DES MOINES, Iowa – Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won the hotly contested Iowa Republican caucus on Monday night, fending off a tough challenge from Donald Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
With 99% of precincts in, Cruz led with 28% of the vote versus 24% for Trump, 23% for Rubio, and 9% for fourth-place Dr. Ben Carson.
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The caucus was the first battle in a bitter civil war within the Republican Party over competing ideologies and general election strategies.
Cruz ran on a pledge to faithfully represent the grassroots right, who he argued would respond by turning out in greater numbers in the general election. Rubio, solidly conservative himself, argued he could bring voters who had backed Democrats in the past into the GOP field with a more universal message that emphasized his son-of-immigrants biography.
Trump took a completely different path, ignoring GOP tradition in favor of a swaggering populist appeal that targeted independents and loose partisans who are disillusioned with politics entirely.
The candidates will move on to New Hampshire next, which votes on February 9. Polls for months have shown Trump with a dominant lead there with Rubio and Cruz competing with a handful of candidates for a distant second. Rubio may have the most to gain from his performance as he’s struggled to distinguish himself in the Granite State from Florida Governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Ohio Governor John Kasich, all of whom have positioned themselves as mainstream alternatives to Cruz and Trump. The three governors each finished in the low single-digits in Iowa on Monday.
The results represented a personal triumph for Cruz, who appeared to have lost his lead in polls to Trump in the race’s final days. The billionaire real estate mogul mercilessly attacked Cruz in speeches across the state over his use of a $1 million loan from Goldman Sachs to fund his 2012 Senate race as well as his Canadian birthplace, which Trump said cast a cloud over his eligibility for president.
In the end, however, Cruz’s grunt work in the state paid off. He visited all 99 counties in the state, built a volunteer army, and corralled key endorsements from the state’s most prominent social conservative leaders.
Elected in 2012, Cruz distinguished himself within the GOP by rallying conservatives to pressure party leaders into a scorched earth campaign against Obama’s agenda, culminating in the 2013 government shutdown over health care. The effort won him few friends in the Senate, who derided his efforts as cynical grandstanding, but raised his profile among the hardline conservatives who form the backbone of his candidacy.
He carried a similar message into Iowa, where he touted himself as the most consistent conservative in the race and pledged an all-out effort to undo President Obama’s policies, including repealing the Affordable Care Act, ending the Iranian nuclear deal, and reversing executive orders shielding some undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Trump’s second-place performance was a disappointment given that a number of surveys, including the prestigious Des Moines Register poll, showed him with a lead over Cruz. His reliance on non-traditional voters raised questions about his ability to turn out supporters, questions that will follow him past Iowa given the results.
At the same time, the New York billionaire finally demonstrated substantial support from actual voters — and not just poll respondents — for his platform of building a border wall, deporting all undocumented immigrants, renegotiating trade deals, temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country, and challenging “political correctness” in all forms.









