As the caucus results start pouring in tonight, what I’ll be looking for is the urban/suburban vs. rural contours of each GOP candidate’s coalition. We often think of Iowa as a rural state. But in 2012, more than half of GOP caucus-goers (62,144 of 121,503) lived in Iowa’s 10 most populous counties. Twenty-nine percent of Republican voters in those “metro 10” caucused for Mitt Romney, compared with 22 percent for Rick Santorum. In the “rural 89” other counties, however, Santorum had the advantage, receiving 27 percent to Romney’s 20 percent.
If Marco Rubio wants to exceed expectations, he’ll need to clean up in “Romney country” — the large metro areas home to thousands of suburban, secular, well-educated GOP voters. Key counties for him will be Polk and Dallas (Des Moines and its western suburbs), Scott (Quad Cities) and Linn (Cedar Rapids). Ted Cruz, meanwhile, will need to dominate the evangelical-heavy “rural 89” if he wants to beat Donald Trump. Key counties for him include Mahaska, Sioux and Warren.
The biggest mystery: What will Trump’s coalition look like on a map? Unlike Rubio and Cruz, Trump doesn’t seem to have a natural constituency that’s geographically concentrated or obvious to spot, at least based on polling. It could be that he performs fairly well and fairly evenly across the entire state. Or it could be that tonight, we’ll get our first real sense of where Trump isn’t selling as briskly.
