First was turnout.
238,000 people turned out on a cold night in Iowa to participate in the Democratic caucus, and 120,000 did the same for the Republican caucus. This is the highest turnout for a caucus in Iowa ever, sharply higher than 2004 which was also considered a high turnout. That is 66% Democrat to 34% Republican. Compare this to the Presidential vote (much easier to cast) in 2004. Bush ( R) got 751,957 and Kerry (D) got 741,898 – 50% Republican and 49 % Democratic. The caucuses involved almost one-fourth the total number of voters who voted in the 2004 Presidential election in Iowa. Almost a quarter of the caucus-goers were new voters under age 30, the potential voters who rarely vote. The caucus-goers in Iowa told us that this Presidential election matters, and they also said that they strongly preferred the Democrats.
Second. Who won.
First the Republicans. From Washington Post
| Candidate | Votes | Percent |
| Mike Huckabee | 39,814 | 34% |
| Mitt Romney | 29,405 | 25% |
| Fred Thompson | 15,521 | 13% |
| John McCain | 15,248 | 13% |
| Ron Paul | 11,598 | 10% |
| Rudy Giuliani | 4,013 | 3% |
| Duncan Hunter | 515 | 0% |
| Tom Tancredo | 5 | 0% |
Message and native skill as a politician trumped money. Both Romney and Clinton tried to buy the caucuses. Each spent a great deal of money. It didn't work. In the Republican Party, Huckabee strongly defeated Romney, even though Huckabee ran his campaign on a shoestring. Huckabee is clearly a gifted politician. He ran on his Republican evangelist message, but he also ran on a strong populist, anti-corporate message that the Wall Street dominated Republican establishment finds quite abhorrent.
Then the Democrats. Also from The Washington Post.
| Candidate | Votes | Percent |
| Barack Obama | 940 | 38% |
| John Edwards | 744 | 30% |
| Hillary Clinton | 737 | 29% |
| Bill Richardson | 53 | 2% |
| Joe Biden | 23 | 1% |
| Uncommitted | 3 | 0% |
| Chris Dodd | 1 | 0% |
| Mike Gravel | 0 | 0% |
| Dennis Kucinich | 0 | 0% |
| Other | 0 | 0% |
The Democrats report the estimated number of delegates each candidate is expectent to send to the state convention rather than the number of individuals who voted for the candidate. Iowa Democratic Party Rules. The caucuses also have a 15% threshold. If there are not at least 15% of the caucus-goers at a given precinct in favor of a candidate, that candidate gets no delegates and the individuals supporting that candidate can choose to support another candidate. Caucus-goers who would have supported Richardson or Biden were reported to switch to Obama rather than Clinton or Edwards.
The results in the Democratic Party caucuses appear to have been similar to the results in the Republicans except that while the underfunded clearly populist anti-corporate candidate, John Edwards, defeated the well-financed establishment candidate, Hillary, the gifted politician was Obama. Obama offered a message that it was time for change, but that change was not made explicit and he worked hard to offer change without blaming anyone for the problems America has. It looks like the Iowa voters indicated by the relative turnout that were ready for a change in which party has the Presidency, but that another change they wanted was to eliminate the nastiness which has dominated Washington since the 1990's. So they voted for Obama. However, the great spread between Obama and both Edwards and Clinton represents an unknown number of second choices by individuals who initially preferred Biden or Richardson. That they did not switch to Clinton again points to the general caucus-goer demand for change away from the establishment. Many of those second-choicers may not be firm Obama supporters. Still, they may be firm opponents of Hillary, and the bandwagon effect may keep them with Obama even as it attracts more Democrats to his side.
So the caucus-goers in both parties rejected the establishment candidates and ignored the money that was being spent to go either for the populist or the gifted politician.
What has the Press gotten out of this?
