So today is the day it is the Iowa caucuses. The primaries have finally at long last begun.

The Iowa caucuses today in, of course, Iowa. This Republican primary is going to decide, well,

not all that much unless Donald Trump falls on his face. The expectations for Donald Trump are,

of course, that he's going to win by an extraordinarily wide margin. By the polling data, he has the largest lead among any Republican nominee in modern American history. The latest polls that are out from Iowa show him, this is the one from the Des Moines Register, NBC News, and MediaCom, and shows Trump with 48% of the vote that is followed now by Nikki Haley at 20%, Governor Ron Deantis at 16% Vivek Ramaswamy at 8%.

That means that Donald Trump has a 28 percentage point lead in that particular primary going in,

which means that the expectations are that he's going to blow away the rest of the field.

The real question is, one, does he?

And two, by how much?

That's the real question going in. Now, the reason I say that it doesn't really decide all that much the Iowa question is, one, does he? And two, by how much? That's the real question going in.

Now, the reason I say that it doesn't really decide all that much the Iowa caucuses, unless Trump falls on his face, is because we've had a bunch of candidates win the Iowa caucuses and then go on to fail in the rest of the primaries. George W. Bush won the Iowa caucuses in 2000. He ended up winning, of course. But Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses in 2008.

Rick Santorum,

won the Iowa caucuses in 2012.

Ted Cruz, won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Rick Santorum

won the Iowa caucuses in 2012. Ted Cruz when the Iowa caucuses in 2016, literally none of them

became the nominee. So the Iowa caucuses are not highly predictive of who will be the nominee,

but this is a bit of a different race only in the sense that because Donald Trump is such

an overwhelming favorite, the question is going to be whether the God bleeds. Donald Trump is so far ahead of the rest of the field in every single primary at this point that if he shows weakness in this early primary, it could be a problem for him. Now, in order for him to show weakness in the early primary, one of two things has to happen. Either Ron DeSantis has to wildly outperform

or Nikki Haley has to wildly outperform. One of those two things has to happen. New Hampshire, of

course, is much closer. And everybody is already pointing forward toward the future primaries. Those

are going to be New Hampshire and South Carolina. In New Hampshire right now, the latest polling data

from W.H.D.H. Emerson has Donald Trump up 4428 over Nikki Haley. Chris Christie just dropped out. So presumably a lot of that support is going to go to Nikki Haley. Ronisantis is running in single digits in New Hampshire. So Nikki Haley is the only person who actually has a shot at Donald Trump in New Hampshire. And then you move forward to South Carolina. And there really is not a lot of good polling in South Carolina at this point.

Nikki Haley, of course, is the former governor of South Carolina.

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