Recommended reading for the Iowa caucuses

I guess I better start using this thing, huh?

This week marks the first big election of 2024: the Florida HD-35 special election Iowa caucuses. 538 doesn’t have the resources we once did, but I’m really proud of all the coverage we’ve put out these last couple weeks in preparation for today: I’m biased, of course, but I think it’s essential reading for following these early primary contests. So before the results start coming in tonight (and yes, we’ll be live-blogging), might I recommend some pre-caucal literature?

• The caucuses are an expectations game—and Geoffrey Skelley has written a guide to what each candidate needs to do in order to meet those expectations.

• Be honest: Do you ever look past the horse race topline of an Iowa poll? Well, Monica Potts did, and she has a lot of good info on how Iowa Republicans feel about issues like immigration, abortion, and Trump’s legal extracurriculars.

• Original dataset alert! Mary Radcliffe and Cooper Burton logged every public campaign event they could find from the GOP candidates, including 676 in Iowa, and I wrote about them here.

• Katie Marriner and Aaron Bycoffe resurrected one of our most popular interactives from the 2016 cycle: a “smart” delegate tracker that tracks whether candidates are above or below the pace they need to be on to win the nomination. (It’ll update after tonight.) Elliott Morris wrote about why the tracker thinks Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis need to do especially well in the early states.

• Haley seems to be the candidate du moment, and if she wakes up tomorrow morning as Donald Trump’s main opposition, you’ll want to read this Leah Askarinam article on which voters are behind her rise in the polls.

• Finally, if anyone drops out tonight, I know I’ll be referring back to this article of mine from last week looking at who polls say is the preferred second-choice candidate of DeSantis supporters, Vivek Ramaswamy supporters, etc.