’s this industry of semi-disposable suits with garish patterns.”

Marnell estimates he has been to between 35 and 40 Trump rallies and confidently predicts the former president will win the Iowa caucuses. “I believe President Trump will win. I think everybody knows that so the real question is by how much? If you go by polling, I think that he will be over 50%.”

The “Brick Man” is also looking forward to seeing the president’s eldest son in action soon. “He’s an excellent speaker for President Trump, for his father, because one thing that a lot of President Trump’s surrogates don’t have but Donald Trump Jr does have is they share the same sense of humour: at times irreverent, at times offensive to some people, at times perhaps people might think it’s a little bit too much, but if you’re a fan of President Trump and his humour, you’re also going to be a fan of Don Jr.

“The politician that supports President Trump won’t have the freedom or the latitude to say things because they have to worry about their constituency back home and how that impacts their office. Donald Trump Jr? No filters. He can say what he wants to say. He can say what he’s feeling and people understand that and they gravitate towards him.”

Vice-President Kamala Harris said “freedom is under profound threat” in a speech in South Carolina to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr Day.

The vice-president spoke as Republicans campaigned around Iowa in the final push to sway voters before the caucus began this evening. Democrats aren’t holding an Iowa caucus this year, after shifting their calendar to make South Carolina the first official primary because Iowa and New Hampshire’s voters don’t represent the diversity of the party. Republicans set their Iowa caucus on MLK day to maintain its status as the first election contest, but the fact that it was a federal holiday didn’t seem to enter into the decision.

Harris cited MLK’s iconic “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, where the civil rights leader wrote that “the goal of America is freedom”.

“And so, as we gather to honor his legacy, I pose a question I believe Dr. King would today ask: In 2024, where exactly is America in our fight for freedom?…As Vice President of the United States, I’d say: At this moment, in America, freedom is under profound threat,” she said.

Speaking at an NAACP event, Harris sought to make the case that supporting Democrats in this year’s elections would protect freedoms in the wake of attacks on reproductive rights, book bans and voting rights. She implored attendees to join the fight against these restrictions by voting blue in 2024.

“This generation now has fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers,” she said. “It is not hypothetical that from kindergarten to 12th grade, this generation has had to endure active shooter drills. Our children, who should be in a classroom fulfilling their God-given potential and exploring their wonder for the beauty of the world, instead have to worry that someone might burst through their classroom door with a gun. It is not hypothetical. When students go to vote, they often have to wait in line for hours because of laws that intentionally make it more difficult for them to cast a ballot.”

Chris Stein

Shortly after that, the Biden campaign’s press conference wrapped up.

We’re now four hours away from the start of the Republican caucuses in Iowa’s 99 counties, and you can expect the Biden campaign will speak up again once their choice becomes clear.

Chris Stein

JB Pritzker was asked about Joe Biden’s persistent unpopularity.

The president’s approval rating has been underwater for more than two-and-a-half years, and has lately lurked in the low 40% range. The factors behind this trend are myriad and include Biden’s advanced age as well as the hangover from the record inflation Americans experienced in 2022, but the trend has been enough to make many Democrats nervous about his bid to win another four years in the White House.

Pritzker argued that polls don’t yet reflect the reality of the presidential race, since the Republican nominee hasn’t yet been decided.

“Until we see that we won’t know really what the numbers are,” the governor said (though many pollsters have surveyed how the president would perform against various Republicans, including Donald Trump, who some polls have found voters prefer.)

But I can tell you this, that it’s Joe Biden that’s delivered for the American public, it’s Joe Biden that’s got an awful lot to brag about, and I think the dangers that are posed by this Republican field will be well known to people once … one of them is chosen.

Chris Stein

Jeffrey Katzenberg, a movie mogul who is co-chairing the national advisory board for Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, is talking up the mammoth fundraising haul the president received in the final quarter of last year.

“Last quarter, Team Biden Harris raised more than $97m and reported $117m of cash on hand,” Katzenberg said.

It means team Biden-Harris is entering the election year with more cash on hand than any democratic candidate in history.

He said the Biden campaign’s financial firepower now dwarfs his Republican rivals, no matter who that may be, and allows them to focus their efforts on winning the November general election. Katzenberg said:

Republicans are spending money in a race for the Maga base without a single dime going towards the voters who will ultimately decide the general election. By the time they are finished with the primary and Donald Trump or whichever extremists is finally in a position where they can start trying to compete with us, it’s just going to be too late.

Chris Stein

The Minnesota senator Tina Smith laid into the Republican field, saying all the candidates had plans to cut off access to abortion.

We know one thing for sure. Every one of these extremist candidates is attacking women’s freedom to make their own decisions about abortion. These extreme Republican candidates want a national ban on abortion, and that is what they will try to do if given the chance.

The reality is that none of these candidates trust women to make their own decisions about abortion because they believe that they know and that is why we cannot trust them to be president.

Republican candidates espousing extremist ideas, Illinois governor tells Iowa Democratic event

Chris Stein

The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, is up at the podium first, and saying that all Republican candidates competing in tonight’s caucus are ignoring the country’s needs and espousing extremist policies. Pritzker said:

Here we stand on Martin Luther King Jr Day, and this field of candidates is espousing Adolf Hitler’s ideas, denying that … the civil war was about slavery, or demonizing and discounting the rights of large groups of Americans. All of these Republican candidates are singing the same, terrible song.

In an apparent reference to Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and sole woman in the Republican race, and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who has been accused of wearing footwear that boosts his stature, Pritzker said:

Tonight’s contest is simply a question of whether you like your Maga Trump agenda wrapped in the original packaging with high heels, or with lifts in their boots.

Chris Stein

While everyone will be watching who Iowa Republicans select as their nominee tonight, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is in town to, in their words, “remind voters what’s at stake this November as Donald Trump and Maga Republicans launch an all-out assault on Americans’ freedoms”.

They’ve got some Democratic heavy hitters speaking to the press this afternoon at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, including the Illinois governor JB Pritzker, the Minnesota senator Tina Smith and Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-chair of the Biden-Harris campaign’s national advisory board.

I am in the room and will let you know what they have to say.

Precinct captains in Iowa will try to persuade caucus voters tonight to pick their preferred candidate, a practice common to the Iowa caucuses but not typical of US elections otherwise.

Candidates work to have volunteer caucus captains at all precinct voting sites, usually local schools or community gathering places. Those captains whip votes at the precinct, speechifying and debating with voters who are unsure who to vote for or could be swayed from one candidate to another.

Outside the caucus process, it’s usually illegal to actively campaign at a polling site.

This year, Trump’s precinct captains are donning white hats with “Trump Caucus Captain” written in gold lettering. The hats were given to 2,000 caucus captains and have become “the hottest item in Maga world”, Politico reported.

The precinct captains, while their role is important on caucus day, are typically regular Iowa voters who volunteer to help their preferred candidate because they’re passionate about that person winning. They’re often seen as people who can influence their neighbors at the hyperlocal precinct sites.

Sometimes, the New York Times writes in its feature about caucus captains, the captains can be more high-profile. “One of Ron DeSantis’s captains is a former co-chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, and one of Nikki Haley’s is a state senator,” the paper notes.