What I am about to say is so deeply radical, so fundamentally extreme, that it may be unfit for children, unsafe for work, and unhealthy for pets. Please adjust your environment accordingly. It would appear that 227,000 caucus goers in Iowa do not get to decide the Democratic nomination. The fact that they cast votes for "change" rather than "experience," for Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton, proved prelude rather than prophecy, thus disproving the First Law of Political Physics: Election results equal momentum squared.
Last night, Hillary Clinton edged out Barack Obama to win the New Hampshire primary. It was an unexpected victory (this reporter, for one, would like his crow prepared medium-rare, and set atop a bed of wilted spinach). In the week before the election, Obama held an eight percent lead in the polls and seemed to hold a monopoly on momentum. His events were better attended, his crowds louder, his debate performance surer. But he lost. And he lost not because he underperformed his own numbers -- indeed, he received nearly exactly the vote total the polls predicted. Rather, he lost because Hillary outperformed hers. Late voters broke overwhelmingly for Clinton, boosting her share far above what the surveys predicted, and what the pundits expected.
Clinton won by only three percent, and so it's a little tricky to try and attribute her victory to one or another set of characteristics, or forces. But the exit polls did show some clear differences. Obama beat her among independents, but only by 10 percent. Clinton, by contrast, won 11 percent more self-described Democrats. Obama won both the secular and the devout, but Clinton captured the votes of the casual churchgoers. Obama won among those who sought the candidate best able to bring about change, but Clinton won among those who prized experience and populist sympathies. Most importantly, Obama won among men, with 40 percent, where Hillary took a surprisingly low 29 percent. But Clinton destroyed him among women, with 46 percent. And women, at the end of the day, turned out in much higher numbers, accounting for 57 percent of the total Democratic electorate.
Democrats have now seen the two most-hyped contests of the primary to their conclusions. And both mattered. Because both validated the central rationale for the respective winner's candidacy. This has been, as the pundits say, a "change" election. But more than that, it's been, as Mark Schmitt called it, a "theory of change" election. What else could it be? The three frontrunners for the Democratic nomination are all relatively new senators who served the overwhelming majority of their terms during George W. Bush's presidency. Since Democrats have, at no point, enjoyed a veto proof majority, that's meant that none of them actually could effect legislative change. The closest anyone really got was John Edwards' with his Patient's Bill of Rights, which was summarily rejected by the president and left to languish in Congress.
Without this ability to actually create change, all the candidates could do was construct plausible arguments for why they'd be change agents. Hillary centered her appeal around experience; having spent eight years in the White House, she was most familiar with the mechanics of the presidency, most adept at navigating the rigors of campaigning, and would be best able to win the general election and step smoothly and confidently into the job. Obama argued for the transformative potential of his own appeal; his unique political talents and evident personal magnetism would allow him to reach out to new constituencies and construct a broader progressive majority, and leverage that enhanced electoral power to force political change. And Edwards relied on the clarity of populism; his clear-eyed view of the pernicious influence of corporate greed would render him best able to mobilize Americans to confront it.
Since none of these candidates had actually created much change, voters were left to decide which argument made the most sense to them. Until Iowa. There, Obama's words became votes. His win demonstrated not just tactical superiority on the political playing field, but the ability to actually transform it, to reach out to new voters and expand the Democratic coalition. In Iowa, he created change. And in New Hampshire, he invoked it, repeatedly inviting listeners to imagine the "new majority" they would build.
But he was unable to replicate his Iowa success in New Hampshire. There, it was Hillary's theory of change, and her political appeal, that proved most successful at attracting votes. A plurality of voters told exit pollsters that she would make "the best commander-in-chief," and almost 90 percent of those voters pulled the lever for Clinton. Her experience did translate into votes. Additionally, women turned out in greater numbers for her, comprising three percent more of the Democratic electorate than they did in 2004.
For Obama, this poses a particular challenge. His pitch is so dependent on his ability to enlarge the Democratic coalition and attract new voters that a failure to do so, or a failure to do so in large enough numbers, actually strikes at the heart of his candidacy. After all, this was as relevant a test case as anyone could ask for: Obama enjoyed plenty of television time after his win in Iowa, and an enormous number of Granite State voters either saw him speak in person, or knew others who did. But it was Hillary who proved best able to expand her coalition, outperform her polls, and convince late deciders.
It is not over, of course. Neither New Hampshire nor Iowa are populous, or representative, states. Iowa has long exhibited a quirky preference for good government insurgents -- think Jimmy Carter or Bob Dole -- while New Hampshire has a well-proven affection for flinty technocrats, like Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, and Paul Tsongas. Now it is on to Nevada, and South Carolina, and Florida. Onto new electorates, with new preferences, and new demographic compositions. The New Hampshire/Iowa split will allow them to judge for themselves. Both Obama and Clinton have shown that their approach to change can achieve results. Now they have to replicate them under decidedly non-lab conditions.
