01/16/2024

Trump’s Smallest Iowa Wins Were in Cities

He scored his biggest gains in evangelical areas

Republican front-runner Donald Trump added Iowa's most religious regions to his strongholds in Monday's caucuses. He combined religious areas with the state's lower-income and less educated counties to pull a majority of all caucus voters, more than double what he earned eight years ago.

Trump dominated the caucuses in the style of other Republican winners of the past 20 years, a pattern that works in Iowa but did not propel them to win the nomination. Meanwhile, Trump's weakest performance was in the parts of Iowa that more closely resemble the rest of the country, with fewer White evangelical Christians, fewer farmers and more people living in cities with higher education and more income.

Trump pulled the evangelical Christian voters who pushed Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to victory in the Iowa caucuses in 2008, Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania in 2012 and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in 2016. None of them won the nomination.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.