Dana H. Allin: Iowa and theories of politics (IISS)

If the metric is which party at least marginally improved its chances of winning the presidency next November, then Republicans had a better night in Iowa. They improved their chances not because Texas Senator Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump for first place in the Iowa caucus – both men constitute prima facie electoral disasters for the GOP – but because of the strong third place showing of Senator Marco Rubio.

Young, Hispanic, well-spoken – Rubio looks like the computer-generated model of what the Republicans need to counter their demographic problem as the party of aging whites in a rapidly diversifying America. Given their nightmare of a primary campaign so far, Rubio’s achievement of almost beating Trump for second place is the first good news for a party establishment that desperately wants to wrest the contest back from Trump’s demagogic insurgency and Cruz’s absolutism.

This is not to say that the Democrats’ virtual tie was a bad outcome for Hillary Clinton. Dispatching Senator Bernie Sanders would have felt better, but would not have solved a big Clinton problem, which is a kind of uneasy feeling that she has been anointed as Democratic nominee without enough competition to test and improve her political performance.

She is now going to have to fight at least somewhat longer. Sanders, from neighbouring Vermont, is the heavy favourite to win the New Hampshire primary next week. But Iowa and New Hampshire are unusual states, much whiter and, in the odd case of Iowa, at the same time more liberal, among Democrats, and more conservative, among Republicans, than the country at large.

Sanders’s pitch highlights another problem for Clinton. She is running for Obama’s third term. This is always difficult – ask Al Gore – but in the current polarised America it means something very specific and, for Sanders’s youthful supporters, quite dispiriting. Hers is a not-very-glamorous promise to defend the significant but reversible gains of the Obama presidency. These include the nuclear agreement with Iran, Obamacare and environmental regulations that put the United States in a position to meet its Paris commitments for international action to avoid the most catastrophic scenarios of climate change. These are hugely important, and Clinton the realist argues that it will be a tough enough fight to defend them.

Sanders, the self-styled democratic socialist, says it’s not enough. He is calling not for defending hard-fought gains but for transforming the US into a Scandinavian-style welfare state, with single-payer national health insurance, free university education and pledging to launch an assault on the political privileges of the very wealthy that he sees driving massive disparities of income and wealth.

His theory of politics for how this will transpire is, in a word, preposterous. He believes in a voter-driven political revolution, but how – in the unlikely event of his election as president – he would get any legislation through what is sure to remain a Republican-controlled House of Representatives is not explained by his theory.

Here is one – but really only one – point of comparison with Cruz, the winner of the Republican caucus. Cruz is literally despised by fellow Republican senators, and other elites, for a number of reasons, but prominent among them was volcanic posturing that played to angry conservatives’ ignorance about the constitutional limits to enacting a right-wing agenda when the President of the United States is a liberal Democrat.

Ironically, however, that right-wing enactment could be within reach, and it probably doesn’t matter whether the candidate is Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. Both are running on a promise to repeal Obamacare, abandon the nuclear agreement, and end the new regulations on carbon emissions. Now, taking away the health insurance from millions of Americans who have no alternative might seem politically daunting. Abandoning a nuclear deal to which American allies and partners are firmly committed would be diplomatically daunting. But there is pent-up conservative demand to do these things, campaign promises are usually a good guide to a new president’s agenda, and if Republicans win the White House they will almost certainly hold on to both houses of Congress. Last night’s caucus was the first test of a significant election.

Dana H. Allin is Editor of Survival and Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs at the IISS.