Mulvaney: Why a 2,335-vote margin in Iowa likely guaranteed Trump the nomination

Commentators, politicos and reporters who follow campaigns love numbers. Hence all the chatter in the wake of the Iowa caucuses about the roughly $120 million that was spent by all the candidates and their related PACs, and the roughly 110,000 people — record-low turnout — who braved the historic negative-30 degree windchill to participate.  

Those who have a calculator will opine as to whether the whole thing was worth almost $1,100 per caucus-goer. Given the chance, we will even remind everyone that Iowa has 99 counties, that Vivek Ramaswamy visited each one at least twice, and for all that received only about 43 voters per county. 

But this is my favorite number from the 2024 Iowa caucus: 2,335.   

That is the margin between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s second place, and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s third. Those 2,335 are probably former President Donald Trump’s favorite people in the entire country right now.   

That’s because they, as much as the 56,000 who actually voted for him, may well have guaranteed Trump the GOP nomination.  

Donald Trump was obviously the big winner of the Iowa caucuses. He won by the largest margin of victory (for a non-incumbent) in the caucuses’ history. He passed the critical 50 percent threshold, slamming the door on any murmuring that he might have some hidden weaknesses going into New Hampshire. In short, he did everything he needed to preserve his role as the prohibitive favorite. 

But DeSantis’s second-place finish virtually guarantees that the race for the nomination remains a three-way contest until at least Super Tuesday. And that is exactly what Trump wanted. 

If DeSantis had underperformed — indeed, if had finished third by even a handful of votes — he would likely have joined Vivek Ramaswamy in gracefully bowing out Tuesday night. That is certainly what the chattering class had laid out: He needed to finish second, or else he was finished entirely. And that was probably correct.

But he didn’t, thanks to those 2,335 people. So, as you read this, DeSantis is somewhere in South Carolina, trying to figure out how vulnerable Haley might be in her home state. He is skipping New Hampshire entirely, but that is pretty much the plan he had laid out when he decided to put all his eggs in the Iowa basket.

Trump and Haley, then, will slug it out in New Hampshire. And certainly, all eyes will be on the margin between the two candidates. But New Hampshire is a little different, and everyone knows it. Independents (or, more technically, anyone who isn’t registered with a particular party) can vote there. Many are expected to do so, largely in favor of Haley. That may well speak to her appeal to mainstream voters who abandoned Trump in 2020. But few commentators consider it indicative of, say, likely voting trends in the largely Republican-only contests that lie ahead in the critical month of March.

Although New Hampshire will essentially be a two-person race, South Carolina and the first Super Tuesday states will not. Trump will, as he did in Iowa, face a fractured opposition. And while he is polling well above 50 percent in most of those states, he won’t need to do even that well. 

Many of those later states — including monsters such as California — are winner-take-all. Even if Trump slips a little bit, no one right now thinks he is coming in second in a three-way race.

The outcome might have been different, but for those 2,335 people. If Haley had finished second, she would have cleared the field for the head-to-head challenge for which the anti-Trump wing of the party has been longing. She also might have had dramatically more momentum going into New Hampshire — momentum that she was counting on to close the gap with, and maybe even catch, her former boss.  

Trump might have skated to the nomination in any event. But certainly, his path got a lot easier Monday night.  

In her wrap-up speech in Des Moines, Haley opined that the result of the caucuses was that the campaign going forward would be, in essence, a two-person race. That is likely something that got written, in a hopeful sense, before the results came in.

Only 2,335 votes separated DeSantis from Haley. And there is no suggestion that Trump convinced that many people to caucus for the Florida governor. But if he had, it would have been genius. 

Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and acting White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.