NATCHITOCHES, La., December 31, 2011 — The polls in Iowa have been remarkably fluid this year. Michele Bachmann won the Iowa straw poll last summer, with Ron Paul a close second. Since then, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have all led in polls conducted by major firms.
The movement of candidates in polls is the result of many variables, but particularly interesting in Iowa is the impact of "values voters."
More than half of Republican voters in Iowa fall into the category of "values voters." The values are religious, the voters often Christian evangelicals. They're Rick Perry's target in ads noting that gays can serve openly in the military, yet public school students can't openly practice their Christianity.
Four years ago, Iowa's values voters rallied around Mike Huckabee, giving him a solid win over Mitt Romney and dealing Romney's campaign a blow from which it never recovered. Romney remains unappealing to those voters, many of whom express distrust of his LDS (Mormon) faith. But now they have three acceptable candidates to choose from, not one, and they've failed to coalesce around either Bachmann, Perry or Rick Santorum.
Bachmann received some early endorsements from Iowa's religious leaders, who found her "Biblically qualified." Her inability to capitalize on that has led ministers of major congregations to look hard at Perry and Santorum. Perry's gaffes and disorganized campaign hurt him, and more attention has fallen on Santorum.
Santorum claims to be "on everyone's list," finding that a "great place to be" in a caucus state. He doesn't have to be most voters' favorite, just one of their top two or three. If caucus goers decide that Bachmann and Perry are just too weak to go on, then Santorum believes he can be the one around whom evangelical support coalesces and pull out a win. He's winning Christian endorsements, and his belief isn't wildly unreasonable.
Gingrich's surge in the polls last month made him a lightning rod for attacks by the values candidates. It thus did a service to Mitt Romney (as has Ron Paul's surge, more on that later), who has by all accounts been the front-runner most ignored by his rivals. The conventional wisdom is that they see Gingrich as the greater impediment to their own movement upward, and the conventional wisdom is probably correct. In any event, Gingrich is mistrusted and increasingly unacceptable to values voters in Iowa.
Ron Paul's trajectory in Iowa points to an important truism: Values matter, but "it's the economy, stupid."
Paul isn't one of the three favorites of values voters. Values voters aren't at heart deeply committed to economic and individual liberty, but rather to seeing their social values promulgated. Their greatest concern isn't he existence of government power, but it's service to causes they despise.
Paul's commitment to economic liberty, however, coincides with a growing conviction among Republicans that government is too big, that taxes should not be raised, that spending should be slashed, and that economic decisions should be made by consumers and producers in markets. In addition to his own core of supporters, Paul appeals to values voters who are even more concerned about economic issues than about his stand on DOMA. His own life is exemplary, and that matters with values voters, as illustrated by the minister who, slamming Gingrich, declared that while he likes nothing about Obama's policies, at least Obama doesn't "trade in wives like used cars."
Paul's growing strength in Iowa has led a number of commentators to conclude that Iowa really doesn't matter. That's not true. It is true that if he wins or comes in a close second, he doesn't really damage Romney, whose resources and organization allow him to continue his campaign until he wins the nomination or decides to give it up as hopeless. He does huge damage to the rest of the field, though. Unlike Romney and Paul, they can't decide for themselves how far they battle on. When the money runs out, they're forced out, and they're all operating on razor thin margins. If they don't do something to encourage supporters to donate money, they'll be forced out of the race.
Thus Gingrich has to focus on the current number two, Paul, in order to take his place and not be forced out, while Bachmann, Perry and Santorum must focus on both Gingrich and Paul. They're like hikers being chased by a grizzly bear. They can't outrun the bear and don't have to; they only have to outrun the bear's other potential meals. At the moment they have to outrun Gingrich and Paul, not Romney, and so the attack ads are against those two.
The real issue being decided in Iowa isn't who will win the nomination (though Iowans have voted more closely to national election outcomes than not, their "atypical" and "skewed" nature notwithstanding), but who will get to go on. Romney and Paul get to go on, no matter what happens in Iowa, and so they've had the luxury of running national campaigns. Of course they want to do well in Iowa - that provides momentum, no denying it - but unlike the rest, they aren't desperate for a win, only strongly desirous of a strong showing.
The ones with the most to lose in Iowa are the values candidates, and therefore the values voters themselves. They were poised to dominate this campaign, but the odds of that are slipping away. The campaign will probably be about the economy and Iran and immigration after all, not about evolution, prayer, gays and abortion.
The challenge for the eventual winner of the GOP nomination will be, if the winner isn't Bachmann, Perry or Santorum, to keep the values voters interested and engaged. If they're apathetic, the GOP will lose. But with President Obama as the opponent, it will take a lot of ineptitude not to get them to the polls.
James Picht is the Senior Editor for Communities Politics and teaches economics at the Louisiana Scholars' College in Natchitoches, La., where he went to take a break from working in Moscow and Washington. But he fell in love with the town and with the professor of Romance languages, so there he stayed. Now he teaches, annoys his children, and makes jalapeno lemonade. His father's family is from Iowa, and so is his father-in-law's. He tweets, hangs out on Facebook, and has a blog he totally neglects at pichtblog.blogspot.com.
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