Pete Buttigieg: First to the Post in Iowa & the BIG WINNER

Big winner

On one hand, a candidate and his (in this case) supporters declaring a victory in the Iowa caucus is like saying that your horse won a race by nosing-out the closest contender at the first pole. Nice, but the race has a long way to go, and the other horses are still running hard and expect to close the gap.

Bernie Sanders claims that he received the most votes (I've seen no press reports to confirm that), but this is the thinking that brought us President Al Gore and President Hillary Clinton--oh, wait, that's not how the system works (disliked it as one may). Neither does the Iowa caucus work as a candidate plebiscite (although that's the way its portrayed). Iowa Democrats and Republicans choose delegates to go on to county conventions and then to the state convention, which then selects delegates to the national convention. Indeed, the horse race isn't even over yet in Iowa! (But the media hates to have to deal with subtlety.)

The "winner" by the official count is Pete Buttigieg, by a whisker over Sanders. But in the larger sense, this outcome (for all the fuss about the speed of learning the results) proves a huge win for Buttigieg and a real political earthquake. He just beat (to the post, as I said) three sitting Senators and a former Vice-President. Sanders, his closest rival, has been in Congress since 1991 and campaigning for the nomination since 2015. Sanders has a lifetime--a long lifetime at 78 years of age--in politics and a committed core of supporters. Indeed, Sanders is more a prophet (of democratic socialism) than he is a politician. (On this distinction, see this post that channels Garry Wills on the topic.) One even discerns that Sanders has more faithful than he does supporters. And, of course, Biden, too, at 77 years of age and decades in the Senate (1977-2009) and eight years as vice-president, has the greatest name recognition, and he's still the leader in national polls (which count for nothing in this process except as another form of bragging rights). Yet, Biden finished a distant fourth. Senator Klobuchar from neighboring Minnesota finished a distant fifth. And Elizebeth Warren, from Massachusetts, which Dems seem to love (Kerry, Dukakis, and--a winner by a whisker--JFK (thank you, Mayor Daley)) finished about 8 percentage points (with less than half the delegates) behind the leaders Buttigieg and Sanders (who essentially tied in delegates).

And this is not to mention those who either didn't get out of the gate or who scratched from the race completely. How in the heck did Buttigieg, whom almost no Iowans had ever heard of before 2019 (or even 2020) get to the top over such well-known and well-funded rivals? Name recognition, piles of cash, and long-standing connections usually carry the day.

Let me quote from Storm Lake Times (Iowa) newspaper editor Art Cullen, who wrote in the Washington Post about Buttigieg's perhaps not-so-surprising success in Iowa:

Pete Buttigieg surged from nowhere to the top of Iowa’s caucus race, fair and square, by working places most candidates forgot or wrote off.
In late January, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., took his rural Rust Belt revival message to places like Orange City, Iowa, a place where books about homosexuality had been burned. He drew a crowd of more than 200 in that deep-red town of 6,000 in a county that voted 6 to 1 for Donald Trump. They had seldom so much as seen a Democrat before. 

Mayor Pete stumped Storm Lake, my town of about 10,500, four times. He twice called me for interviews, in which he candidly discussed his views on race and owned the actions of South Bend’s police department. He talked about how immigrants had revitalized both his Indiana town and Storm Lake. About how agriculture could lead the way out of our climate crisis by capturing carbon. About how we can treat each other with decency. 

That’s how you win Iowa. You show up. You understand the issues and you press the flesh in 99 counties. You meet real people and hear about real concerns (not that much about impeachment). And then you organize.

The horse race is far from over, but this 38-year-old from South Bend may yet pull off an upset over his more established rivals. The Iowa Democrat Caucus gave us the first woman to receive a major party nomination (and winner of the popular votes for president, the participant's trophy) and it gave us our first African-American nominee and president. It may prove to have been the first marker for our youngest president (among his many other potential firsts). Wow!