It’ll mean absolutely nothing if Donald Trump wins Iowa and New Hampshire
We’re heading into the Iowa 2024 Republican caucus today, followed by the New Hampshire 2024 Republican primary soon thereafter. Donald Trump will likely win them both by double digits. The entire media and pundit class (on both sides) will then insist that it means Trump has a lock on the Republican nomination, and maybe even the general election. But I’m here to tell you that Iowa and New Hampshire will mean nothing, for a number of reasons.
First of all, there’s the fact that the Iowa and New Hampshire results never tell us anything about who’s going to be the nominee. With all due respect to those two states and the great people living there, the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary aren’t about the results. They’re about the process of candidates having to go in and shake hands and talk to people one on one. If you fall flat on your face trying to pull this off, your candidacy can fall apart and you may end up dropping out before those two states even get around to voting. But you don’t have to win Iowa or New Hampshire, or even come close to winning them, in order to win the nomination. You just have to still be a candidate by the time the Iowa and New Hampshire processes are over.
That’s when the race shifts to South Carolina, the first state whose population actually looks like the general electorate. The results in South Carolina are usually a pretty close indicator of how Super Tuesday will go – and it never ends up looking like Iowa and New Hampshire did.
Remember in 2020, when Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders won Iowa and New Hampshire, and Biden wasn’t even competitive in those states? It didn’t matter at all, because Biden was always on track to win South Carolina in a blowout, and South Carolina told us how Biden would do on Super Tuesday. All those months of national media hype about Iowa and New Hampshire were nothing more than an attempt at scoring ratings, as always. Iowa and New Hampshire just about never tell us who the nominee is going to be for either party. Over the past fifty years, very rarely have the Democratic and Republican nominees both won Iowa and New Hampshire. You’d get more accurate results with a dartboard. Sorry, but that’s just a fact. Go look up the results for the past dozen presidential elections if you don’t believe me.
So even if Donald Trump wins Iowa and New Hampshire, it won’t mean anything, because it never means anything. Remember in 2016, when Ted Cruz beat Trump in Iowa by several points, and Marco Rubio nearly beat Trump in Iowa as well? Did that mean Trump was doomed in 2016? Of course not. He turned around and dominated on Super Tuesday. We see this pattern again and again. Iowa and New Hampshire, for all their great traits, simply don’t tell us anything.
But let’s say that after Trump wins Iowa and New Hampshire, he does then coincidentally go on to win big on Super Tuesday. In a normal primary, this would indeed hand him the nomination. But this isn’t a normal primary. Donald Trump is pretty firmly on track to be tried and convicted in federal court, and sentenced to prison, before we get to the Republican National Convention this summer.
Will the Republican Party take the nomination away from Trump at the convention? Who knows? But can they? Yes. Political parties pretty much make up their own rules for things like picking a nominee. You can expect quite an ugly floor fight about whether the Republicans really want to go through with nominating a convicted felon who’s on his way to prison. And how that will play out is anyone’s guess.
But for now, the point is that it’s not going to mean anything at all if Donald Trump wins Iowa and New Hampshire. That’s both because Iowa and New Hampshire never tell us much about who’s going to be the nominee in general, and because in this instance primary results may not determine who comes out of the Republican National Convention with the nomination. The notion that Trump will have the nomination “locked up” if he wins Iowa and New Hampshire is just sort of laugh out loud silly. But we’ll hear it 24/7 anyway.
