While news outlets typically refrain from announcing a projection until after polls have closed, Iowa’s caucuses are not typical. Voters must be present by 7 p.m., when the caucus doors close, and The A.P. considers this moment the equivalent of a poll closing. In 2020, The A.P. projected Mr. Trump as the winner after 25 minutes.
That year, Mr. Trump was an incumbent president running virtually unopposed. He faced more competition at Monday’s caucus, and the second-place finisher — either Mr. DeSantis or Nikki Haley — was a source of suspense for several hours on Monday night. Some voters and campaign aides believed the early call for Mr. Trump could affect voters’ decisions at caucuses that had barely begun.
“The early call rubs a lot of voters the wrong way,” said Mosheh Oinounou, the founder of Mo News and a former executive producer at CBS. “These results were widely expected. At the same time, we have been talking about things like election interference, our democracy and the media trying to earn the trust of people again.”
“Just because you can call it that early,” he added, “should you?”
For its part, The A.P. said that it had analyzed early results from eight Iowa counties that were received within the first half-hour after caucusing began, which showed that Mr. Trump had received “far more than half of the total votes counted.” That data gelled with The A.P.’s proprietary voter survey, which the outlet said “showed Trump with an insurmountable lead” among men and women, and across every age group and geographic region of Iowa. (The New York Times relied upon The A.P.’s race call in reporting its own results.)
CNN actually beat The A.P. by one minute in projecting Mr. Trump as the night’s winner. The network’s projection relied in part on a so-called entrance poll conducted by Edison Research on behalf of several major television networks. On air, Jake Tapper told viewers that Mr. Trump’s expected victory was “based on his overwhelming lead in our entrance poll of Iowa caucusgoers and some initial votes that are coming in.”