All posts tagged: Iowa Republicans

The age of incoherent partisanship

The age of incoherent partisanship

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The GOP has collapsed as a party, but voters in general don’t seem to care about what parties once represented. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Irrational Tribalism On Tuesday, Representative Elise Stefanik called for an end to the GOP primary season—in January, after one caucus in which some 56,000 Iowa Republicans chose Donald Trump. “I am calling on every other candidate – all of whom have no chance to win – to drop out,” she said in a statement, “so we can unify and immediately rally behind President Trump so that we can focus 100% of our resources on defeating Joe Biden to Save America.” Maybe I spent too much of my career studying the Soviet Union, but Stefanik to me sounded like one of the old-school Kremlin Bolsheviks nominating the new general secretary and …

Does Iowa Matter To Republican Candidates?

Does Iowa Matter To Republican Candidates?

The recent history of the Iowa Republican caucus offers the candidates chasing former President Donald Trump one big reason for optimism. But that history also presents them with an even larger reason for concern. In each of the past three contested GOP nomination fights, Iowa Republicans have rejected the candidate considered the national front-runner in the race, as Trump is now. Instead, in each of those three past caucuses, Iowa Republicans delivered victory to an alternative who relied primarily on support from the state’s powerful bloc of evangelical Christian conservatives. Read: The GOP primary is a field of broken dreams But each of those three recent Iowa winners failed to capture the Republican presidential nomination or, in the end, even to come very close. All three of them were eventually defeated, handily, by the front-runner that they beat in Iowa. That pattern played out in 2008 when Mike Huckabee won Iowa but then lost the nomination to John McCain, in 2012 when Rick Santorum won Iowa but lost the nomination to Mitt Romney, and in …