Iowans keep the country's pipe dreams — and pipe nightmares

This week, the Iowa Caucuses marked the first votes cast in the 2016 presidential race. While Hillary Clinton won with 49.9 percent to Bernie Sanders’ 49.6 percent, on the Republican side a clear pack of three emerged — Ted Cruz, the winner; Donald Trump; and Marco Rubio — in a much more telling race. Rubio had been locked in a four-way battle with Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich to be the establishment alternative to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and the results from Iowa have given Rubio backers significant reason to believe their candidate will emerge from that pack as that alternative candidate. While we are still a long way from having a nominee on either side and the results later this month in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina could shift the direction of the race dramatically, the one thing that can definitively be taken away from Iowa is that the country's pipe dreams — and pipe nightmares — have both been kept alive.

Even though Bernie Sanders came in an unbelievably close second in Iowa, the fact that he was this competitive with Clinton — and will almost certainly win in New Hampshire, which votes next — was almost unthinkable last summer when he launched his campaign. Clinton was the picture of the establishment, had the support of 100 percent of declared superdelegates and had pledged to raise an eye-popping $100M by the end of 2015. She also had near-universal name recognition, something the firebrand Vermont senator did not. Bernie Sanders, and his ideas, were ridiculed as pipe dreams, feasible in Sweden (as Marco Rubio said), but never electable in the United States. The extremely liberal Huffington Post even went so far as to publish a blog post, the opening line of which was “If you think Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee for President in 2016, you're out of your mind.”

In poll after poll and fundraising total after fundraising total, nothing has proven further from the truth, a result Iowa has only confirmed. With few and minor exceptions, Sanders has taken large bite after large bite over Clinton’s national lead, shrinking it from nearly 40 points in August to roughly 12 today. His campaign has received more individual contributions from more individual donors than any in history to this point, all while eschewing super PAC money and traditional, well-staffed fundraising apparatuses. Sanders’ performance in Iowa and his likely win in New Hampshire in a few days have shown that his supporters, often much younger than those of Clinton, are willing not just to tweet about #feelthebern, but to actually vote, caucus, donate and engage in a political system they otherwise normally feel has disengaged itself from their interests and input. His campaign is therefore historic and provides a much-needed infusion of actual voters and their interests into the country's political system, regardless of whether he is the Democratic nominee come this summer.

On the Republican side, the ‘Iowa Rule of 3’ can provide a sketch of the rest of the campaign for the nomination. With the exception of one candidate, no eventual nominee for either party has come in worse than third place in Iowa since 1972, and those third-place finishers all either had special circumstances or, like Rubio, finished extremely close to the first and second place candidates. While the Democrats’ pipe dream of Bernie Sanders is now still clearly a realistic possibility, so too is liberals’, centrists’ and elite conservatives’ nightmare of Donald Trump. While he may have hit his “ceiling,” as conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote on Twitter, Trump has now clearly demonstrated that he is not a media phenomenon with no real support in the form of actual votes. With a finish only roughly three points behind Cruz and just one and a half ahead of Rubio (whom betting markets favor to be the GOP nominee), it is clear that Trump’s supporters are not straw men and that they are willing to turn out and actually vote for their candidate on election day. He will remain a serious candidate for weeks, if not months, even if no longer the obvious and clear-away front-runner he has been for most of the last six months.

Ryan Dukeman is a Wilson School Major from Westwood, Mass. He can be reached at rdukeman@princeton.edu.