Winners triumphed by attracting new voters
DES MOINES - The twin victories by Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrat Barack Obama, who positioned themselves as outsiders challenging their party's establishment, upended political wisdom about the Iowa caucuses by targeting and winning the votes of first-time caucus-goers.
But the profile of those new voters varied dramatically, according to entrance polls conducted by the National Election Poll and reported by the Associated Press.
The polls indicate Obama, the 45-year-old senator from Illinois, relied on young voters among the record number Democrats who participated in the caucuses - many of them self-described independents. By contrast, Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and ordained Baptist minister, found his support among evangelical Christian voters who hold some of his party's more conservative views.
Both Obama and Huckabee, 51, won by expanding the electorate in novel ways. The strategy went against the traditional blueprint for winning in Iowa and showed the importance of attracting voters outside the small, insular circle of dedicated party activists who have dominated past caucuses.
"People are going to look at their respective candidate through the lens of their ability to enlarge the group, to widen the circle," said Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa.
While Republicans drew only about a third as many voters as the Democrats, Huckabee's win was based on participation from first-time participants. More than 60 percent of Republican caucus-goers described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christian - a key voting bloc for Huckabee, who frequently invoked his faith in campaign appearances.
A record 212,000 Democratic caucus attendees - many of them first-time participants - appeared to ratify Obama's strategy.
In the closing weeks of the campaign, Obama trumpeted the large numbers of Republican and independent voters drawn to his "coalition for change and progress." By contrast, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, Obama's chief rival, campaigned with her mother and daughter, highlighting her appeal to female voters.
Among Democrats, according to the entrance polls, age appeared to be the salient divide: 57 percent of young voters ages 17 and 29 chose Obama - five times as many as Clinton, who depended on the support of older, married women. That suggests a generational split between the youthful appeal of Obama's idealism and Clinton's experience, her chief asset.
Clinton drew 45 percent of voters age 65 and older, nearly three times as many as Obama and more than twice as many as John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina.
Still, Obama dominated Iowa's college towns, including Johnson County, home to the University of Iowa. His dominance among the youngest Democratic voters indicate that Clinton's gender-based appeals may have backfired among younger women.
"They have to be careful about that strategy, because a lot of those young women are for Obama. You have to be more targeted," said Celinda Lake, pollster for Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, a Democratic presidential candidate who finished far behind in the polls and dropped out of the race last night. "You can do as much harm as good."
Yet Obama's support base was not limited to urban areas with affluent, highly-educated voters, which preelection polls suggested was strong. He swept the counties along the Mississippi River shoreline bordering his home state, an area that is home to a significant number of blue-collar Catholic voters, along the way.
"If someone like Obama is able to do well there, it will be a good sign that he was able to connect with lots of different kinds of people," said Gordon Fischer, a former Democratic state party chair.
Edwards - who ran the most traditional campaign among the leading Democrats - won decisively in rural regions like Sioux County in the northwest corner of the state, where his fierce populist message resonated.
Among Republicans, the results seemed to validate a fresh approach to winning the caucuses.
While Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, based his campaign on TV ads and a network of Republican leaders at all levels across the state, Huckabee - vastly outspent by Romney and not as well organized - counted on a informal statewide organization of Christian ministers to deliver votes on caucus night.
"Huckabee was able to motivate evangelical voters like no other Republican in the field could," said Russ Tisinger, a pollster with International Communication Research. Religious-minded Iowans, energized by Huckabee's humble origins, his positive message, and declarations of faith, "showed up in large numbers to caucus for him, and he rode that support to victory," Tisinger said.
Meanwhile, John McCain also bucked conventional wisdom, yet still managed to compete for third place.
McCain spent little time campaigning in Iowa, and when he did appear in the state - one of the nation's leading corn producers - McCain boldly opposed agricultural subsidies for farmers. That including federal payments for growing corn for production of ethanol, the energy source President Bush and others have touted as a key to the nation's energy independence.
"This is a guy who beat up on the caucus itself. He beat up on Iowa as a state, he beat up on ethanol, he beat up on Christians," said Christopher C. Hull, a Georgetown University professor and author of "Grassroots Rules: How The Iowa Caucus Helps Elect American Presidents."
"I just can't tell you where these McCainiacs are coming from," he said. 