From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lerer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Tuesday, January 16th.

What a night on television for tuning in to see who won.

You could choose the Emmy Awards on Fox, the NFL playoff game on ABC,

or the Iowa caucuses on all the news channels. But ho-hum, there was little suspense in any of them,

as it turned out, right? If you bet on the favorites, Succession and the Bear, Donald Trump, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers,

you knew you were coming out ahead by pretty early in the evening. In fact, if we learned anything

from the Iowa caucuses, maybe we learned that contrary to what we like to snarkily think,

opinion polls and weather forecasts are both usually right.

Like the polls predicted, Donald Trump won by 30 points. Like the weather service predicted,

temperatures and wind chills were dangerously below zero. So turnout was lower than in 2016,

but it was still about the same as in 2008 and 2012, which were also years

with serious competition in the Republican presidential field. That was interesting. The basic

numbers were that Trump got about 51% of the vote to 21% for DeSantis and 19% for Nikki Haley.

Vivek Ramoswamy was in single digits, and one of the headlines from Iowa,

don't know if you've seen this, is that Ramoswamy has now suspended his campaign.

But despite Trump's record margin of victory for an Iowa caucus night,

the Washington Post reminds us that 51% still means nearly half the

Republican caucus goers chose not to vote for Trump despite his presumed dominance in the party.

So what does that portend for the general election?

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