Iowa
Biden douses cold water on Trump’s blowout win, doesn’t ‘think Iowa means anything’
President Biden doused cold water on Donald Trump’s momentous win over his 2024 GOP foes in Iowa earlier this week.
Biden, who lost his 2020 Iowa Caucus with 13.7% of the final vote and a fourth-place finish, suggested that Trump’s record-breaking estimated 51% victory wasn’t very significant.
“I don’t think Iowa means anything. The president got 50-some-thousand votes — the lowest number of votes anybody who’s won got,” Biden chided to reporters Thursday.
Trump amassed at least 56,260 votes in the Hawkeye State this year, per the most recent estimate.
Back in 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won the popular vote with 45,652 supporting him in the final count. But that primary was far more crowded than the 2024 GOP contest.
Some 110,000 voters participated in Iowa’s 2024 Caucus, compared to 187,000 who participated in the 2016 GOP event, and over 176,400 who partook in the Democrat’s glitch-plagued 2020 Iowa Caucus.
That was a roughly 15% turnout for Iowan Republicans on Monday, per the Des Moines Register, and the lowest in a GOP contest there since 2000, Business Insider reported.
Monday was dogged by frigid below-zero temperatures and fairly slick road conditions in parts of the state.
The 45th president’s roughly 30-point margin of victory was the largest achieved in the Iowa Caucus since it became the first in the nation presidential nominating contest.
Trump’s allies heralded the victory as emblematic of his political dominance, but Biden sounded doubtful.
“You know, this idea that it’s been a runaway, I think he can characterize it any way he wants. I’ll let them make that judgment,” Biden went on.
Shortly after Trump’s blowout win, Biden took note of his dominance of Trump on the GOP field as the two seemingly careen toward a rematch of 2020 this November.
“Looks like Donald Trump just won Iowa. He’s the clear front runner on the other side at this point,” Biden posted on X.
“But here’s the thing: this election was always going to be you and me vs. extreme MAGA Republicans. It was true yesterday and it’ll be true tomorrow,” he added with a link to a fundraising page.
Republicans are poised to hold their next presidential contest in New Hampshire next Tuesday. Biden is mounting a write-in campaign there due to a feud between the Granite State and the Democratic Party.
At the moment, Trump has a threadbare 0.9 percentage point edge nationally when environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr. is in the mix, per the RealClearPolitics aggregate.
More importantly, polls show a nailbiter general election showdown between Trump and Biden in the key battleground states, which will determine the election.