Could 2016 be the year that Iowa's iron grip on the attention of our nation's political class begins to slacken? It's an odd thing to contemplate as the hundreds of Republicans running for president continue to make pilgrimages to Cedar Rapids and Dubuque and Council Bluffs, but there are signs that all kinds of interested parties are asking themselves whether the Iowa caucuses-a mere eight months away!-are really worth getting too worked up about.
People have been griping about the hallowed place of Iowa in the presidential election process ever since 1976, when an obscure former Georgia governor practically moved to the state and parlayed his win there into the Democratic nomination and then the presidency. But there are signs of a genuine rethinking underway.
Consider the Ames Straw Poll, a quadrennial hootenanny put on by the state's Republican party. As the first occasion at which people in Iowa do something that vaguely resembles voting, it has in the past gotten enormous attention from a political press starved for actual events to report on. But the straw poll is in trouble. Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, and Marco Rubio have announced that they won't bother competing, and other candidates like Scott Walker and Rand Paul have suggested they might not show either. As Robert Costa of the Washington Post put it last week, the straw poll "has faded into irrelevance," because "almost no one outside the fringes of the race believes a summertime victory would provide a meaningful jolt."
Why are candidates realizing that now? Put the blame on what happened four years ago. The 2011 event was won by Michele Bachmann, one of the most spectacular nincompoops American politics has produced in recent decades, who would go on to place sixth in the actual caucuses. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty overreacted to his third-place finish in the straw poll by dropping out of the race within hours, only to watch ridiculous candidates like Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain later become frontrunners (albeit briefly). No one could look back at those events and avoid the conclusion that the straw poll can't help you, and it can only hurt you if you let it.
Or how about Iowa's precious ethanol subsidies, nurtured and cared for by one Congress after another whose members hoped to compete in the caucuses one day? They expired in 2012. Ethanol still gets a boost from the Renewable Fuel Standard, which mandates that biofuels make up a portion of the nation's fuel supply, but Republicans who see that as big government overreach are willing to come out against it (Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal have opposed the RFS, and other candidates have been less than enthusiastic about it). In other words, competing for Iowa votes no longer means adopting every position Iowa farmers might want you to.
And why should it? Iowa is different from America in many ways, and its healthy population of farmers is one of the big ones, so it makes sense for candidates to be wary about going too far to win their votes. I'm as pro-food as the next person, but as a voting bloc, farmers are miniscule (while there was a time when most Americans were farmers, today less than one percent of us list farming as our occupation).
The caucuses may also be suffering from the increasing awareness that they don't have a particularly good track record at picking winners. While the image of Iowa as a kingmaker was sustained for a couple of decades by the story of how Jimmy Carter used his victory there like a spacecraft slingshotting around the moon, the last two Republican contests have undermined the idea that winning the caucuses gets you very much. Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008 couldn't get more than a temporary bump out of their wins in Iowa, mostly because their support was too confined to evangelical voters. Evangelicals have an outsized presence in Iowa; they made up 57 percent of Republican caucus attendees in 2012, compared to 43 percent of Mitt Romney's votes in the general election. Those elections may have taught the current candidates that while evangelical support is great to have, if that's all you've got you won't be the nominee.
That may be why Jeb Bush, who is most certainly not the evangelicals' candidate, seems so ambivalent about Iowa. One one hand, he says he's going to "campaign hard" there; on the other, as of a couple of weeks ago, Bush had only one staffer in the state. If and when he loses Iowa, Bush will inevitably dismiss the results-and he'll be right to do so.
If this awareness of the limits of what Iowa can tell us continues to spread, losing there may not be that big a deal. In the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll, Walker was leading the pack-but he had only 17 percent of the vote (Rand Paul and Ben Carson each had 10 percent, while Bush and Huckabee came in at 9 percent each). One or two candidates could pull farther ahead between now and next February, of course, but with the vote split so many ways, it will be hard to argue with the (second or third place) candidate who argues that winning one out of five Iowa caucus attendees doesn't exactly give the guy who came out on top an unstoppable momentum.
Iowa will continue to be the first presidential primary contest (it's written into state law), and as long as that's true it will get an unusual amount of attention from both candidates and the journalists who cover them. But if that attention is tempered by a little perspective, in the form of an understanding that the caucuses aren't the be-all and end-all so many have believed them to be for so long, it would be healthy for all of us.
