At this point, Ed Kilgore has basically beaten his mantra into my head that we should take every comment from every political “insider” in Iowa and New Hampshire with a giant shaker of salt. All they seem to care about is protecting their prerogatives as first-in-the-nation caucuses and primaries, and they’ll basically advise every candidate to spend campaign cash in their states.
So, naturally, Iowa insiders will tell Jeb Bush that he absolutely needs to compete in their state and New Hampshire insiders will advise him to blow off Iowa and spend all his time and money in their state. When I read this article, I immediately thought about Ed and wasn’t at all surprised to see that he’d written about this phenomenon again.
That doesn’t mean that these insiders are incapable of coming up with decent arguments to makes their cases, though. For example, Iowa is a state that Jeb pretty clearly needs to win in a general election if he gets that far. It seems like an imperative that he not antagonize people there by rejecting their caucuses. And getting a head start on organizing the state is damn good idea.
On the other hand, getting crushed in Iowa can be detrimental to your effort to win New Hampshire. That’s what happened to Bill Bradley in 2000, when he watched a narrow but healthy polling lead in New Hampshire vanish as soon as he lost Iowa and wound up losing there by about 4,000 votes. That effectively killed his candidacy in its crib.
Another reason to compete in Iowa is that he’d like to avoid letting more than one rival get any momentum, particularly if that rival is going to be competing for the same kind of votes. For one Iowa insider, this threat comes from Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
“He cannot allow Rubio to come out of Iowa with a head of steam going into New Hampshire. The more Walker caters to the evangelical right, the wider berth that gives Rubio and Bush to work the establishment, economic conservative lane. If Bush doesn’t compete here, Rubio has a ton of room to roam.”
I’m pretty skeptical about Rubio’s chances in Iowa or really any place else, but if Rubio is going to try to be a Bush Republican, then this analysis might be solid.
The compete-or-not-compete in Iowa question is a conundrum that comes up in virtually every presidential nominating season, and there never seems to be a definitively good answer to it. A lot of people think Hillary spent way too much money there only to come in third place. But she did rebound and win New Hampshire despite expectations that she’d screwed the pooch. Plus, it was a gamble worth taking because if she had won in Iowa she might have prevented Obama from taking off and there’s a chance that she would have coasted to the presidency from there.
If I were advising Jeb, I’ll tell him to go all-in in Iowa for a simple reason. He will have enough money to spend. He can rehabilitate himself if he needs to just by vastly outspending his rivals. There’s too much obvious downside to skipping out on the first contest. The worst that can really happen is that he finishes at the back of the pack and gets beaten by some lunatics like Ben Carson and Rick Santorum, but no one will think his campaign is over as a result. And why hand Hillary Clinton a gift in Iowa? Her third place finish there in 2008 indicates that she’ll have to fight for those Electoral College votes.
So, yeah, regardless of what the insiders in New Hampshire say, Jeb would be wise to compete in Iowa even if the voters there are never going to support him in large numbers.