Iowa caucuses 2024 live: Trump ramps up attacks on Haley and DeSantis as voters battle cold to pick Republican candidate | US politicsthedigitalchaps

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.

Chris Stein

Iowa’s Republican party has announced a website where it will publicly collate the results of this evening’s caucuses.

The website will post results from precincts in all 99 counties, and include the following candidates: the former president Donald Trump; the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis; the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley; the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson; the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; and the pastor Ryan Binkley. The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie will also appear in the results because, the state GOP said, they had planned for him to be there. Christie suspended his campaign last week.

Doors to caucus sites will open at 7pm ET, with the caucusing beginning at 8pm. All sites are open to reporters, except for those in Perry, where a school shooting occurred last week. The community has requested the press not be present, the Iowa GOP says.

This year’s Iowa caucuses coincide with Martin Luther King Jr Day in the US, a federal holiday that honors the civil rights leader on the third Monday in January.

The holiday didn’t seem to initially factor into Republicans’ decision to set the date, reporting from the Associated Press last July said. Democrats aren’t holding a caucus in Iowa this year.

Setting the Iowa caucus on 15 January ensured it would occur before New Hampshire’s contest and maintain its first-in-the-nation status.

After the decision was made, Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said:

As Republicans, we can, I, we see this as honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King in terms of having a caucus here.

The Monday night caucus interfered with scheduled events meant to commemorate MLK Day. The Sioux City NAACP shifted a celebration to Sunday, though organizers didn’t mind, the Sioux City Journal reported. “The Iowa Caucuses are very important. If you want to participate, you should be able to participate,” Sandra Pearson told the paper.

In Ames, Iowa, an annual MLK day celebration is still set for Monday night, which has some local leaders frustrated and residents deciding whether to attend one or the other, the Iowa State Daily reported.

“Why do we even make people have to choose on something like this?” Ames council representative Tim Gartin said, according to Iowa State Daily.

So that’s the part that’s painful to me is that this is a choice that we should never have to make, you should be able to do both.

Nikki Haley has dismissed Donald Trump’s comments earlier today that she is a “Globalist Rino” and “doesn’t have Maga”.

“Donald Trump knows Nikki Haley is a strong conservative who he praises repeatedly for her toughness at the United Nations,” said a national spokesperson for Haley, Olivia Perez-Cubas.

Now that Nikki is surging and Trump is dropping, his campaign is flinging phony, contradictory attacks. Don’t believe the fake news from Trump world – they don’t believe it themselves.

Sam Levine

Before Vivek Ramaswamy’s event started in Cedar Rapids, I spoke with Gaylen Vance, a 68-year-old retiree who said he’s still undecided about who to caucus for.

Nikki Haley has the best chance of winning the general election, he said. Ron DeSantis is “the most like Trump without some of the extraneous crap”. And Ramaswamy is “the smartest guy in the room”.

Vance said his wife was a caucus captain for Trump in tonight’s caucuses but he was hesitant to support the former president because of his lies about the 2020 election.

Sam Levine

Vivek Ramaswamy is about to take the stage here at a brewery in Cedar Rapids just a few hours ahead of the Iowa caucuses.

The room here is crowded – I would guess around 100 people are here – though noticeably smaller than the crowd at events I’ve been to for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis in recent days. Ramaswamy trails DeSantis by 8% and Haley by double digits in Iowa.

Before the program started, a speaker asked how many voters were undecided and a smattering of hands went up. She said this was a chance for those undecided voters to ask Ramaswamy anything.

Steve King, a far right former Republican congressman who has endorsed Ramaswamy, spoke before the candidate.

“When I step in and endorse in and endorse a candidate I’m all in,” King said. “And today where am I? I’m really really enthusiastically all in.”

Chris Stein

It’s hard to put into words just what the -1F (-18C) temperature in Des Moines feels like.

Suffice to say, few people are outside in downtown Des Moines, and those that must go out are typically darting from a car into a building.

Conditions remain treacherous, and the sub-freezing temperatures that have stretched on since Friday’s snow dump mean roads remains slick with slush, sidewalks are piled high with drifts, and it’s still typical to see cars stuck in piles of snow.

The one group of people spending more time outside than most is television reporters doing standups, who apparently have no option but to brave the frigid weather in exchange for a nice background of the state capital:

The caucuses are a big event for Des Moines, drawing reporters and politicians from all over the country. The city rolls out the welcome mat in a variety of ways, including with banners posted all over the downtown’s very useful skywalk system:

Joanna Walters

The longshot rightwinger Vivek Ramaswamy is out and about on the frozen trail in Iowa today, too, earlier hanging with one of Britain’s ultimate Brexiteers, Nigel Farage.

Here’s a very ordinary post on X/Twitter from Ramaswamy earlier.

And the less ordinary, giving his provocative, ultra-conservative definition of “truth”.

It’s a bracing day in Iowa as the caucus gatherings approach later on Monday, and there are other items of US politics news occurring too, all brought to you as they happen. We are here, live, to bring you all the events.

Here’s where things stand:

• Economy, border, foreign policy are key issues as Iowans head to caucus, with Republican voters in the Hawkeye state saying these themes are top of mind as they prepare to caucus tonight in the US’s first nominating contest.

• Donald Trump has stepped up his attacks on Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis on the morning of the day Iowans go to vote on their Republican candidate.

• The Pentagon said the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has been released from hospital today. Austin, 70, had been hospitalized since 1 January due to complications after prostate cancer treatment, but there was uproar because he didn’t tell the White House (or many others) about it.

• Iowa Republicans will brave brutally cold temperatures on Monday evening to participate in the state’s presidential caucuses, as Donald Trump remains the clear frontrunner in the race for his party’s nomination. The final results will depend on turnout, which could be acutely impacted by the weather.

• Iowans have been told to “limit outdoor exposure” as much as possible with forecasters saying the wind chill temperature could go down to as low as -35F on Monday evening in the “dangerous cold”.

• The 2024 US presidential election begins in earnest in Iowa today. The final Des Moines Register/NBC News poll before Monday night’s caucuses found former president, Donald Trump, maintaining a formidable lead over his opponents, supported by 48% of likely caucus-goers. After trailing the two-term Florida governor, Ron DeSantis for months, the latest poll showed Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, in second place in Iowa, winning the support of 20% of likely Republican caucus-goers, compared to DeSantis’s 16%, with Vivek Ramaswamy at 8%.