From what I saw last night, the Press didn't know what to make of the caucus results, and today they are trying hard to place those results in the mostly horse-race political coverage they are used to. The outcome was a shock, and very few reporters seem to have picked up yet even this morning that this is going to be a big change election. In a regular election, all they have to do is routinely report the horse-race numbers of polls and money raised because the basic attitudes of the voters are much like they were in the previous elections. Iowa is a signal that this is not the case for 2008. But what do the reporters, most of whom were not reporting in 1980, do when all the basic rules are changing? What do they report on? At the moment is it all attempts to place the Iowa results into the horse-race formats they understand.
I think there are two big changes, though.
The Reagan Revolution has crashed and is burning.
The first issue is that the Reagan revolution has run its course. The idea that government is the problem, not the solution and we will all get rich if the government will quit trying to force businesses to behave in socially acceptable ways has been tried for a generation. Government no longer regulates interest rates so usury has become normal banking and bankruptcy has become more difficult. No one regulated mortgages, so now the mortgage market has collapsed, the general credit market has collapse, and homes are being foreclosed at a rate not seen since the Depression. Working Americans have not gotten effective raises in pay as they became more productive, but the managers have been making out like bandits from the additional profits the corporations made. CEO's get multi-million dollar bonuses for driving their companies into bankruptcy (Circuit City), while they also send American jobs to Mexico and China. Managers refuse to even deal with unions - the Producers walked out of talks with the Writers Guild and haven't been back for three months. The workers have not in their life-times had such uncertain lives, while the top managers get paid for doing nothing. The uncertainty that is the American lack-of-system for providing health care speaks for itself. Edwards and Huckabee have both been running on this populist response to the corporate-government disaster that our economy has become for most workers.
American voters hate the nasty negativism of politicians
The second issue is the one that both Obama and Huckabee are running on - the polarized politics in Washington. The American public is suffering through the extreme economic and social uncertainties that are too big to be handled by individual workers and they expect their representatives in government, and they watch as the corporations decide how to get even richer off the problems while the Republicans and Democrats sit in Washington and call each other names instead of doing something to solve the national problems. The K-Street Project made it perfectly clear that the American government belongs to the corporations who are screwing the American workers over every way possible, and the two political parties either participate in the screwing over of the American people or just yell at each other ineffectually. They don't solve problems. Instead they create them.
Sometime today the members of the punditocracy will begin to get these two stories correct. But that's just the result as of today!
What next
The next really big event is February 5 when 24 states hold primaries or caucuses. But between today and Feb 5 we have:
January
05 Sat Wyoming (Republican only)
08 Tues New Hampshire
15 Tues Michigan
19 Sat Nevada
19 Sat South Carolina (Republican)
26 Sat South Carolina (Democrat)
29 Tues Florida
February
01 Fri Maine
These are all relatively small, but the Press is going to be trying to figure out what Iowa means, and those are the best place to search. What I think we will see is the populist message and the demand for change with civility are going to be battling with the forces for the establishment. Since the Press is part of the establishment and hates being wrong, they will try to push the results towards those desired by the political establishment. Since the January events will all be small and mostly arcane, the populist message will be suppressed. They frighten the establishment a great deal.
Then there will be the 24 states on February 5th. The establishment will dominate that because money will dominate that. Both Edwards add Huckabee are underfunded for the February 5th events. Can they get the populist message out? I doubt it.
I can't guess who will be the Republican nominee, but we will know on February 6th. I suspect, though that Iowa will give Obama the funds he needs for February 5th, and since he is not one of those scary populists who frighten the establishment Press, he will get the mantle of the Hillary stopper. So we will know the shape of the 2008 Presidential election by early February. My best guess (right now) is that it will be Obama for the Democrats and a nominee yet to be named for the Republicans. Let's see how McCain and Huckabee do in New Hampshire. It's do-or-die for Mitt Romney, and I think we can write Rudy off.
So that's my take on the results of last night's Iowa caucuses. In 33 days we'll know how right I am.
Addendum 3:04 PM CST
Josh Marshall has posted an interesting email from someone in Iowa.
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