Looking Back At The Iowa Wreckage For The Good News

Ramaswamy dropped out. Trump told him the game was over, his services were no longer needed… and poof— gone. Hated by all the other candidates, he was a greasy self-funder and Putin patsy who wasted over $9.5 million of his own ill-gotten fortune on the vanity race. Aside from name recognition for his next slimy venture, that money bought him 8,449 votes… $1,123.46 per vote. I doubt that was the big shock Elon Musk had predicted for Ramaswamy over the weekend when he pathetically endorsed him. I even wonder if Ramaswamy lost votes because of the Musk endorsement. Or was it because Trump declared him a fraud? In any case, the last national poll of GOP primary voters, had him at 4%.

A virtual tie between DeSantis and Haley— 23,420 votes (21.2%) to 21,085 (21.2%)— has the GOP clown show leaving Iowa without an obvious alternative to Trump, who only managed to win a puny 51.0% of the vote, pretty shocking for someone who ran as an incumbent. A composite picture of a Trump supporter has emerged: an uneducated, elderly (over 65), right-wing white evangelical. That’s the future of the Republican Party.

After the ballots were all tabulated, Ron Brownstein observed that “for all Trump’s strength within the party, the results also hinted at some of the risks the GOP will face if it nominates him again… in a preview of a continuing general election challenge if he wins the nomination, his vote notably lagged among caucus-goers with at least a four-year college degree.

Trump’s relative weakness among college-educated voters in the 2016 GOP primary presaged the alienation from him in white-collar suburbs that grew during his presidency. Though Biden’s approval among those voters has declined since 2021, Trump’s modest showing even among the college-educated voters willing to turn out for a GOP caucus likely shows that resistance to him also remains substantial. When the results are tallied Trump might win all 99 counties in Iowa, an incredible achievement if he manages it. But Trump drew well under his statewide percentage in Polk County, the state’s most populous, fast-growing Dallas County, and in Story and Johnson, the counties centered on Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. (Johnson is the one county where Trump trails as of now.) Those are all the sort of places that have moved away from the GOP in the Trump years.

Also noteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three-in-ten said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those critical Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination. On that front, it may be worth filing away that over four-in-ten college graduates who participated in the caucus said they would not view Trump as fit for the presidency if he’s convicted of a crime, the entrance poll found.

This morning, Democratic polemicist Dan Pfeiffer explained why Trump’s win last night was underwhelming, “another arrow pointing to Trump’s dominance over a weak and feeble Republican Party. Trump’s margin is an indictment of the miserable campaigns run by Haley, DeSantis, and all of the anti-Trump forces in the GOP. Eight years later, not one of them learned a single lesson from the 2016 Republican Primary when Trump took all of their lunch money. From the perspective of candidate skill, messaging, strategic thinking, and resource allocation, it was a truly embarrassing performance all the way around. Why did Republicans blow the very winnable 2022 midterms? Look at the folks running the DeSantis and Haley campaigns as well the Koch Network that lit millions on fire (and lined their own pockets) trying to beat Trump. There is nothing in the Iowa results to support even the vaguest notion that Trump could somehow lose the nomination.”

Pfeiffer pointed to 3 reasons Trump’s win last night wasn’t as big a deal as his campaign has been trying to paint it all day. First off, the turnout was weak. In 2016, 186,000 Republicans turned out. Just 100,000 bothered last night. “Many folks will attribute this shortfall to the frigid weather and the fact that the outcome was never really in doubt. Those factors played a role,” he wrote, “but weather alone cannot explain why turnout was cut nearly in half 2016. Trump is known for cult-like loyalty from his supporters, the ability to generate tremendous enthusiasm among the GOP base, and to bring new Republicans into the political process. None of those were on display last night. Either there is diminished enthusiasm for Trump among all but the most die-hard MAGA voters or Trump’s campaign organization could not get his voters to the polls. Neither is a particularly encouraging sign for Trump supporters.”

Trump’s incumbent status gives him a massive advantage in name identification and depth of knowledge about his (lack of?) character and (abhorrent?) views. Trump should have won tonight. There is no modern example of an incumbent president losing a nomination fight. When you shift your frame of reference to analyzing this race through the prism of an incumbent president fending off a primary challenge, Trump’s victory last night doesn’t seem so impressive.

The fact that half of Republicans chose someone else should be embarrassing for Trump. 

Trump’s performance in Iowa once again demonstrated that he is a truly flawed general election candidate.

First, in the Des Moines Register poll, more than a quarter of likely caucus-goers would not vote for Trump if he were the nominee.

These are not soft Republicans, RINOs, or passive political participants; these are Republicans who told the best pollster in the business that they were planning to brave subzero temperatures to go to a two-hour meeting on a Monday night. According to the Pew Validated Voter study, 92% of Republicans voted for Trump. Therefore, his performance in this caucus is a warning sign of erosion within his base.

If that number holds across the battleground states, Trump will struggle mightily to return to the White House.

Second, according to the entrance polls, 32% of caucus participants believe that if convicted, Trump won’t be fit for the presidency. From a moral/common sense perspective, that number is shockingly low, but it does speak to the massive political danger that Trump’s legal problems pose to his candidacy.

Right-wing crackpot Ann Coulter put it less kindly even before any Iowa caucus votes were cast: