Before midnight Tuesday, Ted Cruz became the first Latino presidential candidate to win the Iowa caucus. If that wasn’t history-making enough for the GOP, the other Latino candidate, Marco Rubio, blew through all expectation and came close to knocking billionaire candidate Donald Trump out of second place. In fact, he comes away from Iowa with as many delegates as Trump.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the candidate with all the name recognition, backed by the party machine and with the high profile endorsements on her side, Hillary Clinton, barely managed maybe/sort of/probably (the final tally isn’t in yet, as we go to press) to nose ahead of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who hardly anyone had heard of before the primaries started but who has the youth vote solidly on his side.
Each of these outcomes is significant, and both the GOP and the Democratic Party would do well to heed what each says about the electorate and the way forward.

 

The two “winners” of the Iowa GOP caucus are not only Latino, but the youngest candidates (both in their mid-40s). Moreover the caucus has shown that the “outsider” branch of Republicanism — the Tea Party — will show up in droves for its darling (Cruz) and its pal (Rubio).
This is not your father’s Republican party (as Jeb Bush has learned repeatedly during the campaign).
Trump, at one point spectacularly confident that his dog and pony show would entertain all the way to the White House, now has to consider his options. The discontent that he tapped into is the same as the one that propelled Cruz to his victory — only Cruz’s is better organized and less distracted. And Rubio’s ascendance has cut off Trump’s potential retreat into the more conventional corridors of party power for succor.
The party itself is called by Iowa to examine two trends: the party’s Latino future; and the grassroots’ widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.

 

It isn’t only the GOP that has to grapple with widespread grassroots dissatisfaction. If there is one thing Clinton and the Democratic machine need to glean from the razor-thin victory margin at  Iowa’s Democratic caucus, it is how perilously close they are to tumbling into an unhappy past.
1968 to be exact — with the establishment hunkered down in party stalwart Hubert Humphrey’s camp and the dissatified, protesting youth in opposition, backing Eugene McCarthy. Democrats are afraid to change the system, was McCarthy’s refrain (and the heartfelt belief of many of his supporters) and party leadership seemed to go out of its way to prove him right.
The 1968 Democratic Convention was, you will remember, disastrous both inside and outside of the convention hall. The youth-led protests that year were all anti-Vietnam war, but it’s not inconceivable to think that this year’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia might host our era’s youth-led protest movements, too — this time advocating for racial justice and economic justice (Black Lives Matter and Occupy, respectively).
Iowa has made it painfully clear to the Democratic Party that it, too, has an “outsider” branch that will mobilize and show up in droves for its darling (Sanders). If the party has any hope at all of not fracturing in two, it has to stop dismissing that outsider group as hopelessly naive or cultish, and instead find a way to engage with it as genuinely and fully as it does with the establishment group.
The catchphrase from ‘68 convention fits: the whole world is watching what the GOP candidates, the Democratic candidates — what we — are putting on display from now until November.  

 

 

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