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Iowa Caucuses: Money Triumphs Over Ideology

Daniel Berman says conventional wisdom will triumph in the Republican Primary race.

By Daniel Berman

1 Jan 2012, 14:17

 

Of all the questions that dogged this year’s race for the Republican Nomination, the key one for a long time seemed to be how the power of Tea Party and a newly ascendant Right would shape the GOP primaries. After seeing candidates with little experience, money or organization like Christine O’Donnell and Joe Miller upset long-time GOP stalwarts in the Delaware and Alaska Senate races last year, there was a strong feeling that rules were different. It was argued that money, organization, and establishment support would not matter as much as ideological passion and the Obama campaign seemed for some time to bet their reelection strategy on just such an assurance. With one weekend remaining, the answer seems to be in, and organization and money have defeated ideological conformity and political anger. Nothing illustrates this better than the fall of Newt Gingrich’s campaign.

At the beginning of December I posed the question as to whether Newt Gingrich could win the nomination. In hindsight, the better question would have been whether Newt Gingrich could whether the 15 million dollars in negative ads that were heading his way in Iowa, and transform himself and his campaign into something that it hitherto had not been; a serious effort to win the Republican nomination for the Presidency.

The answer to both appears to be NO. The Gingrich campaign, after a week of staffers bragging to the media about raising millions , has crashed miserably, failing to gain ballot access in the state of Virginia, and is unable to run more than a scattering of low-cost ads. In Iowa meanwhile, where Gingrich led a mere two weeks ago, his poll numbers have cratered under a barrage of attacks from the campaigns of Mitt Romney and Ron Paul,  the two of whom are now locked in a battle for the lead.

The winner of that battle for first in Iowa will in one way or another almost certainly be Mitt Romney. A victory in Iowa, which the most recent poll PPP poll indicates is a possibility, he will then cruise to an inevitable victory in New Hampshire, and likely enter the south with enough momentum to triumph over a divided conservative opposition. A second place finish for Paul in this scenario would all but guarantee that no single anti-Romney alternative would emerge, incentivizing Perry, Santorum, and Gingrich to all remain in the race in the hope of winning in South Carolina. The likely result would be a Romney victory, perhaps with a figure as low as the 33% of the vote McCain won in 2008. Having won South Carolina, Romney would assuredly win Florida, and end the race on Super Tuesday.

A Paul victory in Iowa would be almost as beneficial from the perspective of Team Romney. Paul is not a viable candidate for the GOP nomination nationally, with polls showing that as much as two-thirds of the GOP electorate would never vote for him under any circumstances. Yet by winning Iowa and the momentum such a win would endow, he would simultaneously discredit the legitimacy of Romney’s loss there, and prevent any other, more dangerous opponent from gaining that momentum. A clear third might potentially carry someone like Gingrich or Perry to competiveness in South Carolina, but without media exposure from either Iowa or New Hampshire it is likely that any such candidate would not establish themselves as a viable alternative until far too late.

The irony of this situation, that the two most likely outcomes in Iowa both lead to an easy and almost uncontested Romney nomination highlight one of the great stories of this campaign.  For all of the talk about the front-loaded primary schedule, and the merits of changing the nomination system, at the end of the day the voting may not matter in the slightest. Every major shift in the course of this campaign, the rises and falls of Michelle Bachman, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain, the implosion of Rick Perry, all occurred as a product of debates without any actual input from actual voters. The winner of the Ames Straw Poll, Michelle Bachman is a non-factor. The winner of the Florida Republican Party’s straw poll, Herman Cain has withdrawn from the race. The winner of the Iowa Caucus will almost certainly win with less than 30%, if not less than 25%, and the presumptive nominee has not led a single poll in South Carolina, which every successful Republican nominee has won since 1980.

It would of course be a mistake to be too quick to pronounce the campaign finished and done – but the reality is that in recent years the trench warfare between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has been the exception rather than the rule. John Kerry was the clear frontrunner after Iowa, and the presumptive nominee after New Hampshire in 2004, notwithstanding John Edwards desperate stand in South Carolina. Bush won the nomination in South Carolina in 2000, while all the ingredients were in place for a McCain victory in 2008 after Huckabee defeated Romney in Iowa, notwithstanding McCain’s own 4^th place showing.

If anything, the underlying characteristics of this year’s pool of Republican candidates make clear exactly how unlikely it was that this year’s campaign would be a long run. Of the GOP candidates, only three raised any serious amount of money, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Ron Paul, and of those Ron Paul was not in the game, while the vast majority of Rick Perry’s haul came in his 15 million dollar quarter that followed his entry when he was the frontrunner. Once Perry was banished, Romney, who has raised close to eighty million this year including “Superpacs” faced a field of candidates who struggled to approach ten million for the year. The simple fact is that while the polls and media may have been undecided, those in the know, the major GOP donors, were not in doubt from the start. And the simple fact is that after Perry imploded, no one had the financial resources to compete even if they somehow gained the poll numbers, as Newt Gingrich’s sad tenure as pin cushion for attack ads during his time as “frontrunner” demonstrated.

This same situation makes it unlikely that even in the event of an upset anyone else will be able to consolidate on it. The true message of the GOP Primary Campaign of 2011 is that if the Tea Party subverted everything experts thought they knew about American politics in 2010, that year was an aberration. In the end, the battle in Iowa has come down to the two candidates with both actual campaigns and money, and one of them cannot win the nomination.