US election season begins as Iowa Republicans brave cold in first caucuses

Latest polls place Donald Trump as clear frontrunner for party’s nomination in first round of voting in 2024 primary

Iowa Republicans braved 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 caucuses began at 7pm CT and marked the first round of voting in the 2024 presidential primary. They will offer the most tangible insight yet into whether any of Trump’s primary opponents, particularly the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, have managed to diminish his significant polling advantage in the race. Trump has maintained that advantage for months, even as he has been charged with 91 felony counts across four criminal cases.

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Extreme cold and snow blanket Iowa ahead of Monday’s Republican caucuses

Candidates were forced to cancel campaign events as snow closed rural highways and temperatures are expected to plummet

Wild and dangerous winter storm weather continued to wreak havoc on Saturday in Iowa just two days before the Republican caucuses kick off the official nominating process for the 2024 presidential election.

The National Weather Service (NWS) in the state capital of Des Moines said on Saturday morning that more snow was expected, in combination with lingering gusty winds causing “blowing snow and whiteout conditions at times” and warned that “travel is expected to remain treacherous, so consider altering plans”.

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Who benefits as Christie ends presidential bid before Iowa caucus? – podcast

Hours before Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis took to the debate stage in Iowa on Wednesday night, more than 1,000 miles away in New Hampshire Chris Christie shocked his supporters by announcing he was dropping out of the race. The former New Jersey governor was the only candidate to consistently attack Donald Trump, in a field of Republicans trying to beat the former president, all the while keeping his base sweet.

With only three days until the Iowa caucus, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Elaine Kamarck about who is most likely to come out on top

Archive: CBS, CNN, MSNBC, CSPAN

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Nikki Haley emerges from TV debate as Trump’s nearest rival as Iowa vote looms

Former South Carolina governor, boosted by Chris Christie’s exit, has hopes of seizing second in Iowa caucuses from Ron DeSantis

The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley emerged from the last televised debate before the Iowa caucuses clearly Donald Trump’s strongest challenger for the Republican presidential nomination, boosted by the withdrawal of Chris Christie, the only explicitly anti-Trump candidate to register significantly with voters.

Voting begins in Iowa on Monday, before New Hampshire stages its primary a week on Tuesday. Haley has closed on Trump in New Hampshire and has hopes of seizing second place in Iowa at the expense of the rightwing Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.

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Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley go head to head in Republican presidential debate – live

With less than a week to go before the first-in-the-country Iowa caucuses two challengers to Donald Trump make their case

Trump has decided the identity of his running mate in the presidential election but is not yet ready to announce it, he told a Fox News town hall in Iowa on Wednesday.

Asked who he would pick as vice-president, Trump replied: “Well, I can’t tell you that, really. I mean, I know who it’s going to be but –”
Co-host Bret Baier entreated: “Give us a hint.”

Trump joked in response: “We’ll do another show some time.”

Donald Trump began his Iowa town hall on Fox News by highlighting an incident in which Chris Christie was caught on a hot mic. “She’s going to get smoked, and you and I both know it,” the former New Jersey governor was heard saying on his campaign’s live stream. “She’s not up to this.”

It is widely assumed that Christie, who dropped out of the Republican primary race today, was referring to Nikki Haley, perceived as Trump’s principal rival in New Hampshire.

Trump said: “Chris Christie was in and he got a hot mic I heard about. I thought the bigger story wasn’t actually the fact that he dropped out – nobody cared too much about that – but he had a hot mic where he was talking to somebody about the weather and he happened to say she doesn’t have what it takes, she’ll be creamed in the election.”

The former president added: “I know her very well and I happen to believe that Chris Christie’s right. That’s one of the few things he’s been right about actually.”

Trump admitted he didn’t known whether Christie’s departure would change the dynamic of the race and complained that independents and Democrats can vote in the Republican primary. “Even with that, I think we’ll win substantially,” he added.

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DeSantis political woes deepen after chief strategist for Super Pac resigns

Jeff Roe, who led Never Back Down, said he was stepping down from the $269m fund, just weeks before Iowa caucus

Florida governor Ron DeSantis political woes have deepened further in the wake of the surprise resignation of a chief strategist at a leading campaign fund dealing yet another blow to the right-winger’s rapidly waning 2024 presidential hopes.

