After a fourth-place finish in the Iowa Caucus, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy dropped from the race on Monday night. The entrepreneur-turned-politician had pulled in just 7.7% of the 110,298 Republicans participating in the nominating exercise, the first in the nation for the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump currently has over 51% of the vote (over 56,000 caucus votes), followed by Ron DeSantis, 21%, and Nikki Haley, 19%.
Trump gets awarded 20 delegates for the Republican National Convention in August, when the party’s delegates vote on the party’s nominee. DeSantis gets 9, and Haley gets 8.
Ramaswamy immediately endorsed Trump after declaring that there was “no path for me to be the next president.” That means his three delegates will go to Trump, giving Trump 23 delegates from Iowa.
Ramaswamy, who largely self-funded his campaign that he first announced on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News channel show nearly one year ago, said he will continue his political activism promised he was “not going anywhere.”
The next state to hold a nominating process is New Hampshire on Jan. 23. That state holds a state-run primary, and is the first in the nation to have a primary. With Trump’s 30-point lead out of Iowa, he holds a significant lead in polling nationwide, in spite of the 91 felony counts being waged against him by the Department of Justice and the attorney general of New York.
