The shock from Iowa’s Republican caucus for the party’s presidential nomination is that there was no shock. The polls had it right, not only that Donald Trump would win but that he would win because his supporters were much more amped up than those for Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis.

This small rural state, suffused with farmers and Christian evangelists and completely unrepresentative of America as a whole, has unholy power in framing the pursuit of the Holy Grail of the Republican presidential nomination. The Republican candidates spent $US123 million ($186 million) to get those 100,000 or so Iowa voters to caucus for them.

Donald Trump celebrates his Iowa success with supporters in Des Moines.Credit: AP

Trump romped in, with more than 50 per cent of the vote. Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, and DeSantis, the “Trump-without-the-baggage” governor of Florida who was going to save the Republican Party, each came in some 30 points behind the former president.

Haley is the bridge between the old Republican Party under Ronald Reagan and the new America First populist and nativist party that is Trump. Both Haley and DeSantis believe they got momentum out of Iowa, but it’s a chimera.

New Hampshire’s primary is next Tuesday. With its flinty, Yankee, contrarian patriotism (the motor vehicle licence plates proclaim, “Live Free or Die”), New Hampshire voters have a history of shocking the political establishments of both parties.

That has proved very costly to the frontrunners in their parties. In 1984, Colorado Democratic senator Gary Hart stunned vice president Walter Mondale in New Hampshire. In 2000, Republican senator John McCain did the same to George W. Bush.

Mondale and Bush went into freefall for several weeks. But in both parties, the empires struck back, and the favourites survived the scare.

In South Carolina, the tactics were vicious. Bush allies circulated rumours that McCain had an out-of-wedlock black child. McCain and his wife had adopted a black girl. But the damage was done; Bush crushed McCain in that state and went on to win the nomination.