Oh Iowa!

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2020

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We try to peer through the chaos in Iowa to see who won, who lost and what it means for the future of this presidential race and for American democracy. Are we heading towards a Bernie vs Bloomberg showdown? What might happen at a brokered convention? And how much damage has been done to the Democratic party brand? Plus we review Trump's State of the Union address. Great theatre - but was it great politics? With Helen Thompson and Gary Gerstle.

There were no winners in Iowa.

We still don’t know who actually won.
Pete didn’t do well enough to break out. Bernie did well, but not as well as many people thought he would. Warren had a mediocre showing. It was really bad for Biden.
It was also a bad night for the Democratic Party itself.

Who benefits from Biden’s collapse?

Can Mayor Pete hold the center? He would need to win New Hampshire and he probably won’t.
Bloomberg is going all in with an unusual strategy: gambling on a brokered convention and focusing on TV spending and mayoral endorsements.
His organizational strategy may be clear, but what is his substantive strategy?

It looks like Sanders will win the fight for the left.

But can he translate this momentum into votes.
David thinks that the problem is that there still aren’t enough young people.
All the craziness has distracted from the fact that turnout in Iowa was much lower than expected.

The Democrats want to frame the election as order versus chaos, but that’s hard to do when the first thing you do is produce chaos.

Meanwhile, Trump delivered a fairly conventional State of the Union, the economic numbers are good, and his poll numbers are up.
Can Trump stay in order mode for long?

Mentioned in this Episode:

Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels

Further Learning:

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, my name is David Runsman and this is Talking Politics. It's Wednesday morning, last night Donald Trump gave his state of the Union address and Nancy Pelosi ripped it up.
0:17.0	We thought we were going to be 36 hours on from the hour caucus, we would have digested the results, come to some mature season conclusions.
0:24.0	We still don't know what fully happened.
0:27.0	Oh, Iowa.
0:34.0	Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books and the LRB now has a beautiful new website to mark its 40th anniversary.
0:44.0	Just go to lrb.co.uk and you will discover a treasure trove of articles from the last 40 years and all the latest writing, including Adam Schatz on the death of Soleimani.
0:57.0	If you take out a subscription, you will get all this and so much more. The Print Magazine, the LRB app and unlimited access to that archive, all for just £1 an issue.
1:09.0	To subscribe, visit lrb.me-flash-talk.
1:16.0	Up to 72%, I so...
1:23.0	Yeah, I'm seeing 61 to 72% but have the proportions changed? No.
1:28.0	We don't know, they've been no reporting.
1:32.0	Here to try and help us understand what we know about what we know so far, Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy, Gary Gerstle, Professor of American History.
1:41.0	So I'll give my just take on it and then you tell me if you disagree.
1:46.0	I think we probably all agree it's not a good look for the Democratic Party but for the candidates from what we know so far.
1:51.0	So as we speak, Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders are roughly neck and neck and then there are these three measures now of how you count the votes.
2:01.0	Sanders is a bit ahead on the popular vote, the raw numbers. Buttigieg is a bit ahead on the delegates or maybe their level now we'll see.
2:10.0	I'm going to call him Pete. Pete didn't do well enough to break out.
2:14.0	Bernie underperformed relative to where it looked like he was a few days ago, he was going to win relatively convincingly.
2:22.0	Elizabeth Warren did kind of Blair. Bad for Biden.
2:27.0	Club of Shard didn't do well enough. Bloomberg isn't in it.
2:32.0	So never mind that it's a disaster for the Democratic Party. If you look at the numbers, it's just like bad for everybody.
2:39.0	He's not bad for Sanders, I don't think.
	...

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