The Iowa Caucuses are over. But what does that, when we get down to it, really mean? For those who observe the American presidential process only casually the importance of this event might be difficult to fathom. After all, Iowa is a not very large, not very diverse and not very representative section of the vast American electoral architecture. Iowa has only 30 delegates to award on the Republican side, of a total of 2472. But such is the power and influence of this small corner of the American experiment that it has, at a stroke, rendered the preceding months of campaigning and polls and speculation functionally irrelevant. The sad truth belying the oceans of ink and mountains of text already produced covering the race is that, until now, none of it was real. Until Iowa all things are possible, all parts are moving and the often mentioned ‘race’ is really only occurring in the heads of pundits and talking heads. Nothing counts, until now.

Why is it important?
Iowa is first. That is really the core of it. It is where the metal meets the meat. A good showing here in the land of corn farms and pickup trucks can propel a candidate to the top of the pack, just as a poor performance can destroy ambitions nurtured over decades. This is because, as is often noted, the primary sytem is a process, not an event. American politics is driven by narrative, position and momentum. In this sense Iowa is important because it demonstrates viability, winning potential and forces the media to spend eight days between Iowa and the New Hampshire primary talking about the victor of Iowa.

So what happened this time?
I have been saying for a while now, when asked about the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, that his candidacy wasn’t real until he started amassing delegates. All the national polling advantages in the world can’t save you if the voiters of Des Moines, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids and so on decide to pick the other guy. There is something both charming and terribly strange about that fact.
The big story of the night is obviously the winners. Let us begin with the Democratic side of the ledger. Trust me, the Republican side will take a while so lets start slow. At the time of writing, Clinton is ahead in Iowa on the ‘delegate equivalent’ count. This number is arrived at by arcane and esoteric means with which i won’t bore you, but sufficed to say it is the result, rather than the process. The numbers that Sanders and Clinton are getting are not votes, but the number of delegates pledge by caucus to attend the state convention which decides who the delegates to the national convention will be. The democratic side does not take or publish vote totals, only results. If this seems odd or unsatisfactory, rest assured you are not alone. In any case, the result is 49.89% Clinton, 49.54% Sanders and 0.57% to Martin O’Malley. If you don’t know who Martin O’Malley is, don’t feel bad. He is the man who has been desperately wishing for the last 12 months he was running in a cycle that didn’t include a septuagenarian socialist rock-star with a Brooklyn accent and a woman who has been spoken of as the likely first female president for so long people could be forgiven for thinking its already happened. In this instance, being a photogenic straight white Liberal man with an accomplished record in your home state is tragically not the golden ticket it used to be. Life is tough, no?

The truth is that not much hung on the Democratic caucuses. Clinton can win without victory here. The game we are watching on the Blue side of the aisle is all about how long it will take to put Bernie Sanders back in his box. His ability to fight to within a statstical dead heat puts off that event for a time, but there is little realistic posibility of him accumulating a majority of delegates. There is a great deal more to say about what Sanders is doing in the Democratic process, the long-term value of his contribution and what his candidacy says about the state of American politics and society but i will save that for another time. Right now it is essentially status quo ante bellum, minus the presence of Martin O’Malley as Mr. Cellophane has announced he is winding up his campaign.

But what about the GOP?
After announcing his candidacy Donald Trump shot to the lead in national and Iowa polls. The first essential rule of American presidential politics is that national polls scarcely matter. Don’t pay attention to them. It is popularity state by state which counts. First Trump lost his Iowa lead to Carson, then to Cruz and only regained it in the closing days of the Caucus campaign. The question Iowa was meant to answer was this: Is Donald Trump actually happening? Can this walking, talking Id really be romping it in so convincingly, buoyed to seemingly endless heights each time he smashed the predictions of his demise? The answer, delivered by the humble caucus-goers of the Hawkeye state, is no. Not only did Trump fail to win, but he almost failed to come second, only barely holding Marco Rubio down into third place. Here is why.

Iowa is, actually, a reasonably conservative state. Nearly half the Republican caucus goers there are Christian evangelicals. It is this constituency that propelled Rick Santorum to win Iowa in 2012, and Mike Huckabee to win in 2008. Ted Cruz, darling of the Tea Party and the hard-right of the GOP began putting his eggs in the Iowa basket early on. He courted and acquired the early endorsements of pastors, radio hosts and evangelical activists. The Cruz campaign opened up multiple field offices in Iowa, ferried in volunteers from outside and inside the state and even arranged accommodation for them amusingly nicknamed ‘Camp Cruz’. This sort of organisational muscle matters in Iowa, where the pool of voters is small and the battle is all about how many people you can get to stand in a school gym and fight for you. Activists hold much more power in Iowa than in larger and later contests. Even with the popular governor of the state campaigning against Cruz, and the whole weight of the ‘The Donald’ directed against him, these committed cadres were able to fight to victory on Cruz’ behalf. This is very important. For the first time, someone has hit Trump and survived the blow-back, and for the first time Trump has failed to crush and emasculate his opponent. Like all bullies, Trump’s greatest enemies are impotence and ridicule. I would be willing to bet his life will feature more of both for the rest of the primary season.

