Monday night, Iowa’s Republicans made it clear they would not be held responsible for placing their party in the hands of an insult-comedian character assassin — choosing instead exactly the kind of combative conservative the state’s GOP almost always prefers.
Also Monday night, Iowa’s Democrats made it clear that the coronation she sought is not in the cards for Hillary Clinton.
There’s still no reason to believe she won’t be the party’s eventual nominee. But no matter the regular Democratic spin about how “a win is a win,” the fact that she might have only beaten Bernie Sanders by a split whisker is an indication that her party, at the very least, wants her to earn her nomination.
Hillary said last night she had “breathed a sigh of relief,” but she’d better not throw away those Rolaids.
If she relaxes, if she considers it in the bag, if she starts to behave like she can take the party’s out-of-sorts left for granted, Bernie Sanders will be there to swoop in and give her what his mother would have called a zetz.
She’s a workhorse, but Sanders has the stamina of a man half his age as well — and unless something very big happens, he should beat her in New Hampshire a week from today.
Ted Cruz’s triumph Monday night was important for many reasons — and not least because it affirmed that the laws of American politics have not yet been rewritten wholesale by a billionaire reality-TV huckster. “The next president of the United States will not be chosen by the media,” Cruz said in his victory speech.
He won with the most votes any Republican has ever gotten in an Iowa caucus, through old-fashioned means — and because he appealed to voters for the old-fashioned reasons politicians appeal to voters.
Cruz built a sensationally effective ground organization, at least twice as large as any other candidate’s. He had 12,000 volunteers (a fourth of his vote total) ringing doorbells, making phone calls, and gathering people to show up and caucus. He worked for and secured important endorsements.
More importantly, he ran a campaign affirming classic conservative ideas of particular resonance to the voters of Iowa. They did not fall for Donald Trump’s vainglorious and solipsistic blather about making America great again without ever explaining how on earth he would do such a thing. In fact, 75 percent of the Republicans of Iowa rejected Trump’s nonsense.
And even more than that. The record vote turnout in Iowa — 180,000 strong — completely disproved the conventional wisdom that a newer and larger electorate would favor Trump. If anything, the evidence suggests that voters were inspired to turn out for Cruz and for the surprisingly strong third-place finisher, Marco Rubio (who beat the poll averages by nearly seven points), not only to cast a positive vote for the candidate they preferred but specifically to deny Trump a win.
This is a dynamic that should be closely watched from here on out. The polls showing Trump leading everywhere have been registering the results of his astounding command of the media — but have always been blurred somewhat by his undeniably high negatives.
Perhaps, in the Iowa results, we saw the first real effects of Trump’s unpopularity with Republicans — that he may be generating actual negative turnout of the sort pollsters find difficult to measure. People may not have crawled through glass to vote for him. They may have crawled through glass to tell Trump to take a well-deserved hike.
Oh, and one last thing. In Iowa, among an all-white Republican electorate, 60 percent of the vote last night was cast for two Cubans and an African-American.
Click here to see dramatic video of people being ejected from Trump rallies: