Voters look past legal problems to give Trump a big victory in Iowa caucuses

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : "I really think this is time now for everybody, our country, to come together," Trump said in his victory speech, before veering into divisive promises, such as raising deportation levels higher than they have been in decades.
61% : "DeSantis had previously predicted victory in the state, but Monday he sold his second-place finish as a success, saying he had overcome "everything but the kitchen sink," including news organizations declaring Trump the victor before the caucuses had been completed.
52% : Trump is the first former president in the modern era who has sought to return to the White House.
51% : He dropped out of the race Monday and endorsed Trump.
49% : Should Trump ultimately prevail as the nominee, it would set up a historic potential rematch in November with President Joe Biden that could play out on both the campaign trail and in the courtroom.
48% : Trump has spent the past three years methodically consolidating power to ready his own restoration.
48% : "They even called the election before people got the chance to vote," DeSantis said, later adding, "We've got our ticket punched out of Iowa."Now, the Republican calendar will turn to New Hampshire, where polling shows Trump is expected to face a strong challenge from Haley in a state where independent voters can also cast ballots.
48% : Trump's campaign and his allied super PAC have already been blanketing that state with anti-Haley advertising, a sign of its competitiveness before the Jan. 23 primary.
47% : Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses in a landslide Monday, a crucial first step in his bid to claim the Republican nomination in a third consecutive election as voters looked past his mounting legal jeopardy and embraced his vision of vengeful disruption.
44% : Another former Republican rival, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, endorsed Trump on Sunday.
42% : Still, Trump, remembering bitterly how his lack of political organization had damaged him in the 2016 caucuses, invested early and heavily in the state, building out a robust staff and recruiting more than 1,800 people as "caucus captains" for the more than 1,600 precincts in the state.
41% : Trump did little of that, visiting only a fraction of the state's counties and appearing at only a single in-person rally in the final week of the campaign, citing icy conditions for some cancellations.
40% : After something of a truce for most of the campaign, Trump and his advisers laced into Ramaswamy in the two days before the caucuses, with the former president's team seeing him as siphoning off potential votes.
38% : If Trump does become the nominee, the 2024 campaign will have few modern parallels.
36% : And soon, the Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the basic question of whether states can ban Trump from the ballot outright over his role in the Jan. 6 riot.
34% : A special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, Jack Smith, has indicted Trump over his role in that postelection period, accusing him of trying to subvert the will of the people.
34% : The election subversion case is only one of four indictments that Trump faced in 2023, along with charges that cover his handling of classified documents, his hush-money payments to an adult film actress during his 2016 campaign and his attempts to reverse the 2020 election results in Georgia.
32% : Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who has heavily funded his own run and who has spoken mostly positively about Trump while traveling exhaustively across Iowa, was in a distant fourth, with close to 8% of the vote.
31% : With DeSantis finishing ahead of Haley in Iowa, and her leading him in New Hampshire, the possibility of a two-person race remains elusive for foes of Trump, who fear a split field will ease his path to the nomination.
31% : Even with Trump far ahead, Haley's allied super PAC spent more than $22 million on attacks against DeSantis just in Iowa, hoping to squash his candidacy in the very first state (the group had spent nothing opposing Trump in Iowa, according to federal records).
29% : "DeSantis had entered 2023 as the party's clear alternative to Trump.
26% : With Trump far ahead in most polls, much of the focus heading into the caucuses had been on the race for second, as DeSantis and Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, spent as much time and money attacking each other as they did the front-runner.
24% : Long before the caucuses, Biden had begun to center his reelection bid on casting Trump as an existential threat to American democracy, citing his predecessor's refusal to accept the results of the past election and his impeding of the peaceful transfer of power in 2020.
22% : Supporters of Trump were animated by his dark portrait of a nation in decline and his apocalyptic rhetoric about wresting a country controlled by the left back from the brink.

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