Jeff Roe, the chief strategist for the DeSantis-backing Super Pac Never Back Down, said he was stepping down from the massive, $269m fund that was billed as a novel application of campaign finance laws that prevent the integration of a Pac and its spending with a candidate’s campaign.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

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Casey DeSantis encourages Republicans nationwide to vote in Iowa caucus

On Fox News, wife of Ron DeSantis mistakenly invites ‘moms and grandmoms’ to cross state lines and illegally vote in caucus

Casey DeSantis, the wife of Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, has upset party officials in Iowa by urging her husband’s supporters from around the US to “descend” on the state and illegally take part in next month’s caucuses.

The former television news reporter, who has become the Florida governor’s chief supporter on the campaign trail, made the faux-pas during an appearance with him on Fox News on Friday, in which she wrongly stated it was legal for out-of-state residents to participate.

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Florida congressional map need not be redrawn, says court in reversal

September decision finding Republicans discriminated against Black voters with reconfigured districts overruled on appeal

A Florida appellate court ruled on Friday that lawmakers do not have to redraw the state’s congressional map, reversing a September decision that found Republicans discriminated against Black voters when it reconfigured districts in the northern part of the state.

The ruling from the first district court of appeal is the latest development in a long-running legal battle over Black representation in the state. In 2015, the state supreme court imposed a district that stretched from Jacksonville to west of Tallahassee in order to give Black voters there a chance to elect the candidate of their choosing. From 2015 until 2022, voters in the fifth congressional district elected Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, to represent them. But in 2022, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, went out of his way to dismantle it, chopping it up into four majority-white districts that all elected Republican candidates.

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Florida’s revival of death penalty fuels rise in US executions in 2023

Governor Ron DeSantis scheduled six of the country’s 25 executions this year amid his presidential election bid

The US saw a rise in executions in 2023 as a result of Florida’s revival of the death penalty, amid Ron DeSantis’s “tough on crime” campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

DeSantis scheduled six executions this year – the first time the state has judicially killed people since 2019 and the largest number in almost a decade. Florida also handed down five new death sentences this year, more than any other state.

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DeSantis v Newsom debate: governors clash on housing, taxes, immigration and more – as it happened

Republican and Democrat to take to the stage in Alpharetta, Georgia, for debate moderated by Sean Hannity

Newsom has called out DeSantis’ lagging poll numbers.

“You’re trying to find migrants to play political games to get some news attention so you can out-Trump Trump, and by the way, how’s that going for you, Ron? You’re down 41 points in your own home state.”

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DeSantis v Newsom debate: governors clash on crime, abortion, guns and more

‘Slugfest’ moderated by Sean Hannity saw the Democrat and Republican speaking over each other in heated ‘shadow campaign’

Ron DeSantis, a hard-right contender for the Republican presidential nomination, took the stage in Georgia on Thursday for a debate one eager website dubbed “The Vendetta in Alpharetta.”

But the Florida governor’s opponent was not Donald Trump, the former president and clear primary frontrunner, or any other Republican contender. His opponent was Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California,who is not seeking his party’s nomination next year, given Joe Biden’s grip on the White House.

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Florida state official lay collapsed for 24 minutes outside Ron DeSantis’s office

Peter Antonacci, the chief elections fraud official, died after a heated meeting in the governor’s office and slumped in the hallway

Ron DeSantis’s chief elections fraud official collapsed after abruptly leaving a “contentious” meeting in the Florida governor’s office, then lay dead or dying for almost half an hour in the hallway outside until he was found, an investigation published Monday has revealed.

Previously unreported details of the September 2022 death of Peter Antonacci in the Tallahassee capitol building appeared on the website of the Florida Bulldog, an independent online watchdog of the state’s politics and government.

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Pro-Palestinian student group sues DeSantis over ‘deactivation’

Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine say order by Republican governor violates their free speech rights

A pro-Palestinian student group in Florida is suing the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and the university system for trying to “deactivate” it in a manner that violates the students’ free speech rights.

The University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (UF SJP) filed the suit on Thursday in a federal court in Gainesville. It calls on the court to block what amounts to one of the first attempts in the US to silence a pro-Palestinian student group amid the roiling fallout of the Israel-Hamas war on American campuses.

