2024 Election: Latest news on the Iowa caucuses

The incident occurred on Saturday after the Florida governor staged a town hall in Atlantic, Iowa. An unidentified man approached Mr DeSantis, holding a small award.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley repeatedly called Florida governor Ron DeSantis a liar while both candidates criticised front-runner Donald Trump in the final debate before the Iowa caucus on Wednesday evening.

Last night’s CNN debate in Des Moines came five days before Republicans across the Hawkeye State gather in public meeting spaces to make their decision about who they support to be the Republican nominee for president.

DeSantis, the once-promising governor who had hoped his hard-right policies on everything from abortion to restricting how gender and sexuality are taught in schools would bolster him in the heavily church-going Iowa, elected to regularly attack Haley.

Eric Garcia watched the action.

The Warwick Board of Canvassers said it had found “several deceased voters” named on Mr Ramaswamy’s nomination papers while the Coventry board in the same state said it had also been forced to invalidate “an unusually high number” of signatures submitted on behalf of the candidate’s campaign, according to Ben Smith, a spokesperson for the state’s Board of Elections.

“The Board of Elections asked for local boards of canvassers to be extra vigilant and to notify them if they see patterns of fraudulent signatures,” Mr Smith said.

“They were asking to take a closer look at all nomination papers, and in this case the nomination papers for Ramaswamy.”

Nikki Haley mocked Donald Trump’s presidential immunity legal defence as ‘ridiculous’ during the latest Republican debate in Iowa.

The 2024 hopeful was asked during a debate by CNN host Jake Tapper if she agreed with Trump that a president should have complete immunity, after he appeared at a federal appeals court earlier this week to make just that case.

Lawyers for Trump told a panel of judges that a president should have that immunity even if they ordered the assassination of a political rival unless they were impeached and convicted in the US Senate.

He completed the “Full Grassley,” named for Iowa’s long-serving Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, where he visited all 99 counties in the state. He made the hard sell at Iowa’s State Fair. He received the endorsement of Kim Reynolds, the state’s governor, and Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Iowa Family Leader and a kingmaker in the state whose support of Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz all played a role in their victories in the caucuses.

But is this going to be his last stand of the 2024 election cycle?

Eric Garcia and Gustaf Kilander report for The Independent:

The former president was originally set to hold campaign events on Saturday and Sunday in Atlantic, Sioux City, Indianola and Cherokee.

On Friday, his team announced that several live appearances would be replaced with tele-rallies, with only one in-person event still taking place in Indianola.

It comes as blizzard warnings remain in place for large parts of the state, according to the National Weather Service, with Iowans advised to avoid outdoor activity if possible.

The former UN ambassador branded 2024 Republican rival DeSantis “desperate” as the pair clashed in a fiery debate days before the Iowa caucuses.

The pair argued as they discussed potential cuts to social security, with the Florida governor accusing Haley of being in favour of sending American tax dollars over “to pay the pensions of Ukrainian bureaucrats.”

“That is not true. That is such a lie, Ron,” she said as DeSantis told her she was in favour of continuing to send money over to the at-war country.

“You’re so desperate. You’re just so desperate,” she told him as she shook her head in apparent disgust.

Haley accusing her rival of lying was a theme of the night as she repeatedly plugged her new DeSantisLies.com website.

Graeme Massie watched the debate.

He didn’t have to be there, and according to his attorneys, he didn’t want to be. Days earlier, Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to convince a judge to postpone closing arguments in his fraud trial altogether, until the end of the month, so he could be with his family after the death of his mother-in-law.

Instead, the former president turned a hallway inside New York State Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan into a press conference. As he has done several times over the last four months, he sat with his lawyers at the defence table, where he was photographed in images blasted across news networks and on social media. But for the first time, he used the microphone in front of him to lash out at the judge in front of him, the attorney general suing him, and the case itself.

Hours earlier, he was in Iowa, answering a round of softball questions from a supportive Fox News audience on a brightly lit stage that looked more like a game show than a town hall.

After he left Judge Arthur Engoron’s courtroom, Mr Trump went to one of his brand-building properties in New York City to give a press conference aired on the same network.

The chain of events underscored his reliance on his growing legal battles for his own campaign for the presidency, using his criminal and civil cases to cast himself as a victim of political persecution, while telling his supporters that what he claims is a conspiracy against him will come for them, too, unless he stops them.

The trials have become his campaign, packed with court appearances, and the campaign is his chance to bury the charges, if elected.

Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and two-time failed presidential candidate, announced he is dropping out of the 2024 race during a town hall in New Hampshire.

“It’s clear to me tonight, there isn’t a path for me to win the nomination which is why I’m suspending my campaign tonight for president of the United States,” Christie told potential voters on Wednesday just hours ahead of the next GOP debate.

He reportedly notified allies that he would remove himself from the Republican candidate pool, facing faltering polling numbers and pressure from Donald Trump critics to find a viable opponent to take on the former president.

“I would rather lose by telling the truth than lie in order to win,” Christie said.

All eyes will be on the race to secure the Republican nomination, with front-runner Donald Trump expected to cement his commanding lead over his rivals in the polls as the likes of Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy seek to make an impact and prove they have the support to mount a meaningful challenge.

For Democrats, the matter is much more straightforward: they will simply gather in gyms, schools, libraries and churches across the state’s 1,657 precincts (spread over 99 counties) to elect delegates to send to the county conventions in March, the next step to selecting the delegates that will attend the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.

Despite sub-zero temperatures and snow being forecast, the state Republican Party chair Jeff Kaufmann has insisted: “We have done everything humanly possible to ensure that this caucus comes off without a hitch.”

So when can we expect to find out the results?