Trump Won Iowa, Sanders Proves Socialism Okay

Nobody really wants to hear me say this, but I have to keep it SquareBiz for those of you who need it.

Trump won Iowa.

No really.

Trump won Iowa, and it wasn't even close.  Well, it was close, but not in the way that you think. Iowa is AS full of religious fundamentalism as any state in the union.  Not only is Iowa full of it (so to speak), it is full of religico's who are highly politically active as well- possibly more so than any other fundamentalist spot in America.

In other words, betting Ted Cruz to win in Iowa would have been a wasted bet in Vegas because you would have had to put down $3,000 just to win $100.  I just made up those odds, but you get my point.  Iowa chose Mike Huckabee two cycles ago, and Rick Santorum during the last presidential election primary/caucus season. because the Tea Party has owned Iowa for some time now.

Polls might have threatened to hand Iowa to Trump, but they didn't have a great way of knowing who would actually leave their home and caucus for Trump.

Now we know, and the numbers are staggering.

Cruz might have stopped Trump from finishing on top like he claims he always does, but he barely kept Iowa from shifting itself away from its religious roots and firmly into the area of social dissent with many other parts of the American electorate.

If there is any reason for Marco Rubio to be doing victory laps over a third place finish (and there is), Trump has just as much a cause for applause for finishing second in a place that his heathen arse should have never finished so high, but he did.

Without the benefit of a real ground game in a state that he knew would be a waste of money to fight in, Trump still came up second.  Cruz committed mightily to the outcome he got, and should also consider the Rubio result to be a considerable challenge to his evangelical claim over the GOP.  As for ground game, the same could be said for Clinton who had a representative in each of Iowa's 1681 democrat caucusing precincts.

Hillary and Cruz worked like crazy to insure the Iowa outcomes that they sorely needed.  Trump and Bernie Sanders will be hard to beat in New Hampshire, so a loss in Iowa too would have been a rough start for Hillary, too rough in fact for either to allow for such an outcome.  So she didn't lose, and neither did Cruz. 

But they almost did.

Did Cruz win by a wide enough margin to celebrate?

Rubio can feel happy about the large portions of Cruz's voters that had to be a part of the results he enjoyed last night.  Yet if Rubio has any legitimacy to his joy (and he does), than Trump and Sanders should be sipping champagne too.

From my perspective, they answered the question of how loud will the voice of the angry populist actually be in this upcoming election.  Will unusual voters show up to do something that they've rarely done before?


After our first sampling, it is clear that they will be pretty damn loud if we heard their voices all the way from fundamentalist Iowa. 

Pretty damn loud indeed.