Winners and losers from Iowa, ranked:
Ted Cruz: The big winner, obviously. Because Cruz didn’t just stake his campaign on Iowa, he vanquished the ogre. And the win is much more important because Cruz had to take the state back from Trump. Cruz can now legitimately claim to be the Donaldslayer. It also validates his organization, his data operation, and his GOTV plans. All in all, Cruz couldn’t have asked for a better night.
Except for one thing: His victory speech was a trainwreck. It was 32 minutes long when Fox cut away from it—the other networks bailed earlier, when Clinton came out to talk. All of these speeches have to thank campaign surrogates and wives and whatnot—that’s part of the deal—but they are primarily vehicles to introduce the candidate to a giant audience of people who may never have seen him before. So you have to make a pitch. Barack Obama executed this to perfection in 2008. He did it in 13 concise, dramatic minutes.
Marco Rubio: Rubio didn’t win anything tonight. Remember: His job is to beat Christie-Kasich-Bush in New Hampshire. That’s it. But tonight’s very strong showing should help in that task. He showed that he’s a vote-getter, which goes to the heart of concerns about electability. And if you’re looking for a candidate who can stop Trump (and Cruz isn’t your cup of tea), Rubio’s Iowa finish suggests that he’s going to be up to that challenge, too. After all, he almost beat the big guy heads-up even with another 9 percent of the vote scattered among Fiorina, Bush, Christie, and Kasich.
Rubio wanted to be just below par in a three-man race after New Hampshire. The Iowa results suggest that if he handles his business next week and the field consolidates, his position in the final three should actually be quite strong.
Hillary Clinton: It’s the ugliest, least decisive win imaginable. Clinton seems—at least as of this writing—to have beaten Bernie Sanders by a very, very small margin, essentially by leaning into the tape. This is bad news for all sorts of reasons: She shouldn’t be struggling just to hit 50 percent; she and Sanders take away basically the same number of delegates; and when you looked at their victory rallies, Clinton was shrill and robotic—it was a terribly delivered speech—while Sanders was his usual fiery self. And all the energy was with Sanders people.
But on the other hand, it was (probably!) a win. His campaign is such a longshot that to even have a chance to win the nomination, he needs to run the table in winnable states. And not only did she win, but she won with the sort of high turnout that was supposed to guarantee a Sanders victory. Unless something (like an indictment) unsettles the race, you can now see a path forward where Clinton has ups-and-down—she won’t run the table—but in the end should be positioned to secure the nomination.
Bernie Sanders: On the one hand, he’s just happy to be here. On the other hand, he let Clinton off the hook. You half expected some version of “she is who we thought she was.”
Had Sanders won, there would have been genuine panic in the Democratic establishment and he could have gone looking to bring an establishment Democrat—maybe Elizabeth Warren?—off the bench to try to start a stampede away from Clinton as he moved to consolidate the victory with a New Hampshire win. Now, that’s just a dream. And Sanders has to decide what he’s willing to do in order to win. Because to have a shot, he’ll have to change the dynamic of the race. Which means trying to disqualify Clinton with Democratic voters.
Donald Trump: Whatever else you want to say about Trump, there’s this: He was never a good fit for Iowa, but instead of playing the expectations game, or skipping and banking on New Hampshire, Trump came to Iowa and competed. Good for him. Also good was his concession speech, which was mellow and actually kind of sweet.
There ends the good news. Trump imploded. It wasn’t like the Howard Dean collapse of 2004. But it was a reassertion of the laws of politics. You can’t have negatives as high as Trump’s and succeed. You can’t replace infrastructure with a Twitter account. You can’t predicate your campaign on winning, because if you’re not winning, then you have no rationale for your campaign. Now that Cruz and Rubio are news for getting actual votes, we’re about to see what happens when Trump’s free-media advantage equilibrates. And after that, we’re going to see what happens when Trump has to deal with attack ads.
The biggest concern for Trump is that he got the increased turnout he wanted, but it didn’t matter. The new voters—and especially the late-breaking voters—went against him.
The big problem for Trump coming out of Iowa isn’t that he barely held on to second place. It’s that his theory of the race was that This Time Is Different. And instead, for the first vote, at least, this time looks a lot like a normal political cycle.
