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Donald trump loves to crow about his big crowds and smashing victories, even when he has to stretch the truth. His record-breaking performance in the Iowa Republican caucuses required no exaggeration. He enjoyed the largest margin of victory for any contested Republican caucus in the state’s history. Among Republicans he may be better understood as an incumbent president seeking re-election than as the insurgent outsider he performs at rallies. But Mr Trump’s dominance of the party faithful is no guarantee of success in November. What can the results of the earliest caucus reveal about his prospects for a general election still ten months away?
Those who endeavour to draw sweeping conclusions from quirky, low-turnout contests like the Iowa caucuses do so at their peril. Iowa (with its whiter-than-average population) and caucuses (which draw more engaged and older voters) tend not to reflect the American electorate. This year, only some 15% of registered Republicans in Iowa showed up to vote. Despite these caveats, the very first contest on the long road to election day can offer a glimpse into Mr Trump’s 2024 coalition. While the former president showed strength across all demographic segments, the results suggest he remains comparatively weaker among the college-educated and suburban voters who probably cost him the election in 2020.
In 2016 Mr Trump came in second in the Iowa caucuses, winning 37 of 99 counties. This year he won 98, losing only Johnson County, which is home to the University of Iowa, by one vote. Entrance polls, which survey voters before they enter their caucus site, indicate why. According to one such poll, AP VoteCast, 31% of college graduates said they would vote for Mr Trump, just barely edging out Ms Haley and Mr DeSantis, who polled at 30% each. Mr Trump’s divided primary opposition masked his weakness with this segment.
Entrance polls, like their better-known sibling the exit poll, are notoriously noisy and unreliable as samples of wider populations. But The Economist’s county-level analysis of Mr Trump’s vote share shows a similar pattern. Across the ten most educated counties in Iowa Mr Trump won 42% of the vote, compared with 66% across the ten least educated ones. And this analysis also points to a weakness among suburban voters. Mr Trump received an estimated 43% of the suburban vote in contrast to 60% of the rural vote.
Image: The Economist
Mr Trump lost in 2020 in part because of gains Democrats made among college-educated and suburban voters. According to data from Catalist, a political-data firm that helps Democrats, whereas college-educated white voters were split between Hillary Clinton and Mr Trump in 2016, in 2020 he lost those voters by nine points. His share of suburban white voters fell similarly. The Iowa caucuses suggest he may still have a problem with these groups. On January 15th Mr Trump failed to crack 40% of the vote in only four counties: Dallas, Johnson, Polk and Story, counties that are disproportionately educated and suburban (see map).
Mr Trump may overcome this vulnerability by attracting yet more non-college voters away from the Democrats. The political logic of his nativist populism is to do just that. And it seems likely that many voters like the suburban Iowans who caucused for Ms Haley or Mr DeSantis will make their way to Mr Trump’s camp come November. But despite broad support overall among Republicans, his narrower margins among some key parts of the electorate could also presage struggles in the general election. Mr Trump may be building a winning coalition for November, but its makeup is not stable. ■
BERLIN, GERMANY – FEBRUARY 24: Robert Habeck, chancellor candidate of the German Greens Party, speaks to the media the day after German parliamentary elections on February 24, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. The Greens came in fourth place with 11.6% of the vote, down 2.9% from the previous election. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump will “buckle under pressure” and alter his tariff policies if Europe bands together, acting German economy minister Robert Habeck said Thursday.
“That is what I see, that Donald Trump will buckle under pressure, that he corrects his announcements under pressure, but the logical consequence is that he then also needs to feel the pressure,” he said during a press conference, according to a CNBC translation.
“And this pressure now needs to be unfolded, from Germany, from Europe in the alliance with other countries, and then we will see who is the stronger one in this arm wrestle,” Habeck said.
Elsewhere, outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he believed the latest tariff decisions by Trump were “fundamentally wrong,” according to a CNBC translation.
The measures are an attack on the global trade order and will result in suffering for the global economy, Scholz said.
On Wednesday, Trump imposed 20% levies on the European Union, including on the bloc’s foremost economy Germany, as he signed a sweeping and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy.
Germany is widely regarded as one of the countries likely to be most impacted by Trump’s tariffs, given its heavy economic reliance on trade.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
THESE DAYS are dire and dour for Democrats. But April 1st brought a brief reprieve—and not because of jokes. That was the day that the most expensive judicial election in American history in the battleground state of Wisconsin ended in a decisive triumph for the left-leaning candidate. It had drawn $100m of spending, including an estimated $25m from Elon Musk who also, perhaps unhelpfully, personally campaigned in the state. The same day, two special elections in Florida for vacant congressional seats took place in safe Republican districts. Although they did not win, Democrats improved their margins by 17 and 20 percentage points compared with the general elections held just five months ago. Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, staged a one-man protest on the floor of the Senate, excoriating President Donald Trump’s administration for 25 hours straight—a stunt, to be sure, but one that demonstrated proof of life in a party that supporters worried had gone limp.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a “Make America Wealthy Again” trade announcement event in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Markets have turned their sights on how U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration arrived at the figures behind the sweeping tariffs on U.S. imports declared Wednesday, which sent global financial markets tumbling and sparked concerns worldwide.
Trump and the White House shared a series of charts on social media detailing the tariff rates they say other countries impose on the U.S. Those purported rates include the countries’ “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers.”
An adjacent column shows the new U.S. tariff rates on each country, as well as the European Union.
Chart of reciprocal tariffs.
Courtesy: Donald Trump via Truth Social
Those rates are, in most cases, roughly half of what the Trump administration claims each country has “charged” the U.S. CNBC could not independently verify the U.S. administration’s data on these duties.
It didn’t take long for market observers to try and reverse engineer the formula — toconfusing results.Many, including journalist and author James Surowiecki, said the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries.
Such methodology doesn’t necessarily align with the conventional approach to calculate tariffs and would imply the U.S. would have only looked at the trade deficit in goods and ignored trade in services.
“The formula is about trade imbalances with the U.S. rather than reciprocal tariffs in the sense of tariff level or non-tariff level distortions. This makes it very difficult for Asian, particularly the poorer Asian countries, to meet US demand to reduce tariffs in the short-term as the benchmark is buying more American goods than they export to the U.S., ” according to Trinh Nguyen, senior economist of emerging Asia at Natixis.
“Given that U.S. goods are much more expensive, and the purchasing power is lower for countries targeted with the highest levels of tariffs, such option is not optimal. Vietnam, for example, stands out in having the 4th largest trade surplus with the U.S., and has already lowered tariffs versus the U.S. ahead of tariff announcement without any reprieve,” Nguyen said.
The U.S. also appeared to have applied a 10% levy for regions where it is running a trade surplus.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative laid out its approach on its website, which appeared somewhat similar to what cyber sleuths had already figured out, barring a few differences.
The U.S.T.R. also included estimates for the elasticity of imports to import prices—in other words, how sensitive demand for foreign goods is to prices—and the passthrough of higher tariffs into higher prices of imported goods.
“While individually computing the trade deficit effects of tens of thousands of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in each country is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero. If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the website reads.
This screenshot of the U.S.T.R. webpage shows the methodology and formula that was used in greater detail:
A screenshot from the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
Some analysts acknowledged that the U.S. government’s methodology could give it more wiggle room to reach an agreement.
“All I can say is that the opaqueness surrounding the tariff numbers may add some flexibility in making deals, but it could come at a cost to US credibility,” according to Rob Subbaraman, head of global macro research at Nomura.
— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this piece.