Handicapping the Iowa Caucus

With two weeks and two days remaining before thousands of Iowans descend on their local caucuses, it seems as good a time as any to peer into the "Le Tas & Me" crystal ball and take a whack at the pivotal upcoming primary.

The past few weeks have been predictably turbulent for the front-runners. Hillary Clinton, heretofore undeterred by the increasingly vehement (if not always high-minded) assaults by the struggling John Edwards, has fallen in the Iowa polls, mostly to the benefit of her underspoken rival, Barack Obama. While the Des Moines Register endorsement surely can't hurt Clinton in the next sixteen days, she's unlikely to able to recover her once-secure front-runner status unless and until she wins on January 3rd. Perhaps less expectedly, Mitt Romney has taken a serious beating from Mike Huckabee, whose stellar debate performances have wowed a Republican base with unusually low expectations of the candidate field. The last four polls of Iowa Republicans all show Huckabee in the lead, by an average of 10.7%--and this excluding the December 7th Newsweek poll that put Huckabee at a startling 22 point advantage.

But the real story isn't even that of these newfangled front-runners; the open secret of the Iowa caucus is that it will be decided, in any close race, by the second-place preferences of those "marginal voters" who initially select a candidate who can't crack 15% statewide. In the Republican camp, according to the aforementioned composite of recent polls, some 30.8% of the electorate is scattered between Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain, and Ron Paul, none of whom is likely to meet the 15% threshold. (We can expect the level of support for these second-tier candidates to drop as the caucuses approach, but it wouldn't be unusual to find a fifth or a quarter of all voters ultimately casting their primary ballots for candidates who each fall short of 15%.) In these cases, the supporters of a "non-viable" (sub-15%) candidate can switch their support to a "viable" candidate, or to another non-viable candidate they hope to make viable.

But while there is a striking degree of dissension in the Republican field, and so many second-choice votes to be courted by top-tier candidates, there is no obvious substitute for any of the candidates currently polling below 15%. John McCain's supporters, assuming they support the President's Iraq strategy, may gravitate more naturally to Romney than to Huckbee, while Thompson supporters, who may chafe at Huckabee's support for social programs, may chafe much more at the thought of voting for a Mormon. And although the residual supporters of Paul and Giuliani are less likely to hold religious affiliation against their second-choice pick, Paul supporters are likely too critical of the war to vote for Romney, while Giuliani supporters might be put off by the free-spending, "compassionate" accommodationalism associated with the former Governor of Arkansas. If all this is right--and it's quite the "if"--we can imagine the supporters of non-viable candidates dispersing fairly evenly between the two front-runners, leaving Huckabee victorious. An uphill battle he then will have to climb.

On the Democratic side, however, it's almost certain three candidates will clear the 15% bar, with all the rest falling considerably short. In recent surveys, only Richardson (with an average of 7%) and Biden (with an average of 4.3%) ever surpass the polls' margins of error. Two months ago, it might have seemed obvious that Richardson, who has most vocally defended Senator Clinton in the debates (perhaps in search of the vice presidency), would send his supporters to Hillary's camp; by the same token, we might suppose that Biden's supporters are sticking with him because of his experience and foreign-policy expertise--two categories in which Clinton enjoys a perceived advantage over Edwards and Obama, often cast as greenhorns on the big issues of war and terrorism. But despite these compelling reasons, and even in light of the Register's disappointingly bland endorsement of Senator Clinton, we would venture the proposition that these few residual Democratic ballots are in fact Senator Obama's to lose.

For one thing, Obama has been on a two-week-long media cruise, which has effectively eliminated from public view the unseemly comparison Senator Clinton's campaign was working to draw between the two candidates' health care plans. More than this, though, it seems fair to say at this point that most supporters of "establishment" candidates like Dodd or Biden who have not already shifted their allegiance to Hillary Clinton are unlikely to do so on January 3rd: they appreciate experience, preparedness, toughness, and other putatively Clintonesque traits, but find themselves in that well-populated category of voters who (for one reason or another) can't stand her, don't trust her, or both. The same analysis holds a fortiori for supporters of Bill Richardson, who has rendered himself practically indistinguishable from Senator Clinton on all major policy positions except Iraq, where he advocates a complete, unconditional, and swift withdrawal--hardly friendly territory for Hillary Clinton. And if Iowans have seen all they need to see from Senator Clinton, they must have an acute sense of over-saturation when it comes to John Edwards, who has hardly left the state since declaring his candidacy for President in 2003, and who has spent more money and flexed more organizational muscle in Iowa than any candidate in this election cycle, Republican or Democrat. His persistent attacks on Hillary Clinton have lured a significant swath of voters away from her, to be sure, but they have yet to bring his poll numbers up at all.

It may be, of course, that the Register endorsement puts an end to Obama's December-long surge, nudging undecided voters toward the insider candidacy, to the safe-bet conventionalism, the foregone conclusion of a nominee that is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Indeed, in the last presidential election, as Democrats ran scared, the allure of unprincipled compromise was too great to resist. Here's to hoping they learned their lesson.