So that’s Cruz, what about Rubio?
This is where my point about the narrative nature of American presidential politics becomes important. How well you are doing is not so much measured by objective performance, but based on relative position and expectations. Ever heard of Paul Tsongas? He is the guy who beat Bill Clinton by nine percent in the New Hampshire primary. You have likely never heard of him because Clinton did better than expected, declared himself the ‘Comeback Kid’ and proceeded to bask in positive news coverage while beating the victorious Tsongas into submission in successive primaries. It is all about expectations, which is why so much of the spin around presidential campaigns is about managing those expectations. Marco Rubio’s campaign was in this instance, as in many others, very canny indeed. Not wanting to raise expectations in Iowa, they were fairly late to the party. While Trump and Cruz were slugging it out, Rubio was setting up campaign headquarters, hiring staff, and performing analytic surveys. These allowed his campaign to find the areas of the state most susceptible to Rubio’s message, and campaign intensively in those areas virtually exclusively. This was a small-target strategy. Not going for the win, not even going for second place, but trying to get the maximum in terms of delegates and votes in exchange for the minimum of time and money. The Rubio campaign said over and over that it was the underdog, it was arriving late, it was in no way going to win. Cruz and Trump obligingly co-operated with this story, needing to argue for their own purposes that it was a two horse race between Trump and Cruz to try and shake off supporters from other candidates. This allowed Rubio to come up the middle, beat expectations and come out of Iowa with a very strong third place finish. This is extremely important, as the makeup of the later race will be determined by who is able to crowd out the competition and become the standard bearer for a wing of the party. This takes Rubio several steps closer to clinching the ‘Establishment’ or ‘Moderate’ republican label, and days of positive media coverage are unlikely to hurt him in his quest to beat Kasich, Christie and Bush in New Hampshire and consolidate their supporters into a legitimately plausible coalition.

And then there’s Trump…
The Trump candidacy deserves a post all of its own, so i won’t burden this already overly long post with an explanation of his rise or alleged ‘ascendancy’. Remember all that stuff about managing expectations? Yeah, trump doesn’t do that. That is one of the many curves and edges of the TrumpCopter that should render it unable to fly by the laws of political reality, and yet there it is, stubbornly airborne day after day, driving pundits and the commentariat into fits of inchoate rage. Regarding his results, sufficed to say he failed to meet expectations. It is difficult at this stage to discuss the exact reasons why, as in a real sense the Trump campaign is a cipher. They don’t run all that many TV ads, they don’t talk about organisation very much and their expressed strategy seems limited to ‘we are going to win’. The Trump ‘campaign’ is really Donald, the Man Himself in all his glory. We were assured numerous times over the last few weeks that they had a ‘great ground game’. Whether this is true or not we can only speculate, but considering the results i am inclined to say it wasn’t as great as they thought. Can he still win the nomination? Absolutely, but one leg of the stool has been removed, and the Manhattan real estate developer wobbles precariously on his diminished perch. He can still win because, as the astute among you would have noticed, the man who won Iowa has not won the nomination in the Republican Party since George W. Bush. This harkens back to the aforementioned unrepresentative nature of the Iowa electorate, particularly on the GOP side. America is simply not 50% Evangelical. Iowa also requires relatively little money to compete in. Its TV markets are comparatively cheap, it is a world capital of face to face retail politics and the state is reasonably small. So Iowa is often captured by the scrappy conservative insurgency against the more establishment or moderate candidates who have their powerbase elsewhere. Trump never needed Iowa to win. But he does need to win somewhere to prove he is a real candidate. If not Iowa, then where? His lead remains in New Hampshire, and in South Carolina. But both of those races have tightened already, and will come into sharper contrast still as polling day draws near. If Trump fails to meet expectations in New Hampshire, for instance by Rubio vaulting into competition with him on the basis of his Iowa performance, his already rattled candidacy will be seriously derailed. South Carolina, the following state in the calendar, is a notorious bastion of social and evangelical conservatism, a base Trump failed to win over in Iowa once already.

And so the question we are left with, still, is this. Are the polls accurately predicting Trump’s support at the ballot box? In Iowa they didn’t. We have eight days until the first primary. The world was created in less.