The Iowa caucuses get a lot of buzz in politics, but only because they go first. In the grand scheme of things, what happens in Iowa means almost nothing.
Yet for reasons of stupidity or bad political strategy, candidates seeking the Republican nomination for president dump a ton of money and hinge their fate on a state with a worse record for predicting winners than Dick Morris.
Given the history, you don’t even want to win Iowa if you want to win the nomination. You want a good showing, yes, but a victory brings with it a better chance you’ll flame out than that you’ll win.
If you go back to 1980, only two non-incumbent candidates won Iowa and went on to win the GOP nomination. Those were Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000. And only Bush went on to with the general election.
Every other time the Iowa winner has lost the nomination. This includes George H.W. Bush (1980), Bob Dole (1988), Mike Huckabee (2008), Rick Santorum (2012) and Ted Cruz (2016).
That’s a wasteland of losing candidacies.
For Democrats, things have been different. Five times in that period has the Iowa winner won the nomination — Walter Mondale (1984), Al Gore (2000), John Kerry (2004), Barack Obama (2008) and Hillary Clinton (2016) — with only two of them eventually winning the presidency.
Democrats can’t ignore Iowa, but as Pete Buttigieg can attest, anyone who bets the farm on it is destined to lose.
For Republicans, New Hampshire has a much better track record of boosting candidates to victory. Again since 1980, New Hampshire primary voters have successfully voted for the eventual Republican nominee five times when there was no incumbent Republican president on the ballot. Granite State primary voters picked Ronald Reagan (1980), George H. W. Bush (1988), John McCain (2008), Mitt Romney (2012) and Donald Trump (2016). Think what you will of those nominees, but the only way to win the presidency is to first win the nomination, and New Hampshire is much better than Iowa at choosing Republican winners.
(Curiously, on the Democratic side, the results are nearly the opposite, with New Hampshire primary voters only picking three eventual nominees in that period — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry — who all lost the general election.)
In spite of Iowa’s track record, we see a conga line of Republicans marching through the state every four years, appearing in diners and at fairs, eating deep-fried whatevers and burning up a huge pile of campaign cash trying to win what amounts to a giant bucket of fool’s gold.
Maybe this time it’s different. Maybe the campaign consultants they hire this year have a strategy that will somehow buck history and get them the nomination. But don’t hold your breath. Republican candidates need to show signs of life in Iowa, but the Republican field only gets weeded there, then plucked almost clean in New Hampshire. If you win Iowa, there’s nowhere to go but down, and history says that’s likely where you will go.
On the Democratic side, the opposite is true: Iowa is where it’s at. The momentum from a victory there can carry a candidate much further. Historically, after Iowa, Democrats get in line much more easily than Republicans do. But the party of individuality does not acquiesce to the caucus results.
The people of New Hampshire have different attitudes and interests than Iowans do, and that’s reflected in how they vote. A win in New Hampshire will carry you much further in the Republican primary than a win in Iowa. Whoever recognizes this sooner and campaigns accordingly will stand a better chance of winning the nomination, not just a corn-on-the-cob-eating championship and first prize for pancake-flipping.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).