Another Weird Iowa Caucus

One of my favorite political traditions is the Iowa Caucus. Held every election year the caucuses are the official starting gun of the presidential race (although for many candidates

they are also the end of that race). The caucus process itself is delightfully deranged, they are not the same as primaries where you simply go and vote for the candidate you like and that’s the end of it. Instead both the Democrat and Republican parties have separate processes for how their caucuses are run with the Democrats having the much more amusing process involving people actually standing together in different parts of a room and a weird candidate musical chairs scenario happens. On the republican side a secret ballot is used after speeches are made with delegates being given proportionally to the percentages earned by the candidates.

The Democratic party no longer believes in democracy so like they have done in other states they have effectively canceled the Iowa Democratic caucus moving it to March where it will likely have no meaningful impact on the race (Joe Biden has never won the Iowa caucus and dropped out after the caucus in both 1988 and 2008). This left only the Republican contest. To make matters more strange the weather in Iowa was the coldest it had ever been during a caucus which left many concerned about turnout. Even Donald Trump who typically doesn’t struggle with turnout had to make an interesting appeal to supporters.

After all the fanfare though we got a pretty predictable result. Donald Trump absolutely dominated. He received over fifty thousand votes (over 50% more than double his 2016 showing) and has 20 delegates. The real question was who would come in 2nd, at first it seemed like that would be Nikki Haley but Meatball Ron was able to overtake and got about two thousand more votes and 1 more delegate than her (Ron got 9, Nikki 8). Vivek Ramaswammy performed a little above expectations and walked away with 3 delegates, he suspended his campaign about 12 hours after the caucus and endorsed Trump (becoming the 2nd primary challenger to endorse him). Shockingly enough former governor Asa Hutchinson was still in the race, receiving less than 200 votes. He has also since dropped out.

So at the end of the day does any of this matter? Probably not, Trump still continues to have a lead that seems insurmountable. Desantis or Haley need to drastically increase their numbers to have any impact and that seems unlikely. On the Democrat side the New Hampshire primary has also effectively been canceled so it looks like we are destined for a Biden Trump rematch which we probably deserve at this point.