By Jim Geraghty
Friday, February 07, 2020
Even if the Associated Press doesn’t feel comfortable
declaring a winner between Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders in Iowa, we now
know that the Iowa Democratic Party says 176,436 people voted in the first
round of the caucus.
For Democrats, that is ominous news. That’s about what
the turnout was in 2016, and well below what it was in 2008, at 240,000, when
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards were in a high-stakes fight.
Democrats thought that three years of Trump’s presidency — and impeachment on
top of that! — would have their base extremely fired up, angry, enthusiastic,
champing at the bit.
In a lengthy Medium post that compares the current
political resistance to Trump to the Germans who resisted the rise of the
Nazis, Beto O’Rourke writes, “We’re in the middle of a national emergency, and
people are staying home.”
If people are staying home, they are not convinced
that the country is in the middle of a national emergency.
There are a few reasons for Democrats to think that the
“meh” turnout in Iowa may not be indicative of their grassroots across the
country. First, as this past week has made abundantly clear, caucuses are
complicated, convoluted, and time-consuming; some Iowa Democrats might have
voted in a primary but didn’t feel like spending all of Monday night at a
caucus location.
Second, Iowa is drifting red; Trump’s nearly ten-point
margin of victory in Iowa in 2016 was better than his margin in Texas, Arizona,
and Georgia. Some people who might have been interested in participating in a
Democratic caucus may now be converted to Trumpism. (The 32,389 who
participated in the noncompetitive GOP primary was a record for a year with a
Republican incumbent.) Third, this is just one contest, and New Hampshire,
Nevada, and the other contests could have higher turnout than Iowa did.
But that observation by O’Rourke should spur Democrats —
the presidential candidates, the strategists, the national party, and their
talking-head allies — to ask themselves whether the overwhelming majority of
their messaging amounts to preaching to the converted. Trump’s
never-great-but-surprisingly-steady approval rating suggests that while some
Americans can’t stand him, there are a lot who are somewhat annoyed by him or
disapprove of him but who don’t see him “a national emergency.” As Ramesh
points out, Democrats talk about “a bleak economy that only works for the
wealthy.” The Democrats have embraced abortion on demand under any
circumstances, to effectively end enforcement of laws against illegal
immigration, and to ban fracking. And as Beto himself added, “hell yeah, we’re
going to take your AR-15s.”
Just putting it out there, Democrats, but have you ever
considered that maybe, just maybe, that agenda has a hard ceiling of support?
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