Editors’ Blog

Roughly 110,000 voters turned out for last night’s caucuses. That compares to 187,000 in 2016. (2012 and 2008 were closer to last night’s numbers 122,000 and 120,000, respectively.) But that’s still the lowest turnout in more than a decade and dramatically lower than the last contest in 2016. To me the turnout number is much less significant than the result, which I discussed here.

But it’s not insignificant.

There are a few possible explanations. One is that it was incredibly cold last night. But let’s be honest: winters in Iowa are always cold as fuck. They’re used to it. More significant, Republicans could be pretty confident that the outcome of the caucus and the overall nomination battle are both pretty much settled in Trump’s favor. That is a big disincentive to show up. Those explanations, especially the second, get you pretty close to a good explanation.

But not all the way there.

Keep an eye on how the national press covers this. The White House, as you know, has been under immense pressure to offer concessions to address the continuing large number of migrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border. Now there’s a bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate. Last night Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that bill is DOA in the House. But Speaker Johnson said something more specific and revealing. He refused to bring up the bill and according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl said “Congress can’t solve border until Trump is elected or a republican is back in the White House.”

We hear a lot of fears these days about civil war or major political unrest in the United States. It’s less clear precisely how something like this would happen. There’s no lack of polarization and anger. But how precisely does it come about? Despite the blue and red maps we show on TV screens, U.S. politics is highly polarized by region even within most states. Something happened in Texas yesterday that struck me as a possible leading edge of some form of it.

Under the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott (R), Texas has made recent moves to try to take over certain aspects of patrol and enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. This is of course primarily a political move. It’s for show. But the actions assert new rights or powers which are fraught with the potential for abuse and possible used for a sort of slow-motion insurrection. This weekend things went to a new level.

I want to flag this post from Barak Ravid, writing in Axios. Much of it is important detail on a general story you know if you’ve been following things: The Biden White House is out of patience with Benjamin Netanyahu. While Biden’s steadfast support for Israel has been transformative within the broader Israeli body politic, Netanyahu himself is still the same man: taking everything offered with pro forma gratitude and stiffing most things, if not everything, asked in return.

This is anything but surprising. We’d be wrong to imagine the White House is terribly surprised either. Joe Biden knows this man. What is always important to remember is that almost everyone working these questions in the Biden White House was working them, usually one or two rungs down, in the bad old Obama days when Netanyahu notoriously plotted with the president’s domestic political enemies but added the deeper indignity of doing it publicly, not even doing him the courtesy of concealment. They all know this guy.

One thing we learn is that Netanyahu and Biden haven’t spoken in almost three weeks, the last time being on December 23rd when Biden cut off the conversation and hung up on him.

I hope you get a chance to read this piece by Josh Green that we published yesterday. It’s an excerpt from his new book The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics. But we’ve packaged it here in a way that you can definitely read in its own right. The book is about the revival of an electoral American left in the years since the Great Financial Crisis — Warren, Sanders, AOC, etc. But this piece is about the deep back story of these events and how critical parts of our current world got their start during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. It’s not unknown history certainly. But it’s little known in our current political conversations. Definitely give it a read.

I don’t generally have much time for scene-setter pieces — not a criticism exactly, just not a form that I have much use for. But this piece from Iowa by Lisa Lerer does manage to capture a sense of foreboding that is very much part of this election cycle. And it fits particularly for Iowa Republicans, the particular flavor of darkness and pessimism. Iowa is a very old state and obviously a very rural one. But what’s interesting in this piece is that there are very few voices that are just straight up for Trump, despite the fact that Trump is completely dominating the race. That’s key.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh kick off 2024 by discussing oral arguments over Donald Trump’s immunity defense, eyebrow raising decision-making by Fulton County DA Fani Willis and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the upcoming early state primaries.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.