Editor’s Note: Reporting for this article was assisted by arts & culture editor Sarah Currier.

Former President Donald Trump will win the Iowa Republican Caucus with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley trailing by nearly 30% according to preliminary results on the Iowa GOP website.

Trump never trailed in the polls, and preliminary results show him earning 3% higher than the most recent Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll.

Preliminary results are as follows:

Donald Trump – 51%
Ron DeSantis – 21.2%
Nikki Haley – 19.1%
Vivek Ramaswamy – 7.7%
Ryan Binkley – 0.7%
Asa Hutchinson – 0.2%
All others – 0.1%

After his win, Trump thanked “the great people of Iowa” at his campaign headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa.

“We want to come together,” Trump said. “Whether it’s Republican or Democrat or liberal and conservative, it would be so nice if we could come together and straighten out the world and straighten out the problems and straighten out all of the death and destruction that we’re witnessing.”

Ames, Story County see different vote leaders

Haley, the former U.N. ambassador under Trump, performed 12.4% better among Ames’ 24 precincts when compared to the rest of Story County. Meanwhile, Trump received 41.4% of Story County’s remaining 20 precincts but received only 27.1% of the vote in Ames.

Trump finished fourth with just 16.3% of the vote at all four precincts located in the Memorial Union, where there was no Trump signage. In Ames’ first precinct there appeared to be no campaign selected caucus captain for the former president but former Iowa State Student Government Senator Armaan Gupta, a senior in management information systems, did speak for the Trump campaign.

Trump received 30% of the vote at Ames’ ninth precinct and his campaign precinct captain Sheryl Sowden said electing Trump is “the only way to save this country.”

“The harder they try to take him out, the stronger he gets,” Sowden. “He’s like a whack-a-mole. He pops up over here and they pound him down over here and he pops up over here.”

Kel Seliger, a former Texas state senator, served as precinct captain for the Haley campaign at Ames’ first precinct and said winning the precinct was “a good step.”

“Gov. Haley looks like she’s doing really, really well and by the time we get to Super Tuesday, I think we’re going to know a lot more and I think Gov. Haley is going to have some real momentum,” Seliger said.

Also at Ames’ ninth precinct, the DeSantis campaign’s precinct captain Dwight Johnson said he is really concerned about “the direction of our country.”

“We’ve got reasons not to turn out tonight because of weather,” Johnson said. “But I would say I think a lot of Iowans are going to turn out because they’re concerned about the direction of our country.”

Ramaswamy is the only candidate to suspend campaign

Just before the caucus began, the Ramaswamy campaign’s caucus captain Dan Runyon at Ames’ first precinct compared the entrepreneur to Trump in 2016 and said “nobody thought Trump would win in ‘16.”

“With Vivek, he’s a nationalist, so he wants to protect the borders,” Runyon said. “He will use the military to do it. He doesn’t want to get into another war.”

Ramaswamy suspended his campaign Monday night and subsequently endorsed Trump from his watch party in Des Moines.

“There is no path for me to be the next president, absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country and I think that I am very worried for our country,” Ramaswamy told attendees in Des Moines.

Ramaswamy was the only campaign to be suspended Monday despite finishing fourth.

Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, finished sixth place and has not yet chosen to suspend his campaign despite his manager telling the Daily Sunday that the former Arkansas governor expected to place fourth and “exceed expectations in that regard.”