Well, Here We Are

Two weeks until Iowa, the race has narrowed. One of these people could beat Trump, right?

- By Gabriel Debenedetti

In the final days before the Iowa caucuses every four years, it’s typical for campaign aides and reporters, and baristas and taxi drivers, and any Iowan who’s ever turned on a television or heard a radio ad, to try predicting which presidential candidates will win and which ones will fall flat. But this year is different. Just two weeks out, as the outcome of the race should be taking shape, almost no one in the state—much less the campaign operatives paid to project confidence to anyone who’ll listen—is comfortable even hazarding a shadow of a guess about the Democratic caucuses. This is, in part, the product of a hangover from the 2016 experience there, when Donald Trump happened and Ted Cruz won the Republican caucuses anyway, and when Bernie Sanders shocked the country by effectively tying Hillary Clinton. But even more than that, it’s about how unusually tight this year’s race is— and how much of the rest of the primary campaign seems to hang on its, for now, totally wide-open outcome.

Come February 4, more than two-thirds of Democrats will be at least some amount of disappointed by who wins Iowa, with a whole lot of them much more panicked than that: If, after a year of seemingly nonstop campaigning, none of the candidates has really pulled in front, how confident can you be, they might ask, that any of them could actually take down Trump? The campaigns know this, and know that after Iowa the field of real contenders is likely to narrow even further—which is why they are all, even the most ideological candidates, so focused on February 3 as a way of demonstrating electability. Because the first and last thing every voter is asking themselves right now is, Who can win in November?