Man, this Iowa caucus just got raucous
THE results are in from Iowa, the first state in the US to preselect for president. And as a certain populist candidate might put it, they are YUUUUGE.
Opinion
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THE results are in from Iowa, the first state in the US to preselect for president. And as a certain populist candidate might put it, they are YUUUUGE.
On the Republican side, Marco Rubio, the baby-faced establishment favourite, did far better than expected — particularly in parts of the state where Mitt Romney did well four years ago, coming in a solid third.
The big-talking Donald Trump, meanwhile, came runner-up, puncturing his previous air of freight-train inevitability.
And Ted Cruz, who has played a deft game slipstreaming behind the putative leader, positioning himself as an outsider candidate who’s also electable, walked away with the state. Or at least the majority of its delegates heading into the conventions later this year.
On the other side of the aisle things were tighter: at press time, the race between Hillary Clinton and self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders was a virtual tie, too close to call.
The voting was so tight that one precinct’s delegates were awarded by coin toss, reducing the process to some- thing akin to a game of Risk where the dice decide the fate of a nation.
These results prove two things: One, that in modern politics, organising trumps (as it were) oratory; and two, that no victory is assured.
Cruz’s people fought a harder ground game against an insurgent candidate with less experience with the mechanics of getting out the vote, something pundits eager to hype the ratings-grabbing Trump missed.
But the Clinton campaign is being dragged down in no small part by her family’s work over the past 25 years. And unlike her husband’s redneck reprise of the Kennedy era, the allegations against Hillary Clinton involve national security and a formal investigation by the FBI. Specifically, it is claimed that while secretary of state she and her staff kept top secret and above material on private homebrew servers rather than the State Department’s secure systems in order to avoid scrutiny under American Freedom of Information laws.
But before laying bets, remember that winners in Iowa rarely wind up going all the way. With heavy concentrations of university students and evangelicals it is hardly a statistically representative slice. (Nor for that matter is the next stop on the trail, New Hampshire, with its odd mix of a “live free or die” tradition fused with rusted-on New Deal love for big government).
Bill Clinton finished fourth in 1992 with 3 per cent of the vote — behind final-round trivia answers Tom Harkin and Paul Tsongas and that eternal candidate, “uncommitted”.
To put it another way, as the Americans say, it is still anyone’s ballgame.
James Morrow is a New York-born writer and political analyst
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