THE IOWA CAUCUSES: IT’S A WRAP…

Al Gore and George W. Bush emerged from the opening round of voting in the 2000 presidential nominating process with their front-runner status reaffirmed. But how much it will be a harbinger of things to come is an open question.

Iowa is a caucus state, where organization is rewarded and turnouts are comparatively low. New Hampshire is a primary state, where broader vote-getting appeal is a prerequisite because turnouts are higher. And most states that will vote after New Hampshire Feb. 1 hold primaries.

Still, the sense of inevitability that surrounds a front-runner must be dented near the beginning of the nominating process for any challenger to have a chance. And both Gore and Bush dodged the bullet in Iowa.

Gore scored a landslide victory Jan. 24 over Bill Bradley in the Democratic contest. Bush registered a less decisive yet clear-cut victory in Iowa’s Republican voting, and defeated Steve Forbes (albeit narrowly) in a straw vote held in conjunction with Alaska’s GOP precinct caucuses the same night.

The Iowa victories by Gore and Bush gave them much to crow about – and they did. Bush noted that his 41% share of the Republican straw vote eclipsed the old record of 37%, set in 1988 by Bob Dole against, among others, Bush’s father (then the sitting vice president).

Gore boasted that his 63% share of the Democratic vote in his one-on-one race against Bradley was the highest for any contested caucus vote in the state.

But Gore’s margin of victory (almost 29 percentage points) was less than that of the last Democratic presidential aspirant with the vice presidency on his resume, Walter Mondale, who crushed Gary Hart in Iowa in 1984 by 32 percentage points.

Meanwhile, Bush’s 11-point spread over Forbes in the Iowa GOP voting was less than Dole’s 13-point win in 1988. (And for what it is worth, both Mondale in 1984 and Dole in 1988 lost New Hampshire the next week.)

Nor could either winner in Iowa this year take much comfort in the size of the turnout that provided their victories. There are close to 600,000 registered voters in each party in Iowa, but turnout for the Republican caucuses fell below 90,000 for the first time in the history of the straw vote. And only 61,000 Iowa Democrats ventured out to the caucuses.

Both Gore and Bush, though, could take satisfaction in the breadth of their Iowa victories. Gore swept all but a half-dozen of the state’s 99 counties, including nine of the 10 most populous. The one hold out for Bradley was Johnson County, a liberal, academically oriented enclave that includes the University of Iowa at Iowa City.

Bradley also nearly won Story County, Iowa’s other major academic county and the site of Iowa State University at Ames. But while academic communities are often the launching pad for insurgent candidacies, Bradley showed little strength in Iowa beyond them.

With hefty support from organized labor and teachers, Gore won supermajorities (over 60% of the vote) in half of Iowa’s 10 major counties, and surpassed 70% in Black Hawk County (Cedar Falls and Waterloo).

Bush was not so dominant in the more crowded Republican race. But like Gore, his victory was broad-based. He carried nearly 80 counties, including nine of the top 10.

The big one that got away from Bush was Woodbury County (Sioux City) on Iowa’s western border. Woodbury is a conservative GOP stronghold. It was the only one of Iowa’s larger counties that voted for Ronald Reagan over Bush’s father in 1980, and for Pat Buchanan over Dole in 1996.

But in most counties, Bush won with votes to spare – from populous Polk County (Des Moines) to academic-oriented Johnson and Story counties. And of the 14 counties that TV evangelist Pat Robertson won in the 1988 Iowa caucuses, the Texas governor carried 13 of them this year.

The vote, though, in some of these former Robertson counties was close. Bush defeated Forbes in the long-time anti-abortion stronghold of Dubuque by just 1 vote. And down the Mississippi River in Clinton County, Bush’s margin over Forbes was only 16 votes.

Where Bush exposed a potential Achilles’ heel, though, was less among the religious conservatives that had backed Robertson than among the economic conservatives who had boosted Buchanan in 1996. Bush won barely half of the two dozen counties that went for Buchanan four years ago. Seven of the former Buchanan counties went to Forbes and three to Gary Bauer.

Bauer’s trio were clustered in rural northwest Iowa, with the largest being Sioux County, an overwhelmingly Republican bastion with a Dutch Calvinist heritage.

Although Alan Keyes finished third in the Republican voting ahead of Bauer, Keyes was unable to win a single county. He did, though, approach 20% of the vote in several of the bigger ones, including Johnson County. It was a hint that the academic community will support candidates of passion on both ends of the political spectrum.

As for the other two Republican candidates, Sen. Orrin Hatch failed to find a base in Iowa and withdrew from the race the next day.

Sen. John McCain skipped Iowa to focus on New Hampshire, but he did gain a toehold of sorts among the Iowa City crowd. It was the only one of the state’s leading population centers where McCain’s vote percentage cracked double digits.