(Dobbs) Maybe Iowa Is No Bellwether

Who's doing the wishful thinking?

Well, we know one thing about the Iowa caucuses: they were not rigged. We know that because Trump won. Had he lost, they would have been rigged, for sure. When he wins, the election is legitimate. When he loses, it’s not.

Beyond that, we can reach two easy conclusions from the caucus results. One is, after winning more than 50% of the caucus vote, Trump owns Iowa, at least the Republican side of it. The other is, after winning more votes than all his rivals combined despite all the impeachments and criminal counts and Hitlerian language and authoritarian agendas and crude behavior, Trump owns the GOP. 

Both conclusions might be absolutely true. But if it’s any consolation for anti-Trump Americans, things might not be as simple as they look.

That’s because Iowa is not America. Sure, it’s one of the fifty states and its people are bonafide American citizens, but if caucus history is any guide, it is anything but a political microcosm of this nation.

That begins with a look at caucuses past. The last Republican caucus winner to go on to win the White House was George W. Bush. That was a quarter century back. In the years before that, Bush’s father George H.W. Bush won Iowa in 1980 but lost the nomination to Ronald Reagan (he did finally nail it down in 1988). Then Bob Dole won Iowa in ’88 but lost the nomination to George H.W. Bush (Dole became the party’s standard bearer in 1996). Since then, Republican caucus winners in the Hawkeye State include Mike Huckabee in 1988, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in ’16. If anyone needs reminding, Iowa did not propel any of them on to greater things.

The takeaway is, winning Iowa doesn’t necessarily mean someone’s won a lock on the nomination, let alone the presidency. And for what it’s worth, the converse is true too: Joe Biden lost in Iowa’s Democratic caucuses four years ago.

You might have noticed, he won the White House anyway.

Of course politics in America have taken a sharp turn in the past few years, so maybe any inferences from those ancient facts are wishful thinking. As Donald Trump races on for the nomination, he’s got a lot going for him, including loyalists at every level of government from Congress to county commissions (including levels of government where election outcomes can be manipulated), and conditions in the nation that have turned people— mostly unfairly, I’d argue— against Joe Biden. But he’s got a few things going against him too. Of Iowans questioned by pollsters as they went into their caucuses, three out of ten said that if Trump is convicted of crimes with which he’s charged, he won’t be fit to be president. Fox News interviewed Nikki Haley supporters and reported that six out of ten said that if Trump wins the nomination, they won’t support him. It’s fair to assume that some will change their minds, but some won’t.

And if we’re looking for positives from Iowa. there’s more.

The state has a total population of almost 3.2 million people. In the caucuses, Donald Trump got 56,260 votes. That’s more than his rivals combined, but still, it’s just 56,260 supporters out of 3.2 million people. And it bears mentioning, out of the roughly 110,000 Iowans who even attended the caucuses, nearly half of them voted for someone else.

Of course if Trump steamrolls over his opponents as the primaries progress, he’ll pick up the votes of many and maybe most of their supporters. But the point is, the turnout in these caucuses, for whatever reasons, was a pittance, and might not reflect the bigger picture of voter sentiment. Trump’s victory does show the power of passion, but not every state is as conservatively Trumpian as Iowa.

Next up, next week: New Hampshire. It’s a vastly different state. One year, I covered both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary for ABC News. About the only thing they had in common was bitter weather. Iowa today has two Republican senators. Both senators from New Hampshire are Democrats. There are four representatives for Iowa in Congress and all four are Republicans. There are two for New Hampshire, both are Democrats. I don’t trade in predictions but I do trade in possibilities, and there is a possibility that Donald Trump’s showing will be a lot less conclusive in New Hampshire than it was in Iowa. That wouldn’t kill his momentum but it could slow it down.

He told his victory rally last night in Des Moines, “The big night is going to be in November, when we take back our country.” But maybe that’s just his wishful thinking. November is a lot of courtrooms, a lot of unpalatable demagoguery, a lot of authoritarian behavior, a lot of unsavory bullying, a lot of racist remarks, a lot of moderate states, away.

What we can count on is this: if he loses in November, he’ll say it was all rigged. What we also can count on is, he’ll be lying. Again.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.