The BKO News Briefing: Iowa Caucus Edition

Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships at sea! Here is the news!

The first two casualties of primary season emerged even before they’d cleaned up all the empty coffee cups and donut boxes from the caucus sites in Des Moines last night: Joe Biden and Chris Dodd have both given up the ghost, both having come up with no delegates out of the 45 that will eventually be selected to go to the DNC convention. Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel didn’t do any better, and Gravel issued a statement countering rumors that he would be dropping out as well. Bill Richardson got more votes than those four guys put together, but he also leaves Iowa with 0 delegates and moves on to New Hampshire.

Bill Richardson is a sad case. He is hands-down the single most qualified guy running for President out of all the candidates in both parties. He’s got more experience than Hillary and Obama combined in both domestic and international politics, has impeccable progressive credentials, comes from a Western state, has just enough Hispanic heritage to tap into that ethnic bloc, and hasn’t done anything embarrassing or distateful. THIS is the guy who really should be our next President, and he’s going to go home after next Tuesday, guaranteed. I really really hope that he ends up on the ticket as the VP nominee so that he might have a real shot at the White House down the road.

Josh Marshall’s analysis of the Republican side of things is dead-on. Huckabee is too far behind in NH to make any hay out of last night’s win, and so McCain is the most immediate beneficiary of the Iowa results. I think McCain is about to kick Romney’s ass and that the stage will thus be set for the Final Showdown between Huckabee and McCain on MegaTuesday. The fundie right-wingers have picked their guy, and now the whole thing is in the hands of “moderate” Republicans. Indeed, I think the entire election will come down to persuading the moderate Republicans not to abandon the party altogether, and McCain might be the party’s only hope. If Huckabee really pulls it off, the Republican party could split or consign itself to minority status for a long time to come.

Neatorama has all the background statistical information you might want to know about the relative importance of the Iowa and New Hampshire contests. It’s been political gospel for years that you had to win in New Hampshire to win the general election, and Neatorama’s numbers prove that to be true, even though neither Bill Clinton in 1992 nor George Bush in 2000 won the NH primary. Iowa was relatively unimportant until Jimmy Carter emerged out of nowhere there in 1976 and is still not a good statistical predictor of the final outcome.

Advertising Age reports that the total amount of spending for television advertising (broadcast and cable) in Iowa was just about $50 million. In 2004, only $9 million was spent, but Bush was running unopposed on the GOP side. Mitt Romney spent $10 million all by himself. So much for buying your way in, I guess.

I keep reading the line “the primaries are a marathon, not a sprint” or variations thereof, but that’s not even remotely true this year. The field will shrink to the top three candidates by Tuesday of next week, and then it’s slightly less than a month until MegaTuesday. It’s almost impossible for the race not to be firmly decided by the morning of February 6, barely a month after the Iowa caucuses. This article in The Nation talks about just how screwed up the primary calendar is this year and why the two parties need to figure out a way to fix it BEFORE the conventions this summer so that the 2012 primary season isn’t compressed into one single day. Believe me, as much as the idea of a single national primary appeals to some people, you really DON’T want to have the nomination process turned into a winner-take-all ballot. Oh, and remember how we were all so incensed about the Electoral College back in 2000 and demanded that it get fixed…only to have ABSOLUTELY ZIPPO happen in 2004? This article talks about the initiative to have all 50 states award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular election. Maryland has already adopted this process, Illinois and New Jersey are expected to do the same soon, and the initiative will be introduced in all 50 state legislatures this year. Never again would the candidate with the lower vote total be able to game the Electoral College into winning the election the way George Bush did in 2000.

Lastly, Alex Tabarrok at the economics blog Marginal Revolution posts about an ongoing study from the business school at University of Iowa which has been looking at the election as if it were a trading market, and the graph he includes tells the whole story: it’s the Democrats’ election to lose, regardless of who the nominees turn out to be.