5 takeaways

5 takeaways from the Iowa caucuses

Cruz outfoxed Trump, Clinton showed her soft underbelly, and Rubio flashed greatness.

By Glenn Thrush

Here’s one little 2016 tradition that should bite the dust after Monday night: Donald Trump’s giddy recitation of the public polling showcasing his supremacy over the lesser, more vulnerable candidates in his party.

The Iowa polls — which showed him with a big edge in Monday’s caucuses — turned out to be worse than meaningless, and the bully billionaire nearly slipped to third place behind Ted Cruz and a suddenly surging Marco Rubio. Trump is not exactly known for his shame — but he isn’t keen on ridicule, so he’ll have to figure out some other way to while away the time at his big rallies, if the rallies aren’t quite as well attended as they were before he became, well, a loser.

Here are five other takeaways from the eventful and unexpected Iowa caucuses that have shifted the dynamics of the 2016 race in both parties.

1. Meet Ted Cruz, your new front-runner. The Texas tea party favorite has run a nearly flawless three-step campaign: 1) Keep out of Trump’s way to avoid the incessant abuse; 2) quietly marshal the support of evangelical voters; and 3) offer targeted attacks on Trump late in the caucus campaign to let voters know you can’t be bullied.

Cruz faced a moment of truth last week when a wily Trump picked a phony fight with Fox to take a powder on the last pre-Iowa debate. At the time, this seemed like a tactically canny maneuver — in his absence, the other candidates savaged Cruz on immigration and other issues. But his controversial attack on Trump’s “New York values” — while roundly criticized by the media — hit the mark with Great Plains religious conservatives, and he eked out an impressive 28 percentto 24 percent win over the heavily favored developer.

2. Hillary Clinton isn’t a very good presidential candidate. Bernie Sanders looks like a septuagenarian physicist caught in a wind tunnel and happily espouses a theory of big-government democratic socialism that had been thought forever killed during the Reagan years. But he understands, with a Cruz-like ear for his party’s base, that the politics of grievance are the politics that will succeed — at least in a primary in state like Iowa, where 43 percent of voters self-identify as “socialists.”

Yet whatever virtues Sanders possesses, it’s hard to discount the role Clinton’s political ineptitude — and tin ear — played in his rapid rise. President Barack Obama charitably described her to me as “rusty” when she first began campaigning in mid-2015. The problem for Clinton is that she’s never quite stripped away the rust .

It’s ironic that she rails against the big drug companies, because there are times when a Clinton speech sounds like a read-aloud pharmaceutical disclaimer — with policy proposal piled upon policy proposal with parsimonious dollops of anecdote or personal revelation. Sanders is no Lincoln, but his spiel is sharply focused on income inequality and is seductively simple enough for any progressive, no matter how uninterested in politics, to understand.

3. Marco’s the man. Ted Cruz is the guy who may have put a 2-by-4 to Trump but Marco Rubio, who came within 2 percentage points of making the domineering developer into a third-place also-ran, might turn out to be the real long-term winner. Until Iowa, he was a talented but electorally rootless political prodigy who seemed to own no particular state or wedge of the Republican electorate, a perpetual No. 3 everywhere and on every subject.

Now he’s No. 3 with a bullet. On Monday, the boyish and policy-focused Florida senator came close to doubling his predicted finish in Iowa — with much of his 23 percent support poached (unexpectedly) from Trump’s tally. In doing so, he established himself as (in the eyes of many party elders and himself) the Republican with the most potential crossover appeal in a general election.

4. Hey Bernie, have fun in New Hampshire! Clinton’s slim but apparently legally validated victory in Iowa — coupled with Sanders’ seemingly insurmountable lead in his neighboring New England state — means that the Clinton campaign is likely to quietly shift resources (and candidate time) to Nevada and South Carolina.

The candidate, according to a person in her orbit, has told her staff that she wants to replicate her 2008 comeback in New Hampshire — but it doesn’t make a ton of political sense: Public polling has the Vermont senator up by as much as 25 percent (Clinton’s own internals show him up by approximately half that margin) — and a resounding win over Sanders in two states with substantial Hispanic (Nevada) and black (South Carolina) voting populations is more important than a quixotic quest. And this seems to be a major difference in Clinton’s approach in 2016 — she’s more pragmatic, and less prone to take on a fight in a state she’s unlikely to win.

5. Trump and Rubio are on a collision course. So far, Rubio has pursued a nonconfrontational approach to Trump — in hopes of goading the once (and perhaps future) front-runner into attacking Cruz. But that was before Rubio invaded Trump’s turf — and very nearly shoved the man who was supposed to win Iowa handily into third place. Trump — a practiced, if sometimes nervous, debater — will certainly go after him and Rubio had better be ready.