The photo finish in tonight’s caucuses shows the folly of trying to pick winners in the presidential race before a single vote is cast.
The top three spots in the caucuses were claimed by candidates who were once considered to have little or no chance of winning Iowa.
Romney, the winner of the GOP caucus by just eight votes and the national front-runner, was seen as too moderate on issues such as health care and not likely to attract the support of key religious leaders. Rick Santorum started the race with few resources and weak prospects. Ron Paul’s third-place finish, bolstered by an infusion of young voters and first-time caucusgoers, underscored the diversity of opinion in Iowa’s GOP precincts.
Santorum, riding a wave of momentum that the Register’s Iowa Poll identified starting just days ago, surpassed the mark set by the final pre-caucus polls. The former Pennsylvania senator not only exceeded expectations, he blew them away against better-organized and better-funded campaigns. Game on, indeed.
“He did it the old-fashioned way,” Gov. Terry Branstad said in an interview with WHO-TV. Santorum dominated in western Iowa and other rural districts, where neither Romney nor Paul spent much time. Romney was leading in most of the state’s metro areas.
Santorum deserves the attention he’ll get as the winner of the expectations game. The tradition of Iowa as a bastion of face-to-face campaigning will be valuable as long as Americans care about preserving the idea that anyone – not just the independently wealthy and famous – can become president.
Romney’s mostly absentee campaign strained that idea. He appeared in Iowa only 19 days during the campaign, seeming to underscore the media narrative that the religious conservatives had the state sewn up.
That brand of conventional wisdom turned to Romney’s advantage. Religious conservative candidates stampeded into Iowa, hoping to be the next Mike Huckabee. The strongest competitor for moderate Republicans and independents, Utah’s Jon Huntsman, opted to skip Iowa. Newt Gingrich, after a late-November rally, fell under a barrage of negative ads. The division of the evangelical vote gave Romney the advantage as the only mainstream alternative for fiscally focused Republicans.
Romney spent more time in New Hampshire, but he didn’t entirely neglect the Hawkeye State. He built a well-seasoned and aggressive Iowa campaign operation, which helped maintain support from his fans. It also tirelessly and effectively pummeled Romney’s foes, especially Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich.
In the final weeks of the campaign, he took the obligatory bus tour across Iowa, pressing home his message that he’s the candidate most capable of beating Barack Obama. In the Register’s Iowa Poll released Saturday, Romney was the candidate considered most electable in the general election by 48 percent of caucusgoers.
However, candidates who might see Romney as a model for future campaigns should think twice. Romney could never have pulled off an arm’s-length campaign had he not spent an enormous amount of time and money on his Iowa effort in 2008. Santorum’s late surge, attributed in part to his dogged courting of Iowans on a shoestring budget, also reinforces Iowa’s status as a place where money is secondary to personal appeal.
The experience of Romney and Santorum should make candidates reconsider the wisdom of spilling out their campaign treasuries to compete for the Iowa Straw Poll. Romney maintained his status in the polls without participating in the resource-draining mock vote. Santorum finished far back in the pack.
That’s not the only reason the straw poll, a party fundraiser, has seen its status diminish. The winner of the event, Michele Bachmann, was immediately eclipsed by the entry of Perry into the race. Tim Pawlenty, who dropped out after a disappointing third-place finish, later lamented that he had bailed out too soon.
Pawlenty’s experience reinforces Iowa’s status as a winnower of candidates, but it also may make tonight’s losers slower to surrender. The fabled three tickets out of Iowa have been elastic in the past and may stretch even more this year.
Bachmann, who finished sixth, is the most vulnerable in terms of money. But she has already announced campaign stops in South Carolina. Gingrich, who finished fourth after being bloodied by negative advertising, has already resurrected his campaign once. It appears he’ll try to repeat the stunt in the next debates. Perry, in fifth place, seemed to be considering the exit. But there have been enough premature obituaries written in this campaign, you won’t read another one in this space.
What we can nail into its coffin is the stereotype of the Iowa caucuses as a pup tent open only to a narrow segment of voters. Rest in peace.
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