With fewer than 750 votes in -- less than one percent of the total -- the news organizations have already called the Republican Iowa caucuses for Donald Trump. As I write this, Ron DeSantis is up over Nikki Haley by a count of 161 to 159, so obviously there is still going to be a close race for second place. Neither one of them is topping 16 percent as of now, while Trump sits above 60 percent. All of these numbers could swing as the evening continues, but the fact that Trump is going to walk away the winner is already set.

The entire Republican primary season has the same feeling of inevitability that we're experiencing right now in Iowa. Perhaps Haley or DeSantis might score some sort of upset in one of the next few states, but even if they do, they're likely to see their hopes buried by Super Tuesday. By early March, the news organizations may have called the entire nomination contest for Trump.

This is a very strange race, historically, since it is incredibly rare in American politics that a major-party candidate gets a second chance after losing a presidential race. Most candidates who lose sink into obscurity, or at the very least slink back to the Senate or a governor's office to finish out their terms. Even if they have the temerity to run again, the party normally rejects betting on a proven loser the next time around.

It is also strange because Trump is essentially running as an incumbent. Only one U.S. president -- Grover Cleveland -- ever managed to win a nonconsecutive second term. The last one to mount a serious try to do so was Teddy Roosevelt, over 100 years ago. It's just not that common. But this is the real reason why Trump is going to score a historic win in Iowa tonight (with a margin of victory far greater than the current record of 12 points). He's not running in a truly open race; he's running as an incumbent against minor challengers. And just as Joe Biden is not going to have any problem defeating Dean Phillips, Trump is going to easily beat the likes of Haley and DeSantis. So when the pundits all report the historic margin of victory in Iowa tonight, it really shouldn't be measured against other open contests, it should be measured against the margin of victory that sitting Republican presidents have chalked up in Iowa when they ran for re-election.

The whole campaign that all the GOP hopefuls (not named Trump) ran was to pin their hopes on some game-changing event suddenly taking Trump out of the running. But since (so far) a stray meteor or serious medical problem hasn't struck Trump down, they never really had much of a chance. Most of the GOP candidates didn't even bother trying to run against Trump (instead they ran against each other for second place), because they knew that their only real shot was some deus ex machina taking Trump out. Which, so far, has obviously not happened yet.

Perhaps they had hoped that Trump's legal woes would hurt him politically. But Trump has long portrayed himself as the biggest victim of all time, and all of his setbacks in the courtrooms have just fed into this persona. The voters have not abandoned Trump after his various indictments and rulings against him -- instead they have moved towards Trump. At this point, even being convicted of serious federal charges isn't going to move that needle much -- at least in the primary races.

We probably won't even see this happen, because by the time any jury gets around to convicting Trump he is quite likely to have already sewn up the GOP nomination anyway. Being a convicted felon may hurt Trump's chances in the general election against Biden, but even if such convictions had already happened it likely wouldn't have even dented his support among the GOP faithful in the primaries.

So I will be watching the rest of the night to see how the results play out, and it will indeed be interesting to see whether Haley or DeSantis places second -- and what happens next (will DeSantis drop out if Haley bests him?). But none if it is likely to wind up mattering much in the end. Even if New Hampshire slows Trump down, he still is going to have the feeling of inevitability about him. Haley could pull an upset in New Hampshire and then go right on to lose her home state of South Carolina to Trump -- which would be rather embarrassing, you've got to admit.

Donald Trump was proclaimed the winner of the Iowa caucuses tonight with only a few hundred votes counted. And at this point, it feels like it wouldn't be too much of a stretch if the news organizations just called the entire primary season for Trump as well. Because barring some cataclysmic event or radical shift in the Republican electorate, Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president for the third time. It seems all but inevitable, at this point.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant