The 2024 election kicks off when the first votes of the presidential campaign are cast Monday night in Iowa, where Republicans are jockeying for support in that state’s caucuses.

Will former President Donald Trump score the victory that eluded him in his first White House run? Could rivals Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley pull off an upset or at least keep it from being a Trump runaway? 

MPR News host Brian Bakst gets the lay of the Iowa land from MPR News senior politics reporter Clay Masters, who has been reporting extensively on the first-in-the-nation caucuses.

With early voting starting here in just days, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon joins the program to talk about preparations for Minnesota’s primary.  

And two campaign professionals with deep experience in presidential politics will offer their assessments about how 2024 is shaping up.

Guests:  

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• Clay Masters is a politics reporter for MPR News.

  
  

• Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon.  

  
  

• Jennifer DeJournett is a Republican political operative and president of Ballot Box Strategies. She has worked on past Iowa caucus campaigns and ran Carly Fiorina’s Minnesota campaign in 2016.

  
  

• Corey Day is a Democratic consultant who ran Joe Biden’s 2020 Minnesota primary campaign and the former executive director for the DFL Party. Corey is the vice president of the LS2 Group, a political consultancy.

  
  
  

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Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.