One week after the New Hampshire presidential primary, the playing field gets clearer but the race remains messy. The 2024 election year’s inaugural contest, the Iowa Caucus which occurred on January 15th, saw the withdrawal of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Once billed as Trump’s biggest inner-party threat, DeSantis endorsed Trump. Iowa also saw the withdrawal of billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy whose grandstanding far-right platform, in an apparent attempt at playing kingmaker, sought to divert votes from rivals DeSantis and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in effort to curry favor with Trump. 

Despite Trump’s ongoing lawsuits ranging from fraud in New York to election interference in Georgia, and Supreme Court contentions surrounding whether he will be allowed on the final ballot in several states such as Colorado and Maine over his alleged role in the January 6th Capitol riots, support remains strong. While Haley remains solely in the race, her trailing margin is shrinking as the New Hampshire primary results show. However, it is unclear if that gap is shrinking fast enough for her to pose any meaningful threat to a Trump re-nomination as February sees bipartisan contests in Nevada, Michigan, the US Virgin Islands, and Haley’s state of South Carolina. 

On the other side of the aisle, President Biden is still racing against author Marianne Williamson and Minnesota Representative Dean Philips, with former Democratic lawyer Robert F Kennedy Jr and left-leaning scholar Cornel West running as Independents who also pose a risk of further vote splitting against Biden.