The Iowa Caucus’ two winners emerged Monday, but we are still no closer to finding a nomination for either party. Ted Cruz managed to upset Donald Trump on the Republican side. Cruz grabbed 27.6 percent of the vote and eight delegates, beating Trump’s 24.3 percent and seven delegates. Hillary Clinton barely edged Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side with 49.9 percent and 23 delegates to Sanders’ 49.6 percent and 21 delegates.
What the majority of the public doesn’t understand is the disparity of these results. On the Republican side, the results are basically insignificant. In the last two elections, the candidates who won in Iowa were not the final nominee. In fact, in the 2008 caucus, John McCain didn’t even make the top three. He finished fourth in Iowa. Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson placed over McCain by a considerable margin. He earned just 13 percent of the vote, 21 percent behind the leader.
Fast forward to 2012. Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, managed to move up to two spots, but still lost in a close race to Rick Santorum. So despite Cruz’s major victory in Iowa, Trump, Marco Rubio and Ben Carson are all still alive. Furthermore, Carson should feel great about his chances considering John McCain lost by such a big margin and Carson lost by 18.3 percent in comparison. The only sure thing that resulted from Iowa is Rand Paul, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee decided to pull out of the race.
On the other side, its almost locked in that the winner of the Iowa Caucus will win the Democratic nomination. Iowa has picked the Democratic nominee correctly since 1996. The last time they didn’t, Iowa picked its own senator, Tom Harkin, with 76 percent of the vote over future president Bill Clinton, who managed just 2.8 percent.
Yet despite historical trends, the party hasn’t seen a race this close in Iowa since 1972, a year in which no candidate actually won the caucus, and instead the uncommitted vote won the nomination by a grand total of 0.3 percent. The only other major candidate from the Democratic party, Martin O’Malley pulled out of the race as well.
After all of these inconsistent statistics it basically means the battle for nomination isn’t over -not even close. So if you still want to see a battle of the two most extreme candidates such as Trump vs. Sanders, thats still a possibility. In fact, everything’s a possibility, and the Iowa Caucus means little for both parties. This race is tight and its only going to get better down the stretch.
