Skip Iowa Next Time

By RYAN SAGER
August 13, 2007

To revise the old Woody Allen line: Eighty percent of success is not showing up. While Mitt Romney may have nominally "won" the Iowa Straw Poll over the weekend, the real victors were the ones who stayed away from Ames: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Fred Thompson (who has made something of an art of not showing up, in recent months). The paradox could mean the end of the straw poll as a GOP touchstone. And that would be nothing but good news for the Republican Party.

Let's look first at how Mr. Romney comes out of all of this. Mr. Romney's margin of victory -- 13% over Mike Huckabee -- wasn't particularly stunning. But the price he paid for each vote was. The Romney campaign won't disclose numbers, but plenty have come to light: in excess of $2 million on TV ads, more than $150,000 on tickets, roughly $300,000 on buses, $25,000 for a prime tent, $50,000 for lunch, roughly $1 million in Iowa-related expenditures as of the close of the campaign's second-quarter Federal Election Commission reports (which only cover up through June 30). All told, he easily spent more than $4 million preparing for Ames, or significantly more than $800 a vote.

By way of comparison, according to figures compiled by the Des Moines Register, George Bush spent roughly $825,000 for 7,418 votes, or $111 a vote, at Ames in 1999. And he had well-financed competition from Steve Forbes, who spent $2 million to get 4,921 votes ($406 a vote). So, what has Mr. Romney purchased at this high price? A couple days of good headlines and a new rival for the Christian-conservative vote. While Mr. Huckabee is still a long-shot to join the ranks of the top-tier candidates, he will get a boost out of Iowa; and the voters the ordained Baptist minister will be using his newfound Iowa mojo to court -- well, let's just say they ain't Giuliani supporters.

Speaking of Mr. Giuliani, no one comes out of Iowa looking better. Sure, he came in eighth, with 1.3% of the vote, but it's his name Mr. Romney is cursing as he goes to bed tonight. After all, it was Mr. Giuliani who pulled the rug out from under Mr. Romney's Iowa strategy back in June by simply refusing to play. Mr. McCain followed Mr. Giuliani out the door, and neither campaign has ever looked back. Mr. McCain is busy trying not to slip out of the race altogether. But Mr. Giuliani has his sights set on a bold strategy to make Iowa -- and to a lesser extent, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- irrelevant altogether.

While everyone else was watching Iowa on Saturday, the Giuliani campaign was watching Florida, where the state GOP decided it would send all of its 114 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul next summer (Iowa commands 41 delegates). The national Republican Party has threatened to cut the Sunshine State's delegation in half for moving its primary up to January 29. That early Florida primary is the lynchpin of Mr. Giuliani's strategy to run as a national candidate. After the three traditional early states vote, Florida is supposed to serve as a springboard into the Super Duper Tuesday primary on February 5, which will include some 20 states (such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California), most of which Mr. Giuliani leads.

(Yes, you read that right: Florida is both a lynchpin and a springboard in the Giuliani strategy.)

And the big opponent Mr. Giuliani expects to face in Florida isn't Mr. Romney: It's Mr. Thompson. While Mr. Thompson's strategy has yet to come into focus, it's clear his campaign similarly sees Florida as key, along with the former Tennessee senator's strength throughout the South. The campaign recently named a longtime Florida political hand, Randy Enwright, as its national political director.

Thus, we have the two candidates at the top of the polls running a national campaign against each other (yes, yes… Fred Thompson is still just "testing the waters"), while the two lagging candidates, Messrs. McCain and Romney, have committed to an early-state strategy. But even Mr. McCain is pretty much going to forget about Iowa -- having been looked askance at by the Hawkeye State once before, in 1999.

Iowa, in other words, faces irrelevance in 2008. To which anyone concerned about the Republican Party's future prospects must say: good.

The face of the Republican Party in Iowa is the face of a losing party, full of hatred toward immigrants, lust for government subsidies, and the demand that any Republican seeking the office of the presidency acknowledge that he's little more than Jesus Christ's running mate. The pandering from the stage told the story. Mr. Romney promised not a chicken in every pot, but "a button on every computer" for parents to block obscene material. Anti-immigrant ranter Tom Tancredo nearly brought the house down decrying the fact that Americans sometimes have to "Press 1" for English. Mr. Huckabee earned his second-place finish in part by making the specious claim that farm subsidies safeguard America's food independence. (You think it's bad depending on foreign oil, Mr. Huckabee asked? "Wait until our country messes up and has to depend on foreign food.") Senator Brownback of Kansas, the third-place finisher, declared as he often does in his stump speech, quoting Mother Teresa: "All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus."

This all may fly in Ames. But it won't in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the interior West, all of which will be battlegrounds in this presidential election and for many elections to come. Republicans need to broaden their appeal in this tough environment, and the first step is to turn their sights away from Ames and toward the rest of the nation. Otherwise, come November 2008, it's the voters who won't show up.

Mr. Sager is author of "The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party."

Skip Iowa Next Time

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