This morning as I walked on the treadmill at the gym and watched CNN interview all the candidate spinmeisters, the conclusion was obvious: The Iowa Caucus was over and everyone had won. Not a single one said, “Boy did we get clobbered last night” nor did they even concede that they had anything less than a totally wonderful outcome. It’s clear that political speak is a bit of a foreign languages, so I’m going to try to explain what happened last in plain English, and what it might or might not mean as I see it.
First, The Donald. Going in, the polls seemed to indicate that he was going to win and be in the high 20s, perhaps even the low 30s. It didn’t happen. Does that mean that Trump has crested and it’s downhill from here? Probably not. It’s easy to say to a pollster that you’re going to vote for an outlier (which is really what Trump is), but once they go to vote, people tend to be more conservative, no matter the party, and take their voting very seriously. Look for Trump to pivot and change his thrust somewhat. He now knows that he’s going to have to be more substantive, know the issues better, act somewhat more presidential and do it without loosing his populist base, which is difficult but not impossible. The man has extraordinary media talent but he’s got to get some substance to go with it to really be in the race.
Cruz had a good night, sort of. He won and it’s always good to win, but the thrust of his campaign was the Evangelicals. Clearly their vote split pretty much into thirds, although Cruz was up by 29.3 percent over 23.4 percent for Trump and 22.5 percent for Rubio. My guess is they were looking for 2-to-1 from the Evangelicals, which, if it had happened, would have practically meant that next time out, Cruz would have showed up in clerical garb. It didn’t happen; the vote split and Cruz is also going to have to pivot and broaden his reach. The trouble with trying to be the piety candidate by claiming you get down on your knee and pray to the Almighty every morning is that the next candidate comes and says he gets down on both knees every morning and prays, so clearly he’s twice as pious as Cruz.
Rubio appears to be the winner by general consensus, not because he won — which he didn’t — but because he beat expectations and therefore his stock went up. Rubio had a good day. The problem for him is that a presidential race is not the stock market where the daily results have some meaning — the only results that matter are the results at the finish line. Rubio’s now a contender and the others are going to begin to focus on him, which means he’s going to get beat up some — probably a great deal — and how he handles it will be telling. His national public persona is not yet formed, which is both an opportunity and a vulnerability. He could be blown out of the water by saying something stupid. He’s young and attractive and articulate, but he’s got to show he has the gravitas necessary for the job and he’s got to learn as he goes, which is always tricky.
The caucus proved what we already know: that this is not the year for stodgy old politicians, even if they are smart and competent. I think sooner rather than later, some of the old line Republican powerhouses are going to have to choose a new horse. Probably the March primaries are about as long as they can wait, but I’m sure they also may want to see how some of the candidates do in the battleground states.
So if this is not the year for smart competent stogy old politicians, where does that leave Hillary? If she were a Republican among a variety of choices, she’d be in big trouble. Fortunately for her, she’s a Democrat with only two choices: Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Bernie is kind of an interesting guy, a good campaigner, but a socialist, which is an enormous liability in the mind of many voters and probably totally unelectable. Running against an acceptable Republican it would be landslide. The kids may be excited, the newbies may be excited, but their turnout rates are never great, and I also think he has some minority voter problems.
To wrap it, in the course of a marathon, one runner takes the lead and then another. There is always some politician du jour who spurts ahead and then falls back into the pack. Next month or so, we are going to see a lot of primaries, and in political presidential life, a month can be a gigantic amount of time. This has really just begun. Iowa was just the first mile of a 26-mile race.