We begin today’s roundup with Dana Milbank’s take at The Washington Post on the Republican results in yesterday’s Iowa caucuses:
The establishment struck back.
The headlines will show that Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, but the more significant message out of Iowa was that Marco Rubio was neck-and-neck with Donald Trump for second place and within a few points of the lead: It showed that mainstream Republicans are, at long last, pushing themselves back into the 2016 presidential race.
Over at CNN, Sally Cohn analyzes the results on the Democratic side:
Of course, Iowa is just Iowa, and is neither particularly large nor very representative of the rest of the country. The Democratic Party doesn't release the total number of caucusgoers, but on the Republican side, in his victory speech, Ted Cruz noted that 48,608 votes were cast in his favor. That's not a lot of people. And there aren't that many delegates at stake in Iowa. But what Iowa does mean is momentum. And coming out of the state, both Sanders and Clinton have it. [...] This is a long election (although not for Martin O'Malley, who said he will suspend his campaign). Iowa is over. The election isn't. And on the Democratic side, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have plenty of reasons to be encouraged going forward. Perhaps the biggest encouragement is coming from the Republican side, which seems increasingly inclined to nominate the likes of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, deeply troubling personalities who most polls show both Clinton and Sanders could handily beat.
Here’s John Cassidy’s analysis from The New Yorker on Clinton’s narrow edge over Sanders:
This result doesn’t mean that Hillary Clinton won’t win the nomination. Although she seems likely to lose again in New Hampshire next week, she remains a strong over-all favorite: on betting sites, even today, to win twenty dollars on Hillary emerging as the Democratic candidate, you would have to bet a hundred dollars. But for Clinton to unite her party and galvanize it for what could be a tough fight in the fall, she needs to find some way to appeal to the young, who have fastened onto Sanders’s anti-establishment message.
Emma Roller at The New York Times gives advice to candidates who didn’t win:
Candidates who underperformed in Iowa can find themselves in good company. In 1980, Ronald Reagan lost the caucuses to his future vice president, George H.W. Bush. Reagan later thanked Iowans for giving him the “kick in the pants” he needed to eventually win the nomination. And in 1992, Bill Clinton posted less than 3 percent of delegate support behind Iowa’s own Tom Harkin.
Then again — as Martin O’Malley and Mike Huckabee learned Monday — sometimes losing is just losing, and can mean it’s time to call it quits. Thankfully, misery loves company. [...]
Losing doesn’t have to be demoralizing, but it is instructive. And so, in good faith, here are some tips for candidates to pick themselves up and brush themselves off after being disappointed in Iowa. If anything, they can take heart in the fact that they have joined an illustrious cohort of rejects.
The editors at The Des Moines Register explain that Ted Cruz simply outworked Donald Trump in the state:
Trump’s showing in the Iowa caucus further cements the conventional wisdom surrounding the event, which basically says there are no shortcuts to being a contender here.
Traveling to every corner of the state and pressing the flesh in every small outpost doesn’t guarantee a victory or even a strong showing but, as Donald Trump learned Monday night, it’s still an essential ingredient to success.
Andrew Rothensal at The New York Times analyzes Donald Trump’s second-place finish and his speech last night:
It’s impossible to know whether Mr. Trump understands that his slack campaign organization in Iowa may have cost him dearly here.Kenneth P. Vogel of Politico said Mr. Trump spent almost as much on hats as he did on payroll.
Ever optimistic, Mr. Trump said he was on to New Hampshire, where he — of course — promised a big victory.
Iowa’s caucuses are nothing like New Hampshire’s primary, of course, but I wonder if we’ll see fewer Trump hats and more Trump volunteers and TV ads in New Hampshire.
The Los Angeles Times:
As much as he excites hard-right conservatives, Sen. Ted Cruz remains a problematic potential presidential nominee for many voters — includingRepublicans who want to win the White House in November. But even some of Cruz’s critics have reason to celebrate the Texas senator’s first-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. By denying Donald Trump a victory — by turning him into what he most despises, a loser — Cruz may have helped not only his party but also the country dodge a lethal bullet.
Amy Davidson at The New Yorker:
Trump came out after learning that he’d lost and talked about how “we’re just so happy with how it worked out.” Despite the impression he often gives, Trump has plenty of experience with losing, and with carrying on as if he had won. Sometimes, it works for him. It might in New Hampshire. The stubborn, multifarious uncertainty that various candidates are unelectable—especially the ones who are winning votes—will keep the race unsettled. Ted Cruz’s victory makes a brokered convention a little more likely. In December, Frank Bruni, of the Times, quoted someone who had worked with Cruz on George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign as saying, “Why do people take such an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? It just saves time.” If that is so, Cruz seems to have beat the clock in Iowa. And the Republican Party has a lot more time to waste.
Bryce Covert, economic policy editor at ThinkProgress, has an interesting take on the race at The New York Times:
[T]he largest difference between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders is not over policy [...] There is scant daylight between them on most issues and certainly almost all of the causes near and dear to Democrats’ and progressives’ hearts. The largest difference, and therefore what the Democratic Party is truly grappling with, is not about two different visions of the party. The choice is between two theories of change. It’s the difference between working the system and smashing it. [...]
The true contrasts are between what they want and what’s being proposed among Republicans, who want to hand tax cuts to the wealthy, repeal the Affordable Care Act and block most of what Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders support. Once the general election campaign begins, it will truly be a choice between clashing worldviews. Until then, Democratic primary voters are deciding between two theories of how to get things done.
Pat Garafalo at US News:
Regardless of who ultimately "wins," the delegates coming out of the Iowa caucuses will be essentially split. As political scientist Adam Schiffer wrote Monday in U.S. News, delegate count is the only score that matters now, so for all intents and purposes the game is tied, and that would have been true even if one candidate won by a point or two. There's a whole lot of race left, and a new slew of debates coming, so nothing is set in stone.
Perhaps then, the real winners on the evening were Democrats, writ large. Over on the Republican side, firebrand Sen. Ted Cruz – the recipient of almost universal loathing in Washington, but not, apparently, from primary voters – won the night, with the bombastic billionaire Donald Trump eking out a second place finish over Sen. Marco Rubio. Considering that establishment Democrats would likely prefer running against Cruz or Trump than Rubio – and that Rubio now needs to try to out-conservative Cruz in some places – that's a result that will have plenty of Democratic pols smiling.
On a final note, Cathleen Decker at The Los Angeles Times previews New Hampshire:
Cruz's surprise victory, Trump's shortfall and Rubio's notable finish -- and the tight Democratic race -- would be drama enough leading into New Hampshire, but the state’s history seems destined to add more before the Feb. 9 primary. New Hampshire often gives the back of the hand to Iowa’s winners, and the race is often decided by the state’s undeclared voters, the designation here for those not choosing either party.
More than 4 in 10 voters in the state are undeclared and can decide up to election day in which of the party primaries they will vote. That will give a boggling breadth to the get-out-the-vote efforts in New Hampshire by all of the campaigns.