How Iowa Voted

With the first votes of 2016 about to come in, I keep coming back to two ideas. The first is how little the GOP race has changed over a volatile and media-heavy campaign season. Ted Cruz has improved his standing in the polls — but given the size of the Republican field, few candidates have dropped out. It’s a big contrast with 2012, when we saw different candidates get a brief moment as front-runner during the “invisible primary” period and then fade away. The second is the relative significance of Iowa for each party. (Warning: Generalizations based on few observations ahead. Proceed with caution.) The winner of the Iowa Democratic caucuses has become the Democratic presidential nominee for the last three competitive cycles. The track record for Republicans isn’t quite as good, with Rick Santorum beating Mitt Romney by an extremely narrow margin in 2012 and Mike Huckabee winning in 2008. Conventional wisdom points to the social conservatism of Iowa Republicans as the cause for Iowa’s inability to pick winners. And that’s why Cruz is doing well in Iowa. But if he wins in Iowa and goes on to lose the nomination, it could start to look like a pattern. Social conservatives remain an important part of the Republican coalition, but the shape of the race this cycle has so far suggested that their influence may be waning. Also worth noting: Iowa has gone blue in four of the last five presidential elections. So in a nutshell, we tend to talk about the Iowa caucuses as if they have equal importance in both parties, but maybe that’s not the case.