Last night Iowa held their caucus.  This is the quickie breakdown of how the candidates did:

For the Republicans:

• 52 got 34%
• 61 got 25%
• 65 got 13%
• 71 got 13%
• 72 got 10%

The others either didn’t really run or were pretty much already out of it.

For the Democrats:

• 46 got 38%
• 55 got 30%
• 60 got 29%

The rest either got basically nothing or were already pretty much out of it.

I’ve heard of voting straight party lines before, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen voting straight age lines before.

For the unknowing, the youngest of the pack for the Republicans is Mike Huckabee.  For the Democrats, Barack Obama.

I dug a little deeper, there is nothing unusual about Iowa’s demographics.  Their age brackets break down pretty much along the norms of the rest of the country as a whole.  Given that SOME people think Iowa is a precursor for the rest of the country ( not me at all ), that would mean Obama and Huckabee would square off with Obama taking the prize solely since he’s the youngest.

We’ll see.  But I just don’t think it’s gonna happen because of that.

In a more sober observation, the only surprise casualty of Iowa in my own personal opinion is Clinton.  For the life of me I can’t see how she lost to Edwards in Iowa.  About the only logic I see in this is Edwards’ 30% is very similar to his 2004 showing of 32%.  He never really quit running after 2004 so it looks like he held on to most of his caucus voters.  However, this type of logic doesn’t bode well for Hillary.  In 1992 Bill got 52% of the caucus in a crowded field.  In 1996, 89%.  People have to remember, these caucus votes are not people who walk in off the street and vote.  They are groomed and courted for their votes heavily by the candidates.  Once a commitment is made, it has to be changed.  A 58% loss of commitments in any environment would concern me.  This is an environment Hillary could have, and should have, been able to control.  Although I tend to dismiss Iowa as having a flaky voting history, I do look to people’s commitments over time as a indicator of what’s going on.  That has to concern Hillary as well.  The very obvious indocation here is that Democrat individuals’ commitments to Bill in the past are not carrying over to Hillary.  How she handles that is anyone’s guess.  And, I think it is something that she can handle.  If nothing else, it should point her in the direction of stressing who she is individually moreso than who she was before.  That, I think would humanize her better as well.  Whether she can pull that off beats me.

This turned out to be a lot more interesting than I really expected it would.  Only because I like math more than politics and this one presented an odd math to it.

Guess we’ll have to see how New Hampshire does to see if math predicts the future again? ( I don’t bank on that happening again. )

Other views:

• Jon Swift explains it all to us a little differently. ( Best one so far! )

Tags: 2008 Presidential Race, age, caucus, clinton, edwards, huckabee, iowa, mccain, obama, richardson, romney, ron-paul, thompson