The day that hundreds of thousands of people around the country wait for had finally arrived when the presidential primaries in Iowa began, starting off the calendar for the rest of the primaries to follow.

“I’ve most certainly been following the presidential primaries, because I care about who ends up running our country,” vocal freshman Luke Tillitski said.

About a year or so before the actual election, presidential primaries take place. The purpose of these events are to narrow down who will receive both the democratic and republican nominations in the final race. Each and every state will have a caucus held before the general elections begin.

As of late, primaries and caucuses have been conducted in Iowa on Feb. 1, New Hampshire on Feb. 9, South Carolina on Feb. 20, and Nevada on both Feb. 20 and Feb. 23. In each respective event, there were different winners for each party. Iowa showed the democratic winner to be Hillary Clinton, who beat Bernie Sanders by 0.3 percent of votes, and the republican winner to be Ted Cruz.

“I saw Clinton’s win in the Iowa primaries coming, she was popular there in her 2008 candidacy and is still popular now. Meanwhile Cruz really came out of the bushes and surprised pretty much everyone with his win,” communications senior Emma Sue Harris said. “Unfortunately, he’s not any less scary than Donald Trump.”

Trump won on the republican side during both the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and is currently leading in the overall preliminaries. So far, many candidates have dropped out. Some relatively popular ones including Martin O’Malley on the democratic side and Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Carly Fiorina on the republican side. The republican candidates still in the race are leading with Trump, then Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Ben Carson.

The same day as the republican South Carolina primary was the democratic one in Nevada, in which Clinton scored another win. So far, the only other remaining Democratic nominee, Sanders, has won the New Hampshire primary, and Clinton is beating him by far overall.

“I liked the results of the New Hampshire primaries. If both Sanders and Trump are the candidates picked for the legitimate elections, then I know Sanders will win, and he is my personal favorite,” communications sophomore Maya Levkovitz said.

On the most recent republican primary in Nevada on Feb. 23, the winner, by far, was Trump, although Rubio did have many supporters appear too.

There have only been four presidential primaries as of now, and there seems to be clear winners overall within both parties. Regarding the facts, it seems that the presidential race will most likely end up being Clinton versus Trump.

To see the current standings of the presidential nominees for each party, view the graphs below.