The challenge for the primaries begins, for the Republican team, in Iowa. The Midwestern state, nicknamed America's breadbasket, votes for its candidate in the time-honored tradition of caucuses, with voters gathering in schools, gyms and social clubs to vote by show of hands. A thousand miles away from the White House, Iowa has played a key role in presidential primaries for decades. Barack Obama said that the night of his victory in Iowa in 2008 was the best of his political career. The State can in fact prove to be an effective springboard or an early Caporetto.
This is first of all because historically the first two states in the primaries, Iowa and New Hampshire, are those that determine inertia, momentum, that is, they can strengthen or eliminate a candidate. Those who do poorly in both states are in the vast majority of cases cut off from the race and no longer advance because donors distance themselves from a disadvantage compared to the other candidates that appears emotionally unbridgeable.
The rule is valid above all for Republicans because Iowa is a rural state, therefore it has a strong component of white farmers and above all evangelical conservatives who represent what in the past constituted the most important and decisive voting block of the Grand Old Party. It is essentially a sort of microcosm of the party, although this does not mean that whoever wins Iowa will receive the nomination or even be elected president of the United States.
In recent American history the only ones to score the hat-trick (i.e. Iowa, nomination and presidency) were Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama on the Dem side, while on the Republican side only George W. Bush. The conformation of the state electorate, however, reflects the classic “constituency” of the GOP quite closely. Therefore Iowa remains a barometer capable of measuring with a marginal tare the weight of conservatives within the Grand Old Party, and more generally within the American electorate.
Precisely for these characteristics, the Democrats changed the calendar of their primaries, as Iowa is not sufficiently representative of the Dem balance in the United States, because for example it has a very low percentage of African-American voters. The Iowa Democratic Party does not essentially represent the organic structures of the Democratic Party at the national level. And therefore the vote of the breadbasket of America on the Dem side is contaminated by a high risk of winning a candidate who is not representative of the heterogeneity of the movement. Hence the choice to start the primaries in South Carolina where the versatility of the national electorate is much more represented at the state level.
For his part, Trump, while in 2016, the year he won the White House, did not achieve victory in the state, in 2020 he won Iowa and the nomination, losing the final vote against Joe Biden. This year the tycoon wants to cash in on everything immediately and aims to use the Midwestern state's ability to establish a substantial “pole position” to prevail over his opponents Ron De Santis and Nikki Haley. A muscular test with which to immediately launch the challenge to Biden. For his part, the outgoing president is in fact the only candidate whose nomination promises to be a plebiscite vote or, according to some, a dangerously forced choice imposed by the Democratic Party establishment.
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