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Support for Israel and verbal sparring propel fiery third Republican debate

Candidates clash over Ukraine and immigration and grapple with abortion questions as Donald Trump holds rally nearby

The Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and other foreign policy issues dominated Wednesday’s fiery third debate of Republican presidential hopefuls in Miami. Candidates pledged wholehearted support for Israel’s military response following last month’s Hamas attacks, and clashed over Ukraine, China and immigration.

The debate, minus Donald Trump, the runaway favorite for the party’s 2024 nomination who was hosting his own private rally elsewhere in the area, was a more bitter affair than its predecessors in Wisconsin and California. Lively verbal sparring sometimes regressed into insults, with Nikki Haley at one point calling one of her rivals “scum”.

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Calls to ‘finish’ Hamas and ‘you’re just scum’: key Republican debate takeaways

Candidates showed unequivocal support for Israel on a night when Nikki Haley shot back at Vivek Ramaswamy’s criticism

The third Republican debate was held in Miami on Wednesday, with frontrunner Donald Trump once again foregoing the debate for his own rally nearby.

The pool has dwindled since the last debate, and Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott and Chris Christie seemed to be more serious and focused this time around as they answered questions on the Israel-Hamas war, immigration, abortion and the federal budget. Even so, the debate had moments where it devolved into a shouting match, with petty barbs and personal attacks.

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Beleaguered DeSantis falls further behind Trump in Florida, poll shows

University of North Florida study shows governor trailing Trump by 39 points, 60% to 21%, among Republican voters in his state

A new poll shows Florida’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis, falling even further behind Donald Trump in his own state, one day before the embattled candidate for the Republican presidential nomination takes the debate stage in Miami.

The study by the University of North Florida (UNF) published on Tuesday shows DeSantis trailing Trump by 39 points (60-21) among Republican Florida voters, with the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley a distant third on 6%.

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Blow to Ron DeSantis as more key Florida backers switch to Trump

Bad news for Florida governor’s campaign, with favorability falling throughout 2023 and a GOP debate scheduled for Wednesday

Five Republican legislators in Florida have switched their endorsements from rightwing governor Ron DeSantis to former US president Donald Trump before a key party nomination debate in Miami next week.

The move is another boost to Trump – who remains dominant in the 2024 Republican race – and a blow to DeSantis, whose once highly anticipated bid for the White House has recently floundered badly. All recent polling has shown Trump with a strong lead over his rivals and DeSantis being edged out of second place by the former US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.

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Mike Pence’s exit from White House bid is winnowing of crowded field, rivals say

Departure could help Republican candidates but DeSantis and Haley, as well as Ramaswamy and Christie, still hugely trail Trump

Mike Pence’s surprise withdrawal from the Republican presidential nomination race on Saturday is part of natural winnowing of the crowded field, rivals of the former vice-president said Sunday – and one that could help their quest of candidates to wrestle the nomination from overwhelming frontrunner Donald Trump.

“In the end, the race is narrowing, which everyone said it would,” said former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics and one of four who have qualified for a third TV debate next month in Miami that may not have included Pence, who, he told CNN’s State of the Union, had run “a tough race, a good race”.

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Florida governor Ron DeSantis rejects idea of Palestinian refugees in US

At event in Iowa, governor conflates Palestinian civilians with Hamas, the terrorist group that attacked Israel a week ago

Republican presidential candidate and Florida governor Ron DeSantis has rejected accepting Palestinian refugees from Gaza to the US, speaking at a campaign rally in the US midwest on Saturday.

“We cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees,” he said. “If you look how they behave … not all of them are Hamas but they are all antisemitic, none of them believe in Israel’s right to exist.”

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AOC accuses Republicans of fabricating Biden impeachment evidence – live

Ocasio-Cortez also noted the witnesses were under oath, while the lawmakers on the panel could say what they want – including lies

The House oversight committee is about to hold its first hearing in the impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden, the latest step in a months-long effort investigating the president and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings that has yet to produce substantial evidence of wrongdoing.

Today’s hearing, titled The Basis for an Impeachment Inquiry of President Joseph R Biden Jr, comes two weeks after House speaker Kevin McCarthy launched the inquiry in response to demands from hard-right members of the House Republican conference.

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