After having little more than polls and expectations set by the campaigns on which to base 2024 predictions, Monday's Iowa caucuses will finally put points on the board and set Republicans on the path toward officially crowning their nominee at July's Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Within about 30 minutes of the caucuses starting, former President Donald Trump clinched victory in the Hawkeye State. Now it's a (reportedly close) race for second place.
This year's caucuses are reportedly the coldest on record — with air temperatures below zero and windchill values dipping into double-digit negative territory — which caused some to worry about a potential impact on turnout among the hearty Iowans, though Hawkeye State residents didn't seem to share the concerns of pundits. Many caucus locations instead looked to be pretty packed.
At stake on Monday night are Iowa's 40 RNC delegates, allocated proportionally based on the results of the caucuses. After things got underway across Iowa at 7:00 p.m., Republican voters at more than 1,600 caucus sites around the state wrote down the name of their preferred candidate on a secret ballot. Now that those paper slips are being counted, the totals are being reported to the Republican Party of Iowa and that data is continuously updating on the map below.
In addition to statewide numbers, the results can be adjusted to show individual county-level results as vote totals increase through the evening. Join the Townhall team over on our live blog while we keep an eye on the votes and what the campaigns are saying, plus we have everything you need to know about how the Iowa caucuses run here.
One of the biggest things to watch on Monday night is how candidates ultimately perform against expectations set by the polls conducted in recent days.
According to the RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls from January 1 to January 14, former President Trump heads into caucus night with a 33.7-point lead at 52.5 percent. Former Ambassador Nikki Haley sits in a distant second place with 18.8 percent, followed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis with 15.7 percent. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy was averaging 6.8 percent, and still-running former Governor Asa Hutchinson had 0.8 percent.
This is a developing story and may be updated.