This podcast is brought to you by Better Health and Magic Spoon. Well, Welcome to Begg to Differ, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring

Civil Conversation across the political spectrum.

We range from center left, center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor

at the Bulwork, and I am joined by two of our regulars, Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution and the Wall Street Journal and Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center.

My bulwark colleague, Will Salitan, is sitting in this week for Damon Linker and our special

guest this week is Zach Beecham of Vox.

Welcome, Wondon all. We are looking forward to a good discussion today of Iowa, New

Hampshire, and the great suspense about who the Republican nominee may possibly be.

Sorry. All right. nominee may possibly be.

Sorry. All right.

So we did have low turnout in Iowa.

It was the lowest turnout of the last several seasons, very understandable, the weather was atrocious,

but impossible to know whether it was the weather, which after all Iowans are accustomed to, or whether it was lack of enthusiasm.

In any event, a huge amount of commentariat attention was paid to 110,000 Republicans who traips to gyms and churches to

participate in this thing and Trump won with a little over half the vote.

So I'm going to start with you, Linda.

First of all, do we pay too much attention to Iowa?

I mean, should it be retired? Yeah, President

Santoram and President Huckabee and all those people can testify to

President Cruz can testify to its importance. Arguably it mattered for Barack Obama in 2008, but the Democrats

are no longer even doing it. So your views.

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