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Yet there Trump was at the end of the night with a paltry 60,000.
What makes the whole thing ridiculous is that Trump’s win in Iowa will essentially end the Republican nomination process. By capturing a bare majority, Trump could declare himself stronger than all his opponents combined — and his opponents cooperated in the coup. Placing personal vanity and ambition ahead of any possible winning strategy, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley split most of the remaining vote, leaving neither with a persuasive claim to any momentum coming out of the frozen heartland.
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Iowa most likely ends the GOP race before it has had a chance to begin. The party will be weaker for it. Instead of subjecting the front-runner to a meaningful test, this odd exercise amounted to a layup. Trump overperforms in rural areas and among White voters. That’s Iowa to a T.
In the state’s empty reaches, he rolled up majorities worthy of a tin-pot dictator. Take a precinct of Kossuth County, north of Algona, near the South Dakota border. All of 38 voters gathered to caucus, and 33 of them went for Trump. Or the precinct of Appanoose County, down in the southeast corner of the state, that mustered all of 69 voters, with 55 of them choosing Trump.
Huge margins among sparse populations gave Trump an appearance of invulnerability. But the closer the race drew to a population center — someplace big enough to have a Costco or a Chick-fil-A — the weaker he appeared. Haley, the preferred candidate of never-Trump Republicans and independent voters, actually beat the former president in multiple precincts of Des Moines, Iowa City, Ames, Cedar Rapids, Davenport and so on.
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Recent history teaches us that this year’s general election will be won or lost on precisely that ground, not in farm country but in the Chick-fil-A precincts. In these places, Trump’s turnout was unimpressive, bordering on weak. Again: The weather was miserable, I grant you. But few people live in Iowa without a warm winter coat and a pair of gloves, and if there was passion for more Trump, I think we would have seen it.
In short, Iowa answered a question that no one is asking, namely: Can Trump carry the rural vote? Absolutely he can, and he will in November if the GOP continues down this road and makes him the party’s nominee. Fifty years of the culture wars — with the Iowa caucuses as ground zero — have painted our open spaces a deep Republican red.
The question the GOP ought to be asking is: Can Trump win where it counts? This is a man who has twice lost the popular vote, whose hopes for the presidency have always depended on close bounces in the electoral college. I don’t see anything in the deceptive Iowa results to suggest he’s in a position of strength.
That said, Iowa Democrats — like Democrats everywhere — are sleepwalking toward a weak nominee of their own. Trump doesn’t have to beat a heavyweight. He only has to beat Joe Biden.
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Before I say what I think of the Iowa caucuses, I will say something nice, because this is the Midwest and that’s how we roll.
In the summer of 1999, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush took his presidential hot rod for a test drive in Iowa, which is how I found myself waiting for a speech at the pork producers’ pavilion of the Iowa State Fair. A figure in blue jeans, apparently an angel, brought me something from the grill that he called a pork chop. If Michelangelo were a pork chop, maybe. If the slanting sun on a lover’s face were a pork chop, perhaps. When Plato, chewing his supper down in his cave, considered the ideal pork chop, against which real pork chops are measured and fall short, this was the chop he had in mind.
But what’s good for my taste buds is bad for America. Remind me: Why do we begin our presidential elections with a contest so twee that a candidate can win a massive landslide without capturing enough voters to fill a football stadium? After a lifetime of self-promotion, a hit TV show and four tumultuous years as president, Donald Trump persuaded fewer than 60,000 people to caucus for him on Monday — 10,000 short of capacity at an Iowa Hawkeyes home game.
His modest showing was a bit more than half the measly GOP turnout, which was down by more than a third from the number of voters in 2016. Yes, the weather was awful. Yes, Iowa is a lightly populated state. But if the MAGA multitude truly believed what Trump was saying on the stump — that America is hanging by a thread over a lake of fire — surely they would have bundled up to back their hero.
Yet there Trump was at the end of the night with a paltry 60,000.
What makes the whole thing ridiculous is that Trump’s win in Iowa will essentially end the Republican nomination process. By capturing a bare majority, Trump could declare himself stronger than all his opponents combined — and his opponents cooperated in the coup. Placing personal vanity and ambition ahead of any possible winning strategy, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley split most of the remaining vote, leaving neither with a persuasive claim to any momentum coming out of the frozen heartland.
Iowa most likely ends the GOP race before it has had a chance to begin. The party will be weaker for it. Instead of subjecting the front-runner to a meaningful test, this odd exercise amounted to a layup. Trump overperforms in rural areas and among White voters. That’s Iowa to a T.
In the state’s empty reaches, he rolled up majorities worthy of a tin-pot dictator. Take a precinct of Kossuth County, north of Algona, near the South Dakota border. All of 38 voters gathered to caucus, and 33 of them went for Trump. Or the precinct of Appanoose County, down in the southeast corner of the state, that mustered all of 69 voters, with 55 of them choosing Trump.
Huge margins among sparse populations gave Trump an appearance of invulnerability. But the closer the race drew to a population center — someplace big enough to have a Costco or a Chick-fil-A — the weaker he appeared. Haley, the preferred candidate of never-Trump Republicans and independent voters, actually beat the former president in multiple precincts of Des Moines, Iowa City, Ames, Cedar Rapids, Davenport and so on.
Recent history teaches us that this year’s general election will be won or lost on precisely that ground, not in farm country but in the Chick-fil-A precincts. In these places, Trump’s turnout was unimpressive, bordering on weak. Again: The weather was miserable, I grant you. But few people live in Iowa without a warm winter coat and a pair of gloves, and if there was passion for more Trump, I think we would have seen it.
In short, Iowa answered a question that no one is asking, namely: Can Trump carry the rural vote? Absolutely he can, and he will in November if the GOP continues down this road and makes him the party’s nominee. Fifty years of the culture wars — with the Iowa caucuses as ground zero — have painted our open spaces a deep Republican red.
The question the GOP ought to be asking is: Can Trump win where it counts? This is a man who has twice lost the popular vote, whose hopes for the presidency have always depended on close bounces in the electoral college. I don’t see anything in the deceptive Iowa results to suggest he’s in a position of strength.
That said, Iowa Democrats — like Democrats everywhere — are sleepwalking toward a weak nominee of their own. Trump doesn’t have to beat a heavyweight. He only has to beat Joe Biden.
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