Iowa: What It Told Us

The Iowa Caucus crowd is always elated to tell you that they, first among all other Americans, get to begin the process of determining a presidential nominee. Heading into yesterday all signs indicated that Ron Paul had a chance, Romney was sitting virtually identical to where he was in 2008, and that Rick Santorum had somehow become the candidate du jour for hardline conservatives everywhere.

Flash forward to the end of a long night, and you'll see that this assessment was pretty accurate:

- Ron Paul took 21.4% of the vote, a marked improvement over the 9.93% he took in Iowa in 2008
- Mitt Romney was a narrow winner of the caucus, even after not really trying here at all this year. The kicker is that Romney took 25.19% of the vote in 2008 ... and 24.6% of the vote in 2012. For all intents and purposes Mitt Romney just so happened to lose percentage votes, but his holding steady was good enough to win (albeit by eight votes apparently)
- Santorum ... I'm still not sure how this happened, but in the past six months the Republican field has anointed the following people (in order) their savior from the evil Mitt: Bachmann, Perry, Christie (never even in the race), Herman freaking Cain, Newt, and now Santorum. I actually might be missing some people in there, but the point remains the same: Santorum had the great advantage of being the last of all the gloves tried on before the game. Inevitably the voters would have to settle on one to play the game with, and Santorum happened to be the one they picked up when the umpire yelled "play ball."

The final take away for me is the incredible division in the Iowa field. Now, this is hardly unprecedented. The caucus process lends itself to this division of candidates. Look at the 2008 Republican field and you see a similar division:

- Huckabee 34.36%
- Romney 25.19%
- Thompson 13.39%
- McCain 13.03%
- Paul 9.93%

Five candidates essentially getting 1/10th of the vote or more. If you compare that with the 2008 Democratic field you'll see the following:

- Obama 37.6%
- Edwards 29.7%
- Clinton 29.4%

A three person race, but another indicator of the way that Iowa likes to split their delegates. A final look, at the 2000 Republican field, shows this:

- George W. Bush - 40.99%
- Steve Forbes - 30.5%
- Alan Keyes - 14.24%

What do you take away from that? Money matters in Iowa, as does organization. McCain, who finished somewhere around 4% that year, had neither.

So for this year's Republican field, the division shouldn't have been unexpected, but the variance between 1st and 5th wasn't much more than the variance between Bush and Forbes:

- Romney - 24.6%
- Santorum - 24.5%
- Paul - 21.4%
- Gingrich - 13.3% (isn't it nice that Newt now owns the distinction of killing his own campaign twice before Iowa?)
- Perry - 10.3%

Only 14 points separate first from fifth. Needless to say, this has the potential to be a divisive year in the Republican field, but the odd thing is that it might not be. Even with this division, the nomination is now, more firmly than ever, Romney's to lose. If he takes care of business in New Hampshire (which, barring a stunning piece of organization from Jon Huntsman, he will), he can claim victory in the first two contests, something which almost never happens in a truly contested nomination process. He then moves to South Carolina, and hopes that Santorum, Perry, and Gingrich (with some help from Ron Paul) split the vote as well as they did in Iowa (Perry may, in fact, drop out after Iowa, which would be the culmination of a precipitous, and entertaining, decline). If that happens, there is a very real chance that Mitt finishes strongly enough in South Carolina that he can be the defacto candidate already (at which point the far right's head explodes). If Huntsman somehow spoils New Hampshire, and if Newt and Perry directly or indirectly throw support to Santorum in South Carolina, however, we could be in for a long, drawn out nomination process. Either way, it appears that the Republican base is going to be awarded a nominee they don't really believe in. Yet another break for Obama.