Media misfire?
Despite claims of massive win, Trump limping out of Iowa
To read the mainstream media — all of it — you’d think former President Trump was riding a wave of acclamation to a coronation.
The fact that he won just over 50 percent of the votes at the Iowa Caucus — a historic low for a former president seeking his party’s nomination (only President Ford did worse, in 1976) — was somehow spun by both the anti-Trump leftist media (New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, etc.) and the pro-Trump conservative media (Fox, New York Post) as a tsunami wave of popular support. Even the relatively neutral Wall Street Journal headlined its coverage “Trump Dominates Iowa GOP Presidential Caucuses.”
But Jimmy Carter — Jimmy Carter! — did significantly better than Trump during his troubled 1980 re-election campaign, gaining almost 60 percent of the Iowa Democratic Caucus. And yet Carter’s 59 percent showing over Sen. Ted Kennedy was presented in the media of the day as a disappointing result and evidence of his political weakness.
(Grover Cleveland, the only president to this point in history to lose a re-election campaign and then win the presidency back four years later, ran before the primary system was in place.)
The results of the Iowa Caucus broadly reflected recent polls of Republican voters, with almost half of Republicans preferring someone other than Trump.
The current coverage of the Republican nominating process reminds of the media’s coverage of the 2016 Democratic primary, when former Sen. Hillary Clinton’s selection was treated as fait accompli right out of the gate.
The fact that she won the Iowa Caucus by only a few percentage points over Bernie Sanders was treated as a mere speed bump on the way to her inevitable nomination.
For the record, though, Clinton’s 49.83 percent of the vote in Iowa was only slightly behind Trump’s 51 percent this year.
It may well be that Trump does get the Republican nomination. Only former Gov. Nikki Haley stands between him and a third nomination.
But the fact remains that fully half of his own party wants someone else as the Republican nominee — a remarkable number for a former president.
And Trump has other self-inflicted political challenges between him and the White House, primarily his combination of hubris and arrogance.
His Iowa campaign was based on the premise that voting for him is a privilege, and that those voters who cast their ballots for other candidates lost that privilege. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may have endorsed Trump after ending his own campaign, but what the media ignores is that candidates don’t control their voters.
How many DeSantis, Christie, etc. voters who had to listen to Trump brand them as traitors are going to vote for him now?
Some, sure; maybe most if the alternative come November is President Biden or California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
But for lifelong Democrat Donald Trump to disparage Republican voters who’ve tired of his schtick as “RINOs” — “Republicans in Name Only” — is a bit rich, and will undoubtedly cost him uncounted tens of thousands of potential voters.
It’s a needless alienation of potential supporters, but wholly typical of Trump — whose ego needs seemingly outweigh his commitment to either conservative policies or effective governance.
Just about everyone outside Republican operative Karl Rove are declaring Trump the de facto nominee, based on a 51 percent showing in Iowa, and never mind that Trump finished second in Iowa in 2016 to Sen. Ted Cruz yet went on to win the nomination.
Perhaps everyone else is right, and Rove is wrong.
The hate-Trump left, of course, are addicted to Trump, and also seem to believe he is the only Republican that the Democrats can beat in the general election. The pro-Trump right has its own reasons for overstating his case.
For the rest of us, it’s still startling how low Trump’s support remains among Republican voters — and how the national media has chosen to portray that support as being historically high, when it is in fact the opposite.
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But the extreme weather did play a part, "The 110,000 voters who participated in the 2024 caucuses account for just under 15% of the state's 752,000 registered Republicans. Still, though the attendance didn't shatter records, the Iowa GOP celebrated the turnout as a demonstration of Iowans' "resilience and determination."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iowa-caucus-turnout-2024/#:~:text=Iowa%20caucus%20voter%20turnout%20for,%27%20%22resilience%20and%20determination.%22
If the weather had been different, who knows how it would have turned out but it's tough to compare it to previous years, given that.