Ames, Iowa — When Mike Huckabee left Hilton Coliseum on the campus of Iowa State University in the twilight Saturday, a group of his supporters began chanting “First tier! First tier! First tier!” It wasn’t quite “We’re number one!” but it was a huge improvement — and a huge relief — for the former Arkansas governor, who feared that a bad showing might put him out of the GOP presidential race. Spared extinction by a strong second-place finish to winner Mitt Romney, Huckabee was thinking about tomorrow. “We’re going to New Hampshire!” he said to another supporter. Through it all, Huckabee spoke as if he had just won the Iowa caucuses, instead of placing in the straw poll, but no one could begrudge him his happiness.
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As reporters, cameramen, and fans pressed around Huckabee, their TV lights glaring in the fading daylight, less than a hundred yards away Team Romney was closing up shop, knocking down the elaborate spread — tents, music stages, kiddie playgrounds, and an impressive barbecue distribution system — that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney had laid before the voters whose tickets he had purchased, whose buses he had rented, and whose lunches he had provided on a day that he hoped would bring him an overwhelming victory in Iowa. Instead, after beating Huckabee 4,516 to 2,587, Romney’s celebratory words seemed a little muted.
“Today the people of this great state sent a message to America, and that is that change begins in Iowa,” Romney told his supporters. That’s a favorite theme of his of late — he means change from the bad old days of Republicans who don’t know what their true values are — but tonight the change that had begun was that Romney seemed a little less the juggernaut than he had seemed just the day before.
At the end of the day, Huckabee and Romney had become nearly the only stories in town. Sam Brownback placed third, with 2,192 votes, but he seemed a lot farther than 395 behind Huckabee. Like Romney, he had put tons of money into the straw poll. The talk of the day was that he had paid for a big tent — from a distance, it resembled the Denver airport — that was not only spacious but air conditioned. All day long, he seemed to have a lot of supporters around, but no one was entirely sure how many of them were from Iowa and how many were from Brownback’s close-by home state of Kansas. In the end, there weren’t enough Iowans.
Fourth place went, a little surprisingly, to Tom Tancredo, who delivered perhaps the biggest applause line of the day as the candidates delivered their pitches, one after the other, to the Republicans gathered in the air-conditioned Hilton Coliseum. The unexpected thing was that Tancredo’s applause-getter wasn’t about immigration. Instead, Tancredo told the story of Danny Dietz, a Navy SEAL who was killed in Afghanistan in circumstances Tancredo blamed on restrictive rules of engagement. “When I am president, I will never, ever, ever send anyone into harm’s way with a CYA memo drafted by a Pentagon lawyer,” Tancredo told the crowd. “The only rule of engagement I’m going to have in a Tancredo administration is this: We win, you lose!” That got a lot more applause than anyone’s talk about change and the future.
Whatever the appeal, in general Tancredo went over pretty well. He certainly didn’t owe much support to his tent, which featured a corny, a cappella quartet/comedy group singing “Happy Trails” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” There were two guys dressed like cowboys, one like a hayseed, and — make of this what you will — one in a pancho, a big red sombrero and a wide Frito Bandito mustache.
As for everyone else, Ron Paul won 1,305 votes, a number that many people thought might be higher until it turned out that a lot of the very vocal Paul fans wandering around the ISU campus were from out of state. Tommy Thompson, who said he would quit the race if he didn’t finish at the top, came in sixth with 1,039 votes. That’s it for him.
After that came Fred Thompson, who was not only not in Iowa but not even in the race yet, with 203 votes; Rudy Giuliani, with 183; Duncan Hunter, with 174; John McCain, with 101, and John Cox, a candidate who can’t get in the door of the GOP debates but who was allowed to speak to the straw-poll audience, with 41.
When it was all over, there was no doubt that the winner of the day was Huckabee. “It is beyond huge,” Huckabee told reporters. “Tonight, for all practical purposes, we won the Iowa straw poll. No one was even saying we would come in second…You gotta admit, for what we had to work with, the resources we had, for us to surge, coming in second, is the victory, it is the story.”
He’s right. Huckabee said he had spent about $150,000 for the event, a small fraction of what Romney spent. And just a day earlier, Huckabee, who didn’t have the money to rent buses for his voters, was urging people to ride other candidates’ buses and turn around and vote for him. It worked. Given the numbers, there’s no doubt that some Iowans arrived on Romney buses and cast their ballot for Huckabee.
Finally, the other story of the day was turnout. Just before the results were announced, officials revealed that 14,302 people had voted, a figure that is down dramatically from the nearly 24,000 who took part in 2000, when George W. Bush won.
There were a number of competing explanations. One, it was really hot, and some voters, particularly the elderly, stayed away. Two, there were a number of top candidates — Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and John McCain — who didn’t take part in the event. And three, the voting totals from 2000 might have been unreliable. Back then, there were lots of stories about double voting. This time, Republicans cracked down. “We set up, I think, the cleanest straw poll you could ask for,” Iowa Rep. Steve King said. “Bring your driver’s license, swipe your driver’s license, and be an Iowan and be an eligible voter.”
But there was a fourth explanation, too, and it was most troubling for Republicans. A low turnout is pretty consistent with other indicators we have seen this year suggesting that Republican intensity is simply lower than Democratic intensity. The GOP is raising less money, attracting smaller, less vocal crowds, and now, has attracted far fewer people to its straw poll than in 2000. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee may be happy campers, but if the intensity explanation is true, Republicans still have reasons to be worried.
