Iowa Caucus: The Democrats
CAPTAIN ED BLOG
By Ed Morrissey on 2008

Hillary Clinton has run into a serious buzz saw on her way to the coronation. Not only did she not win the state, but she lost to the wrong candidate. Barack Obama now threatens to steal away a nomination that the Clintons thought they had in the bank less than three months ago.

Clinton would have had a tough time winning Iowa in any case. The populist appeal of John Edwards always figured to take some significant support away from Hillary. However, a second-place finish to Edwards would not have had much impact on her campaign, because Edwards has little appeal outside of the populist Midwest. She could easily have survived that kind of loss, without even considering it a bump in the road.

Instead, Barack Obama beat both of them, and that's an ill portent for Hillary's march to the nomination. Obama beat Hillary in a state that has a very small African-American demographic; he won not by playing the race card, but by simply offering a departure from Clintonian politics. That victory will resonate in New Hampshire, where Obama already has her in a dead heat, but also in the following states.

Even worse, Hillary finished in third place, behind Edwards, after working the state hard for the past three weeks. Edwards, meanwhile, didn't improve over his performance in 2004. He wound up actually two points lower, 30% as opposed to 32%. Hillary couldn't take advantage of the decline, and trailing a stagnating Edwards won't give Democratic primary voters any confidence in her ability to beat Obama, let alone a Republican in November.

Hillary has reaped the harvest of two months of self-inflicted wounds, starting with her collapse on drivers licenses for illegal aliens, and through some bizarre attacks on Barack Obama in the aftermath. The question will be whether she can recover from the rapid decline. The answer: she's no Bill Clinton.

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Iowa Caucus: The Republicans

By Ed Morrissey on 2008

This started off sounding like the Super Bowl -- the big-money Immovable Object meeting the grassroots Unstoppable Force. Iowans turned it into the usual kind of Super Bowl, a laugher, as Mike Huckabee stunned Mitt Romney with a nine-point win. Huckabee beat Romney by a much wider margin than anyone predicted, even larger than the five-point gap that I posted earlier this evening.

What does this mean for Romney? It's a body blow. He spent somewhere between $8-9 million and came up far short of a victory. That directly reflects on his next race, where John McCain has taken the lead in his backyard. If he can't do any better against McCain than he did against Huckabee, Republican voters will rightly question whether Romney can win anywhere, even with the huge funding advantage he has had.

If McCain wins in New Hampshire, Romney has serious problems, but it assists the other 50-state candidate: Rudy Giuliani. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Giuliani was smart enough not to waste time in Iowa, and he won't tangle in New Hampshire, either. If Romney gets derailed, it leaves the Super Tuesday field open to Giuliani, who already has leads in the big coastal states. He's an experienced campaigner, and this Romney loss validates his strategy.

Fred Thompson and John McCain, at this moment, still struggle for third place. McCain just needed a significant showing for his upcoming battle in New Hampshire, but Thompson needed a third-place finish just to keep his credibility alive. It looks like he did that, and conservatives who had made a mad rush to help him stay afloat in the last two weeks have longer to build momentum for him. If they can make a big push in South Carolina, he could get back in the race -- but that also helps Giuliani.

Finally, Ron Paul did a respectable 10% in this race -- not bad, but no better than fifth place. The Paul supporters who kept insisting that their man had been victimized by pollsters conspiring to make him look weak in the race will have to explain away a fifth-place finish in a field of seven, only beating Giuliani because he didn't bother to campaign there. A 10% finish won't derail either John McCain or Mitt Romney in New Hampshire. In fact, both men may need to worry about Mike Huckabee, and Romney more than McCain.