The Iowa Caucuses would be a blip in the campaign ocean without the media.
It’s a small, rural, unrepresentative state that would matter little if it didn’t host the first contest–and if the winner wasn’t the recipient of a blizzard of laudatory press coverage (sorry) touting a surge of momentum.
BIDEN CAMP RIPS TRUMP COVERAGE WHILE BRINGING TOP JOURNALISTS TO WILMINGTON HQ
In 2016, for instance, the Democratic turnout was 176,000. If Monday’s Republican turnout is roughly the same – it will likely be lower with the snow and 40-below wind chill – it would be a miniscule fraction of the state’s 3.1 million residents having a huge impact.
So without the media having decided that Iowa is of the utmost importance – and the same for the following week’s New Hampshire primary – both would be negligible. The bigger, more diverse states like South Carolina – third for the Republicans, first for the Democrats – would matter far, far more because they have a bigger delegate haul.
There are essentially two contests right now, since all the pundits expect a big Donald Trump win (and when have the prognosticators ever been wrong?). One is Trump versus high expectations. He and his team had been lowering that yardstick – whether he won with 50 percent or less – and have a built-in explanation: the wicked weather depressed turnout.
That’s why the former president abruptly turned on his biggest booster, Vivek Ramaswamay, and started buying ads on MSNBC attacking Nikki Haley.
TRUMP’S FOX TOWN HALL TOPS CNN’S HALEY-DESANTIS DEBATE
The second contest was the battle for second place. Everyone knew that if Haley finished second, it would be difficult for Ron DeSantis to continue, since he had basically placed all his chips on Iowa.
And while Iowa, with its big evangelical population, was not a natural fit for Haley, she was trailing Trump by only single digits in New Hampshire, where Democrats and independents could cross over and vote for her. New Hampshire, which is culturally more libertarian, loves to go in the opposite direction of Iowa.
Once little-known one-term governor Jimmy Carter won Iowa, and the presidency, in 1976, the press and a passel of candidates started camping out there to see who else could pull that off.
TRUMP GOES TO FEDERAL IMMUNITY HEARING, SKIPPING IOWA, SEIZES MEDIA SPOTLIGHT
New Hampshire has a much better track record in picking GOP nominees than Iowa. George H.W. Bush in 1980, Bob Dole in 1988, Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012 and Ted Cruz in 2016 all won Iowa but fell short. And as NBC’s Steve Kornacki points out, the only two who became the party’s standard-bearer already had 30-plus leads: Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000.
On the Democratic side, Barack Obama could not have become president without winning Iowa (even though Hillary won New Hampshire the following week). But the Dems have given up on the caucuses since Iowa’s unbelievable screwup four years ago, when it could not pronounce a winner for days, depriving Pete Buttigieg of a media bump when he won a razor-thin victory.
The caucuses are just too damn complicated, requiring participants to show up at 7 p.m. on a wintry night for three hours of speechifying and voting.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
The argument for Iowa and New Hampshire, as one who has covered them since the ’90s, is that it gives candidates without much money or name recognition or establishment backing a chance to outwork better-known rivals through retail politics and get in the game. The voters in both states are incredibly dedicated and knowledgeable, and by now speak in perfect sound bites to reporters who grab them.
But one thing was certain heading into the caucuses: Trump has utterly changed the game.
