For once, the Iowa caucuses produced no surprises. That in itself is unusual, since public opinion polls have historically offered an uncertain guide to a caucus night where almost anything can happen. In the past, the Iowa caucuses have been famous for unexpectedly upending presidential primaries by propelling dark-horse candidates to the front of the pack or derailing the campaigns of frontrunners.
Perhaps most famously, the Iowa caucuses made Jimmy Carter – a solid but relatively inexperienced candidate in a crowded race – the frontrunner for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. Since then, many presidential aspirants have hoped to repeat Carter’s magic by using Iowa as a springboard to sudden first-tier candidate status. In 2008, Barack Obama’s surprise victory in Iowa convinced skeptics that he was a serious candidate who could win white votes – and therefore, potentially the nomination.
But Carter and Obama were the exceptions rather than the rule. Most often, underdogs who win in Iowa find that a victory in that state is not enough to get them more than about a week or two of headlines; it rarely translates into national success if their campaign is not already prepared to go the distance. As Mike Huckabee found in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016, a first-place finish in Iowa does not necessarily mean winning the nomination.
Still, it was often fun to see underdogs triumph in Iowa, even if their moment of triumph was short-lived. It was fun to see democracy at work by observing caucus participants carefully weighing the merits of competing campaigns before awarding their votes to the candidates they thought had worked the hardest to earn it.
But this year, it wasn’t an underdog who triumphed. Shortly before the caucuses, Donald Trump was polling 30 points ahead in Iowa – and last night he won the caucuses by just over 30 points. Nikki Haley was polling a distant second before the vote, followed closely by Ron DeSantis in third place. Both finished approximately where public opinion polls indicated they would, with neither one gaining the decisive lead over the other that could have potentially knocked the third-place finisher out of the race.
Tellingly, on the eve of the caucus, only 9 percent of those who were planning to caucus for Haley said that they were “enthusiastic” about her – versus 49 percent of Trump caucusers who said the same. It seems that people who are supporting Haley are doing so not so much because they like her but because they didn’t want Trump, and they thought Haley was the most electable alternative.
But unfortunately for both Haley and DeSantis, if the Iowa results show anything, they show that in rural America, at least – which accounts for a lot of the primary votes that the GOP nominee will have to win – there’s enough enthusiasm for Trump to make it impossible for anyone else to get the nomination. Trump won more than 50 percent of the caucus vote in Iowa – which means, of course, that even if there were only one opponent of Trump left standing, he could still walk away with the nomination relatively easily.
What this really shows, I think, is that this year, the Iowa caucuses were completely unnecessary. The argument for allowing Iowa to vote first, weeks ahead of any of the primaries, has always been that if we allow Iowans to take their duty seriously by carefully observing all of the candidates at close range, they’ll be able to pick up on nuances and character traits that might not be visible to people in other states who haven’t been able to meet the candidates in person, and they’ll be able to pick a potential winner that might otherwise be overlooked – as they did with Carter and Obama.
But this year, they overlooked all of the potentially obscure candidates who spent a lot of time trying to get to know the voters in Iowa and they threw their votes to the one candidate who needed no additional exposure to make himself known to any voters in Iowa or anywhere else.
And they voted for that candidate overwhelmingly. Never before in a multi-candidate race have Iowa Republican caucus participants given more than 50 percent of their vote for a single candidate – but this year they did so for Trump.
So, what are we to make of this? Did Iowans enter the campaign season with their minds already made up? Was the idea that anyone could really take the nomination from Trump just a pipe dream – and was all of the campaigning in Iowa on the part of other candidates just a farce to prepare us for the inevitable second coronation of the Donald as the presumptive GOP nominee? Trump, at least, has often seemed to treat the nomination process as such – as shown, for instance, by his refusal to participate in debates and by his suggestion that he has already decided who his running mate will be.
Or perhaps the Iowa caucus-goers entered into the process willing to at least consider the possibility of supporting someone other than Trump, only to find that none of the other candidates measured up to what they have come to expect from a Republican president. Since none of the other candidates could play Trump as well as Trump played Trump, they decided in the end that they wanted no one but Trump.
They took this position in defiance of some of their state’s Republican powerbrokers. Bob Vander Plaats, the unofficial evangelical kingmaker in Iowa, backed DeSantis. So did Iowa governor Kim Reynolds.
But it’s not Bob Vanderplaats’s party anymore, and it’s not even the governor’s. I think that it’s fair to say that if we didn’t have a caucus or primary system, but instead nominated candidates in the old-fashioned proverbial smoke-filled rooms at party conventions, Trump might not get the nomination this year – and he certainly would not have gotten the nomination in 2016, which means that he never would have become president.
But we do have a caucus and primary system, not a system of nomination by party convention, and as a result, we can expect that what matters will be the will of the voters at the grassroots – including the grassroots evangelical voters, who have been breaking with evangelical leaders for several years now. According to what they’ve repeatedly told journalists, they’re angry and they want a fighter – and they think Trump will be the one to deliver that fight.
That’s exactly what Republican voters were saying in the months leading up to the Iowa caucuses, and it’s not doubt what they’ll continue saying tomorrow and next week.
We probably didn’t need the Iowa caucuses to tell us that. But in case there was any doubt, the Iowa caucuses have confirmed what we already suspected. It will be a tough road for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.