Democrats in Iowa on Monday night debated, negotiated and arbitrated their choice for their party’s nominee for president for 2016, and the one person many presumed to have a lock on the support was facing headwinds.
With 6 percent of the precincts reporting results, Hillary Clinton had 52.8 percent of the support, Bernie Sanders had 46.2 percent and Martin O’Malley 0.9 percent.
That was even though pollsters reported Hillary Clinton was holding a huge double digit lead only a few short weeks ago.
And it was only eight years ago that Hillary Clinton, then a former first lady and senator, was assumed by many to be the presumptive pick for the Democratic Party nomination, with her campaign emphasizing the first woman president.
But Senate upstart Barack Obama, in only his first Washington term and a bystander on most issues at that, following a state legislative term where he mostly voted “present,” stunned the established Democrat politics and beat her in the Iowa caucuses, eventually prompting Clinton to kill her campaign. He went on to become president and appoint Clinton secretary of state.
Heading into Monday night’s caucuses for the 2016 race, Hillary Clinton’s headwinds were, if possible, even bigger.
Which means upstart socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders could play a significant role in the 2016 race with a victory or good showing. It could even mean that supporters of Martin O’Malley, who has been struggling in the single digits in most Democrat candidate polls, might influence the choice between Clinton and Sanders.
In the Iowa Democratic caucuses, supporters enter meetings in pursuit of their individually chosen candidate. They gather in groups for those candidates.
But when the counting starts, if they don’t make a 15 percent threshold for their candidate, they can either pick another candidate, or go home.
That procedure could allow even a few voters supporting O’Malley to be turned into swing voters that could push a decision over the edge for Clinton.
Or for Sanders.
The Democrats are working to choose the 1,406 state residents who eventually will meet to choose the 44 Iowa delegates to the Democratic National Convention, which itself is a total that is just about 1 percent of those who will name the Democratic nominee for president.
It was the New York Times that reported not all was going as planned for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Just hours before the caucus procedures opened, the report said, “Mrs. Clinton found herself defending her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state and reinforcing that she did not knowingly send or receive classified emails.”
Hillary Clinton has been accused of setting up a private computer server for her official government use, and recent revelations appear to confirm that she told sources to send classified information to her unsecured location.
“She lied about the fact that there is nothing classified on [her] server,” said GOP candidate Carly Fiorina.
“She put our national security at risk for her convenience,” charged another GOP candidate, Chris Christie.
The State Department revealed just on Friday that 22 of the emails sent to or from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were “top secret” – a classification that was too high for them to be revealed, ever.
Hillary Clinton earlier was attacked for her actions, or lack thereof, regarding the Benghazi, Libya, terror attack that killed four Americans.
She publicly blamed an obscure online video for the attack, while acknowledging to family members it clearly was a terror attack.
MSNBC said the race going into the caucuses between Hillary Clinton and Sanders was “locked.”
Said the report, “A win for Sanders would be a major upset that could carry his insurgent candidacy deep into the spring, while a win for Clinton would blunt Sanders’ rise and help put her on a glide path to the Democratic nomination.”
Hillary Clinton has been joined on the campaign trail by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as well as daughter, Chelsea, who is a top executive at the Clinton Family Foundation, another source of controversy for its acceptance of foreign donations at a time when then-Secretary of State Clinton was reaching agreements with those governments.
Sanders, who openly advocates for much higher taxes and more government control of individuals’ lives, just weeks ago had trailed Hillary Clinton by double digits in polls, and told NBC’s Chuck Todd, “At the end of the day, I think in terms of the division of delegates, whether you win by two points or you lose by two points, it’s not going to matter a whole lot.”
Both top contenders boasted extensive Iowa work. An estimated 4,000 Sanders volunteers reportedly knocked on more than 100,000 doors over the weekend. Meanwhile, Clinton’s campaign “claims more than 4,200 trained precinct captains and team members,” MSNBC reported.
US News reported the number of actual votes in Iowa means little.
“But, the state can mean everything because of the simple fact that its contest comes first. While a candidate doesn’t need to win Iowa to win its party’s nomination, results in Iowa are followed closely by the media and are an early signal of how the country as a whole will respond to the candidates. It also sets the state for the first primary, eight days later, in New Hampshire. In politics, momentum is king. If a candidate doesn’t place highly in the early states, support and dollars typically begin to dry up, which means that Iowa often is successful at winnowing the field. In a race with many candidates, like the 2016 contest for the Republicans, how a politician fares in Iowa can determine whether he or she will remain on the ballots for the rest of the U.S.”
In 2000, 2004 and 2008, Iowa Democrats picked the eventual winner. But they blew it in 1992 and 1988, choosing Sen. Tom Harkin instead of the eventually winner, Bill Clinton.
Many analysts point to the turnout as a key factor in Monday’s results.
Reported US News, “When Obama won the Democratic primary in Iowa in 2008, he did so with only 4 percent of Iowa’s eligible voters.”
At the Wall Street Journal, Tom Davis, a former U.S. representative from Virginia, said a Sanders victory in Iowa would indicate a “long, arduous struggle for the nomination.”
And Michael Feldman, a former senior adviser to Vice President Al Gore, said observers should follow the money, since the Iowa vote often is a point at which support for one candidate dries up, while donations pour into another.
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