Donald Trump‘s campaign team and both left-leaning and right-leaning media painted the former President’s Iowa caucus victory as a political return of epic proportions. The easy win over three volunteer GOP submissives brought headlines for Trump’s social media scrapbook, as CNN lighted up ‘Trump 2’ with this: Trump’s landslide Iowa win is a stunning show of strength after leaving Washington in disgrace.
Yet Trump’s win — seen through the light of certain data — looks more like what Shakespeare called “sound and fury,” signifying if not nothing then far too little about the future to warrant such emphatic conclusions.
What the Iowa Caucus did signify — indeed it proved beyond a doubt — is that Trump could marshal around 51% of the caucus voters in deeply conservative Iowa, where 98% of caucusgoers are white, 59% support a total abortion ban, and 66% of those polled believe that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
Is 51% of the vote, on low voter turnout, with a total of about 56K votes, a good result for Trump?
Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman — long an anti-Trumper — believes Trump’s winning just 50% of the hardcore Iowa Republican voters who turned out — a number which itself was just under 15% of the state’s 752,000 registered Republicans — is a datapoint that spells trouble for a “vulnerable” Trump, rather than a performance on which the former President can stake his claim to the nomination.
Vindman’s point — like all interpreted data — must be taken with at least a grain of salt, of course, since as the Nobel Laureate and economist Ronald Coase (1910-2013) famously said: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”
[Note: it has been 24 years — since George W. Bush in 2000 — since the winner of the Iowa Caucus became the Republican nominee.]
.@realDonaldTrump looks very vulnerable. It’s just a single datapoint, but this spells disaster for him in a general election. Almost 50% of a hardcore Republican electorate is not interested in what he’s pedaling. Not sure why the media is missing this.
— Alexander S. Vindman ❎ (@AVindman) January 16, 2024
A second datapoint, involving the 19% of Iowa Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley, also looks problematic for Trump, making his victory look perhaps weaker than it seems when considering Trump won 98 of 99 Iowa counties.
As journalist Kyle Griffin reports below, a Des Moines Register poll revealed that nearly 43% of Nikki Haley’s backers say they’d “vote for President Biden over Donald Trump.” The result, if reliable, is notable since Iowa GOP caucusgoers are historically not known to give consideration to candidates from other parties.
Nearly half of Nikki Haley's backers in the latest Des Moines Register poll — 43% — say they'd vote for President Biden over Donald Trump.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 14, 2024
[NOTE: CNN, on the other hand, spoke with numerous Haley backers who — if she were to “get out of the way” — would vote for Trump in a national election.]
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