The smartphones started to buzz at 7:30 p.m. Central time on Monday, just half an hour after the Iowa caucuses had begun. Many Iowans had not yet had a chance to cast a vote when The Associated Press and the major TV networks began to declare former President Donald J. Trump as the winner.
The outcome was expected — but the timing was not. The early call confused some Iowans, infuriated Mr. Trump’s rivals and prompted a fresh round of hand-wringing about the news media’s role in calling elections.
“Are you kidding me?” Representative Chip Roy, a key ally of Ron DeSantis, told reporters in West Des Moines. “They haven’t even started voting yet and heard all the speeches and A.P. calls it?” Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, called the early projection “a self-defeating move at a time of massive distrust.”
In fact, The A.P. — in addition to the major TV networks — followed a longstanding policy on when to project a winner.
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.”
One CNN executive said that the network had collected enough data to announce a race call at 7 p.m. Central, the official caucus start time, but that the network had chosen to hold off until it believed all voters were required to be inside their caucus sites.
ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC projected Mr. Trump as the winner shortly after 7:30 p.m. Central.
Later on Monday, anchors on Fox News said they did not view the early call for Mr. Trump as a problem.
“When the doors closed for the caucuses, that is the official time to be able to characterize the race,” Bret Baier told viewers. “There’s a lot of controversy around it because people were inside and obviously had their phones, but that is how the rules go for Iowa.”
His colleague Brit Hume added: “We are talking here about people who come out on a cold night together at a caucus site, the doors are closed, and nobody can get in, so the opportunity to vote remains. It’s hard to believe very many people would say, ‘Oh, my goodness, the race has been called, I’m going home.’ I don’t think so.”
Nicholas Nehamas and Benjamin Mullin contributed reporting.
