West Des Moines, Iowa
All of the televisions in the Sheraton ballroom at Donald Trump’s caucus watch party were turned to CNN when the news arrived a little after 9:00 p.m. local time. With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Trump was going to lose the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz by 4 percentage points and finish just 1 point ahead of Marco Rubio. One Trump supporter simply raised his hands to shield his eyes from the TV. The crowd remained mostly quiet.
As a trickle of Trump supporters began to leave the ballroom, there were a few misty eyes but no histrionics. Many simply didn’t want to talk about Trump’s loss. But those who did seemed to take the defeat in stride. “I actually thought Trump would probably win. I didn’t expect Cruz to get as big a lead as he has. I was a little disappointed,” said Anne Wolf of Des Moines. When Marco Rubio began to speak on TV, there were loud cheers and applause for Trump’s rival as he attacked Hillary Clinton and said she was “disqualified” from being commander in chief. Trump himself struck a gracious tone in his concession speech, calling it an honor to come in second. He reiterated his love for Iowa and joked that he still wanted to buy a farm there. The loss must have stung, but Trump denied his opponents the sight of a “Dean scream” meltdown.
What went wrong for Trump? Iowa state senator Brad Zaun, the only elected official in the state who endorsed Trump, wasn’t entirely sure. “It was frustrating that we couldn’t do the full Grassley,” Zaun said, referring to the Iowa GOP senator’s practice of visiting all 99 counties. “We couldn’t find venues big enough in these smaller communities to hold these events.”
Did the Sarah Palin endorsement hurt or help? “I don’t think it made any difference,” Zaun replied. He added that he was entirely confident that the votes had been counted accurately.
Many analysts assumed that a huge turnout would mean a Trump blowout. The turnout record on the GOP side was indeed shattered as more than 180,000 Iowans went to the Republican. The previous Republican record was 2012 when about 120,000 voted.
What most analysts and pollsters got wrong is that they believed a big turnout would mean an electorate with a smaller percentage of evangelical Christians.
In 2012, 57 percent of Iowa GOP caucusgoers were evangelical Christians, but the final Des Moines Register poll that showed Trump winning indicated that only 47 percent of 2016 caucusgoers would be evangelical Christians. “When re-weighted as a scenario test for the higher evangelical turnout seen in 2012 entrance polls, the race is closer, with 26 percent for Trump and 25 percent for Cruz,” Bloomberg reported. In fact, according to the entrance poll, evangelicals made up 64 percent of the 2016 electorate.
And that pretty much explains Cruz’s victory. He won 34 percent of evangelicals, while Trump won 22 percent and Rubio won 21 percent. Among the 36 percent of caucusgoers who aren’t evangelicals, Trump took 29 percent, Rubio took 26 percent, and Cruz took 18 percent.
Rubio did best among the 21 percent of voters who identified electability as their top candidate quality, while Donald Trump cleaned up among the 14 percent who most wanted a candidate who “tells it like it is” and the 21 percent who want a candidate who can bring needed change. But Cruz romped among the 42 percent of caucusgoers said that the top quality in a candidate was that he “shares my values.”
In the end, Iowa values won after all.
