Ron Is On

I took a break from not watching the news last night to watch the returns from Iowa.  I'd hoped to write Ron DeSantis's political obituary, at least in national politics, at the conclusion of the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses, but he actually eked out a second-place showing in the Hawkeye State, edging out Nikki Haley by just a couple of percentage points.

Haley was considered the favorite to give Trump a big scare in New Hampshire, but her calculations have possibly been scrambled as a result of DeSantis' better-than-expected run in Iowa.  As all this has happened, Chris Christie has withdrawn as a candidate, having seen that he has no chance of winning and wanting to avoid splitting the vote against Trump after his road-to-Damascus conversion from Trump acolyte to Trump adversary (COVID will do that to you), but not only has Haley been diminished at DeSantis's expense - Trump won an outright majority of caucus-goers' votes, the first presidential candidate to do that in Iowa in either party since, when?  Ever?

Democrats hoping for a bruising battle among Republicans that could affect Trump's chances in November might still get their wish.  Haley, who finished only a couple of points behind the Florida governor, could still make this difficult for the Donald in New Hampshire, where independents can vote in the primary, or DeSantis' new-found momentum could result in the knock-down brawl between Don and Ron that once seemed likely only a year ago.  But the Biden campaign had best not count on too much drama in the early state GOP presidential nomination contests, because, as Trump's success last night proved, it's ultimately not going to matter much.    

Single Digits

So let me get this straight . . ..  Out of sixty thousand votes cast between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum at the Iowa caucuses yesterday, Romney won by eight.  I'm sure Romney would have preferred to win by more than eight thousand votes.  But when I say eight, I don't mean eight thousand.  I mean . . . eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . eight.

Romney won 30,015 votes in Iowa last night.  He would have had to win 36,000 votes to get at least 30 percent and pull out of the 25 percent bracket he'd been in through various opinion polls for months.  As it was, he couldn't win 36,000 votes.  In fact, compared to his 2008 total in Iowa, Romney was off by six.  

Not six thousand.  Six.  One, two, three, four, five . . . six.

That's right, Romney won six fewer votes in Iowa in 2012 than the 30,021 votes he won in 2008.

So, not only did 75 percent of all Iowa Republicans vote against Romney, those that did vote for him gave him a Pyrrhic victory with a margin in single digits over Santorum.  And after all the time and money he spent in Iowa, his vote total was smaller than when he lost the Iowa contest to Mike Huckabee in 2008 - by single digits.  

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann - a woman whose intelligence quotient is likely measured in single digits - dropped out of the race.  The number of people who will miss her can be counted with a single digit - 0. 

Hawkeye Piercing

Are the Iowa caucuses tomorrow? Good, I'm getting sick of hearing about them, and quite frankly, I'm getting sick of hearing about Iowa. Maybe it's only because it's strictly a Republican contest this time, but that's a pretty good reason. Iowa Republicans are an extremely conservative lot (to be fair, Iowa Democrats are just as liberal), and so the caucus campaign is heavily focused on social issues like abortion and family planning, making us Americans look more unsophisticated and heathen-like in the international media than we already are.

Iowa may be seen as irrelevant in the nominating process after this election, especially if Mitt Romney (whom I believe will be the eventual Republican nominee) doesn't win. After all, the state is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly rural, and the last time that counted for anything was when Barack Obama won the Democratic caucuses there in 2008 and proved that an urban black candidate could win there and thus win anywhere. But the state is nonetheless too homogenous to count as a bellwether in any other circumstances. Besides, the state's economy is based on corn and corn by-products, which are a reason for why so many Americans are so grossly fat. I don't think Iowans are going to be so supportive of the President in November when they figure out that his wife's healthy eating initiative is bad for their business.

I'm sure Iowans have made several worthy contributions to civilization, and when I think of any, I'll list them here. Right now, I can only think of that sculptor who carved a statue of Jesus out of butter. Iowa isn't even politically relevant beyond the caucuses - its only native son to become President was Herbert Hoover, and he left as a young man to attend Stanford (he was in its first graduating class), never to return.