Texas Senator Ted Cruz has won the Iowa Republican caucuses, the first vote of the US 2016 presidential election. “Tonight is a victory for courageous conservatives,” he declared, to great applause, as he railed against Washington, lobbyists and the media. He took 28% of the Republican vote, beating his rival, the once frontrunner Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, BBC reported. Votes in the Democratic race are still being counted and some US media have declared it a dead-heat. With 95% of results confirmed, Hillary Clinton clung to the narrowest of leads over Bernie Sanders and told supporters she was “breathing a sigh of relief”. The former secretary of state and first lady stopped short of declaring victory, and her rival, a 74-year-old senator from Vermont said it was a “virtual tie”. No such ambiguity from Republican victor Cruz, whose triumph was reward for the months he spent crisscrossing the state to woo its influential conservative and evangelical leaders.
