How Iowa Voted

With 85 percent reporting, it’s very close between Sanders and Clinton. If the results stay close, what are the implications? The first and most obvious is the idea that Sanders could actually win the nomination. I’m not ready to spin out the bigger claims that could come out of such an upset. What would that say about the Clintons and their legacy? About the possibilities for a woman to be elected president? About the ideological future of the Democratic Party? The more likely scenario, though, is that Clinton will push forward and eventually win in the more delegate-heavy contests, ultimately winning the nomination. If that’s the most likely outcome, then what is at stake in Sanders’s performance? One possibility is that Clinton and her campaign could try to incorporate Sanders himself. We haven’t heard too much about him as a vice-presidential possibility — O’Malley fits that mold much more clearly. Sanders could be a possibility for a position in an eventual Clinton administration if she were to win the general election, just as Clinton served as Obama’s secretary of state. We can debate about the mix of skills and liabilities that Sanders would bring (you thought Joe Biden was a delightfully unpredictable VP!). But bringing Sanders or someone like him (Elizabeth Warren?) into the Clinton orbit would also look a lot like co-opting the movement — which might not go over well with its core supporters. The other possibility is that Clinton moves to the left on economic issues. This opens up a bunch of questions. Clinton has already tried to stake out center-left territory in which she defends business and capitalism. It’s hard to get away from the fact that mainstream Democrats have deep ties to financial power. Another question is how well Sanders would have to do for her to seriously change her policy positions. One implication that’s not based in fact, despite conventional wisdom, is that a divided primary will hurt the party in the general election. There’s no real evidence of this — after a divided race in 2008, the Democrats did fine, for example. Far more important drivers of the election outcome will be the state of the economy and the fact that the Democrats have held the White House for eight years. This is all based on the assumption that Clinton is running like a candidate in an open-seat contest, not like an incumbent. She’s not an incumbent, although she’s closely tied to the last two Democratic administrations and has been the “establishment” favorite going into two nomination seasons. But there have been two incumbents in recent history who were challenged from the ideological wings of their parties, emerging victorious in the primaries and then losing steam in the general: Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. Threats from Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan made it look like they were out of touch with the core commitments of their parties’ voters. If this happens to Clinton — jumping way ahead in the future — it could be a strong signal about ideological struggles to come.