In the end, bombastic bozo Donald Trump’s predictions of an Iowa victory were all a big, sad joke.
The outspoken mogul suffered a “yuge” loss in the Hawkeye State’s caucuses Monday night, finishing a distant second to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and nearly falling into third place.
Despite polls showing him in the lead ahead of the pivotal first-in-the-nation voting contest, Cruz led the whole way Monday, while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio closed the gap on the other end, nearly beating out Trump for second place.
After Cruz was declared the winner, a deflated Trump maintained that he was “really honored” with his silver-medal finish and, unfazed, pointed to the same bunk polls that suggested he would win in Iowa as reasons to predict a victory in the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary — the next big voting contest.
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“We love New Hampshire,” Trump said to a notably small crowd — one of the puniest he had drawn throughout the race. “We will go on to win New Hampshire, we will go on to win the nomination.”
“We will easily go on to beat Hillary or Bernie or whoever the hell they throw up there,” he added, before glumly insinuating his bid was doomed.
“Who knows, I think I might come back here and buy a farm,” he said.
Meanwhile, Cruz, who with more than 98% of Iowa precincts reporting got the support of 27.7% of caucus-goers, compared with 24.3% for Trump, said his win Monday was a “victory for courageous conservatives across Iowa” and the U.S.
“Iowa has sent notice tonight that the next GOP nominee, the next President of the United States, will not be chosen by the media, will not be chosen by the Washington establishment, will not be chosen by the lobbyists, but will be chosen by the most incredible, powerful force, where all sovereignty resides in our nation,” he said at his victory rally in Des Moines. “By we the people.”
Rubio, who finished a close third behind Trump with 23.1% support, effusively thanked his supporters in a triumphant speech that sounded more like a victory rally.
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“They told me I needed to wait my turn, that I needed to wait in line,” Rubio told an enthusiastic crowd at his Iowa headquarters.
“Tonight here in Iowa, the people in this great state sent a very clear message that after seven years of Barack Obama, we are not waiting any longer to take our country back,” he said.
No other candidate even surpassed 10% support in the state, with Ben Carson, the next closest competitor after the top trio, getting 9.3%.
Following his disappointing finish, the retired neurosurgeon’s campaign said he would fly back to Florida Monday night “to go home and get a fresh set of clothes” but that was not ending his bid.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, whose father performed strongly in the 2012 Iowa caucuses, placed fifth with 4.5%, while Jeb Bush placed sixth with 2.8%. Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie and Rick Santorum all finished with less than 2% support.
Before Iowa officials had even finished counting the votes, Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, tweeted that he was “officially” ending his longshot 2016 campaign.
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The biggest loss of the night, however, clearly belonged to Trump, who, for weeks, led virtually all polls in the early-voting state.
As recently as last month, Trump was beating Cruz by 11 percentage points in polls in Iowa, and, in the last poll before the caucuses, a Quinnipiac University survey, Trump remained the race’s front-runner with a 7-percentage point lead over the Texas senator.
Trump had also rolled out a long list of bizarre endorsements in recent weeks, to play up his support among anti-immigrant white voters, including backings from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and bigoted baseball whack job John Rocker.
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But in the end, none of it helped Trump’s fortune in Iowa.
Trump himself, even appeared to sense the outcome earlier in the day, uncharacteristically admitting, hours before caucus sites opened, that he was anxious heading into his first election day as a candidate.
“You have to be a little bit nervous, and you know I like to win,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “This is actually my first election night. I’ve gone through many election nights, but it was always for somebody else.”
“This is a little bit different for me,” he added, before nonetheless blindly predicting a win.
“We’re going to have a tremendous victory,” the bombastic billionaire said during a rally in Cedar Rapids, his last event in a flurry of furious last-minute stumping before Hawkeye State residents began its election year ritual.
Caucusing began across the state at 7:00 p.m. CST, with turnout reportedly so high in certain precincts that state officials didn’t have enough voter registration forms to accommodate the droves of caucus-goers taking advantage of same-day registration, which is legal in the state.
The high turnout across the state had been thought to be an encouraging sign for Trump, who had employed a risky strategy in Iowa that relied heavily on turning out thousands of first-time caucus-goers.
Dan Arthur, who owns an energy conservation business, said he was one of them.
“I believe he can fix a lot of the issues, like unemployment,” he said.
Throughout the week, however, Cruz remained undeterred by naysayers and quietly doubled down on his strategy to hit all 99 counties in the state, a trip he dubbed “the full Grassley,” after Iowa’s senior Republican senator.
The firebrand Texas modeled his campaign after past Iowa winners, with a strong on-the-ground operation that was able to turn out thousands of voters to the caucuses physically — even by driving them, if necessary.
And Cruz, unlike Trump, appeared to play down expectations for his performance in the caucuses, saying Monday morning he was simply happy to be in the running for a first-place finish.
“If you had told me a year ago that two days out from the Iowa caucuses we would be neck and neck, effectively tied for first place in the state of Iowa, I would have been thrilled,” said Cruz, who also ramped up his attacks on Rubio over the weekend as part of an effort to ensure that that the Florida senator didn’t inch into a second-place finish.
Rubio, who in recent weeks quietly received endorsements from the Des Moines Register, the largest newspaper in the state, and several sitting and former lawmakers, confidently dismissed the criticism from Cruz on Monday morning as “politics as usual.”
With Jennifer Fermino in Des Moines, Iowa, and News Wire Services