Iowa caucus 2016: updates and results

Though the national news media might be shifting attention to New Hampshire’s primary on Tuesday, Sanders supporters can’t forget about Iowa. And now they have an ally on their side: the state’s influential Des Moines Register newspaper editorial board.

The newspaper published an editorial Wednesday calling for the Iowa Democratic Party to reevaluate its nearly 50-year-old traditions and bring more accountability to the system.

Appearing on Morning Joe today, Donald Trump made the levelheaded observation that second place is better than third place. So there’s something awfully odd about the Iowa caucus results being spun as both a big win for Marco Rubio and a big loss for Trump:

As is often the case, Trump is making sense. As loyal Vox readers are aware, the importance of the Iowa caucuses is a social construct, meaning that expectations are key. The expectations game hurt Trump in that pre-Iowa polls showed him slightly ahead of Ted Cruz while the actual results showed him slightly behind Cruz.

Hillary Clinton won the support of nonwhite voters in Iowa by 24 percentage points, according to entrance poll results from the Wall Street Journal. Fifty-eight percent of nonwhite voters said they would support her, compared to 34 percent for Sanders.

But nonwhite voters make up a much larger portion of the total population in the next two states to vote, at about 36 percent in South Carolina and 48.5 percent in Nevada.

Notably, had Bernie Sanders beat Clinton, he would have been the first Jewish person to win a presidential primary election. And Rubio, who placed third on the Republican side, is also Hispanic.

And if the two Iowa victors — Clinton and Cruz — win their parties’ nominations, the presidential election would be between two historic firsts: the first woman president or the first Hispanic president. (This would apply, too, if Rubio — now seemingly the Republican establishment candidate with the best chance of winning — gets his party’s nomination.)

Yes, Donald Trump lost the Iowa caucuses. But the GOP establishment shouldn’t cheer yet — because someone they hate just as much emerged triumphant.

Ted Cruz has only held elected office for three years. But in that short time, he’s had quite an impact. He’s helped shut down the federal government. He’s wooed power brokers on the religious right. And he’s made a remarkable number of enemies in the capital.

“Morning is coming,” said Ted Cruz as he took the stage in Iowa to declare victory in the 2016 Republican caucus.

He wasn’t referring to how long his victory speech went — even though it was so long that by the end no TV network was covering it. It was a deliberate callback to Republican hero Ronald Reagan, whose slogan in 1984, “Morning in America,” has become a slogan of a conservative golden age.

1) Donald Trump has been the best candidate in the Republican race. But Ted Cruz has run, by far, the best campaign.

2) Marco Rubio’s unexpectedly strong third-place finish is being treated as a huge win for him. Why? Because the Iowa caucuses are a social construct.

Bernie Sanders proclaimed a “virtual tie” in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night with Hillary Clinton — a far better showing than many have suspected from the long-shot Vermont senator.

Sanders appeared to trail Clinton by a handful of delegates, but cast the speech as a validation of some of the biggest themes of his campaign: campaign finance reform, universal health care, and the necessity of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Hillary Clinton has defeated Bernie Sanders in the Iowa caucus by a razor-thin margin, the Associated Press is reporting. Clinton earned 49.8 percent of delegates, compared with 49.6 percent for rival Bernie Sanders.

Clinton may have technically won the race, but the extremely narrow margin between the two is going to be a cause for concern in the Clinton camp. The primary race moves next to New Hampshire, where Sanders enjoys a big lead thanks in part to its proximity to his home state of Vermont. A virtual tie in Iowa followed by a big Sanders victory in New Hampshire could create a real opening for Sanders, attracting donors and volunteers to help him compete in later races.

No modern political party’s establishment has ever tried as hard to package up a nomination and tie it off with a bow as the Democrats did for Clinton over the course of 2016. And it didn’t work out very well. The result ought to serve as a wake-up call to a Democratic Party elite that’s gotten a little smug and out of touch over the past few years.

The Clinton campaign’s strategy will, of course, be second-guessed, as stumbling frontrunners always are. But the larger problem is the way that party as a whole — elected officials, operatives, leaders of allied interest groups, major donors, graybeard elder statespersons, etc. — decided to cajole all viable non-Clinton candidates out of the race. This had the effect of making a Clinton victory much more likely than it would have been in a scenario when she was facing off against Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and Deval Patrick. But it also means that the only alternative to Clinton is a candidate the party leaders don’t regard as viable.

Hillary Clinton hasn’t been declared the winner in the Iowa caucuses, but she gave a triumphant speech late Monday night as the final votes came in.

“So I stand here tonight, breathing a big sigh of relief: Thank you, Iowa,” Clinton said to her supporters after a neck-and-neck race with Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, in Iowa.

In Monday’s Iowa GOP caucuses, Ted Cruz finished first and Donald Trump finished second.

Yet it’s Cruz and Marco Rubio who are being declared the winners.

In an usually calm and short speech, Trump congratulated Cruz and expressed confidence that he would go on to win the nomination, citing a recent poll that put him 28 points ahead in New Hampshire, the site of the next Republican primary.

It’s unclear what Trump’s underwhelming performance tonight will mean for his chances in New Hampshire. Trump put a positive spin on his second-place Iowa finish, despite once saying that anything but first place amounted to a “big, fat, beautiful waste of time.”

Marco Rubio did not win the 2016 Iowa caucuses. When he got up to speak to supporters on Monday, he was running in third place — a little behind Donald Trump, and a lot behind caucus-winner Ted Cruz.

But you wouldn’t know it from his speech.

Here’s a few reactions:

The schadenfreude comes after a very long effort to tear down Trump, culminating in a big cover by the conservative magazine National Review, which Lowry is the editor of.

Ted Cruz has prevailed in the Iowa Republican caucuses. Cruz earned the support of around 28 percent of caucus-goers.

Donald Trump got about 24 percent of the vote, and Marco Rubio scored around 23 percent. Ben Carson and other candidates were far behind the top three.

In the wake of a dismal third-place finish with less than 1 percent of the delegates in Iowa, former Maryland Gov. and Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley is ready to suspend his campaign, a source confirms to Vox.

On paper, his presidential run made sense. As the leader of a blue state and working in partnership with Democratic majorities in the state legislature, O’Malley racked up a considerably more progressive record than Hillary Clinton’s while remaining a mainstream Democrat who was broadly liked and acceptable to his co-partisans in a way that isn’t true for Bernie Sanders. Obviously, any challenger to Clinton would have been an underdog. But with Elizabeth Warren taking herself out of the picture, rallying behind O’Malley could have been the labor-left wing of the party’s best chance at dethroning her.