I talked a bit yesterday about how Dean fell apart in Iowa, but I wanted to expand a bit on figuring out why he did so poorly. It’s no trivial matter — if Dean can fix his problems, he can still recover and win the nomination; if not, he’s toast.
On paper, Howard Dean seemed like an easy bet for a victory in Iowa’s caucuses. Here we had a passionate candidate with a large army of supporters, who spent more money in Iowa than anyone else, who crafted a huge GOTV effort, and enjoyed a substantive lead in all the major polls with just a couple of weeks to go. And did I mention that he had the enthusiastic support of Iowa’s most popular politician, Sen. Tom Harkin?
Despite all of this, Dean came in a distant third and no one seems sure why. I’ve been scrolling around for a day and a half and I’ve found a handful of possible explanations. Some are more persuasive than others, but I don’t think any capture the real reason.
* It’s the attacks’ fault.
Many seem to believe that the constant negative campaigning between Dean and Gephardt did them both in. Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager, characterized Gephardt’s attacks as a “murder-suicide,” and told reporters, “We got in a fight with Gephardt, and these other two guys flew up the chute.” I don’t think this is fully sufficient. A lot of Iowans, who don’t usually care for internecine warfare, may have been turned off by Dean and Gephardt’s sniping, but that doesn’t explain why Kerry did so well. Let’s not forget, Kerry was throwing plenty of elbows at Dean in Iowa, including a few harsh direct mail pieces, and yet Iowans embraced Kerry in large numbers at the end. If negative campaigning was the make-or-break issue, Edwards would have won in a landslide and Kerry would have been down below 20% with Dean and Gephardt.
* It’s Saddam Hussein’s fault.
CNN’s Bill Schneider, among others, said Saddam Hussein’s capture caused Dean’s support to drop. This is lunacy. For this argument to be true, Democratic voters in Iowa would have had to change their opinion about the utility of the war — in large numbers — after Hussein was arrested. Not only did this not happen, Dean’s support actually rose immediately after Hussein was taken into custody.
* It’s Al Gore’s fault.
Some, including Slate’s Mickey Kaus, believe Dean “jumped the shark” after he picked up Al Gore’s support in December. Suddenly, the theory goes, Dean had trouble reconciling his anti-establishment credibility with his establishment endorsement. Again, this strikes me as convoluted rationalizing. Iowa Democrats liked Al Gore and swung the state to him in 2000. How many of these voters, realistically, said, “I was going to back Dean, but now that Gore supports him, I’m going to look elsewhere?” I have my doubts.
* It’s the kids’ fault.
Young people — volunteers, activists, college kids — were supposed to be the backbone of the Dean campaign in Iowa. This ended up failing on Monday night. George Davey, a precinct captain for the Dean campaign, said he was hoping for 25 to 50 Dean voters between the ages of 18 and 25, but only one showed up on Monday night. “I think if we could blame [Dean’s loss] on anyone, blame it on the 18- to 25-year-olds, because they were nonexistent,” Davey said. Sounds like more rationalizing. When a campaign’s supporters don’t turn out, don’t blame the supporters, blame the campaign. It’s not like young people didn’t vote in Iowa, they did. It’s just that they voted for other candidates. Kerry, for example, won major college precincts in Iowa — Iowa City, Drake, Grinnell, Ames. Dean not only lost overall among voters under the age of 30, he tied Edwards for second place for support from first-time caucus participants. These results aren’t the problem; they’re a symptom of the problem.
* It’s the timing’s fault.
This one resonates a bit with me. Dean was thriving when the failures in Iraq were dominating the news and he told people he was the only serious candidate to oppose the war from the beginning (which wasn’t really true, but that’s not the point here). As the war started to slip from the front page, Dean started to slip in the polls. As the LA Times’ Ron Brownstein noted, three-quarters of Iowa Dems opposed the war, but by the time of the caucuses, “the primacy of that issue apparently had receded among Iowa voters.” This sounds persuasive, but the fact remains that Dean’s didn’t even sweep hard-core war opponents.
All of these arguments make some sense, and some combination of them may have contributed to Dean’s collapse, but for me, the truth is less complicated: the more people saw of Dean, the less they liked him personally.
Iowans had plenty of time to get to know Howard Dean. He started campaigning in Iowa in the fall of 2002, long before any of his rivals made their first trip to the state. He was one of only two candidates to visit each of the state’s 99 counties and he was on the air with campaign ads before anyone else.
And yet, according to polls taken in Iowa, voters didn’t have a high opinion of the man. While Edwards and Kerry had unfavorable ratings below 20%, a Des Moines Register poll on Sunday showed one in three likely caucusgoers had an unfavorable view of Dean.
The Register’s David Yepsen noted yesterday that a lot of Iowa Dems who backed Dean early on started to have “buyer’s remorse.”
“Iowa Democrats decided Howard Dean was simply too angry, too liberal and too gaffe-prone to be trusted with his party’s presidential nomination,” Yepsen explained. Yepsen noted that Dean’s campaign organization was “the best ever built in Iowa,” but added that it wasn’t good enough to “make up for the shortcomings of the candidate and the limitations of his message.”
If voters start to dislike a guy the more they get to know him, he has a serious problem.
In particular, this could be devastating in New Hampshire, where Dean enjoyed an enormous lead as recently as last month. The American Research Group’s Dick Bennett noted today that Dean’s unfavorable ratings went from 19% before the Iowa caucuses to 30% after them. The only other serious candidate with unfavorable ratings this high is Lieberman — and he’s in fifth place.
Dean can survive an embarrassing setback in Iowa, but he may be reeling if he ends up losing New Hampshire too.