With so much attention paid to determining “who won” the Iowa Caucuses, and how irregularities may have affected the outcome, it’s important not to forget about what we did learn about the striking and entirely complementary strengths and weaknesses of the two Democratic candidates. I looked at some of the numbers and their implications yesterday at New York:

As Eric Levitz noted in the wee hours of Caucus Night, Sanders won the under-30 portion of caucus participants by an astonishing 70 points, 84 to 14. That’s unprecedented, best we can tell. Barack Obama, the model for Bernie’s campus-based youth-mobilization effort in Iowa, won only 57 percent of the under-30 crowd in Iowa, albeit against more opponents.
Unfortunately for Sanders, his overwhelming strength in this one demographic was fully offset by his weaknesses elsewhere. There was, in fact, a direct correlation of age to likelihood to caucus for Hillary Clinton, who lost those aged 30 to 44 by a 37/58 margin, but then won the 45 to 64 cohort 58/35 and those 65 and over by 69/26. And as Ron Brownstein observes, older folks tend to show up:

[W]hen it comes to piling up votes, one of these demographic advantages is much more useful than the other. Across all of the 2008 contests, according to [Gary] Langer’s calculations, voters older than 45 cast fully 61 percent of Democratic votes, while those younger than 45 cast 39 percent. That’s an advantage for Clinton. And it’s a slightly worrisome note for Sanders — a cloud passing on an otherwise sunny day — that young voters cast a slightly smaller share of the total Iowa Democratic vote in 2016 than 2008.
And Sanders’s potential weakness in post-New Hampshire primaries was evidenced by his nearly two-to-one loss in the small segment of Iowa caucus participants who were not white.

What Brownstein calls the “Grand Canyon-sized” generation gap in the Democratic nomination contest is likely to significantly erode Hillary Clinton’s advantage among women, much as Barack Obama’s appeal to African-Americans did in 2008. But in the later primaries, in both the South and big states like New York, California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, minority voter support for Clinton will, unless something changes, significantly erode Bernie’s advantage among younger voters as well.
The question in the long run is whether these disparate intraparty bases of support will hang together in a general election on behalf of the eventual nominee. Certainly similar cleavages in 2008 did not keep Barack Obama from assembling what we now know as the Obama Coalition of young and minority voters and certain categories of women. Since young voters are the most marginal electoral participants of them all, Team Clinton should be especially worried that under-30 voters won’t turn out for her in a general election. Indeed, some Republicans fantasize about stealing the youth vote behind a candidate like Marco Rubio, with his whole new-generation, aspirational message (offset, to be sure, by a Reagan-era economic outlook and a Cold War zest for militarism). This is another reason Hillary should be careful about letting her competition with Bernie Sanders become too savage.

It later occurred to me that Sanders and Clinton were like two people holding ends of a wishbone representing the Obama Coalition. Where exactly they divide it may well determine the nomination. But putting it back together in the fall will matter most.

The Fox News GOP presidential debate from Iowa, boycotted by Daniel Trump, did not resolve a lot, as I explained last night at New York:

[N]obody who could have scored a real victory that mattered actually did. Ted Cruz had his worst debate by far, as Megyn Kelly and the other candidates basically called him a slick liar — not what you want when you are trying to convince Iowa evangelicals you are young King Josiah sent to cleanse the land. Speaking of slick: Cruz may have been the champion college debater, but Marco Rubio sounded like one with his determination to pack two minutes of stock speech into every minute of talk. His own flip-flopping on immigration was cast in sharp relief, and his gratuitous shout-outs to Jesus Christ were exceeded only by Cruz’s to Iowa nativist Steve King.
Meanwhile, some of the better performances were by candidates who are going nowhere in Iowa and are struggling to survive in New Hampshire. The last thing the Republican Establishment needs is for Chris Christie or John Kasich to get a second wind, since neither is going to win in New Hampshire or the states immediately following it on the calendar — but could take votes away from a more viable candidate like, say, Marco Rubio. Jeb Bush, who has just enough money left to run another $10 to $20 million in attack ads aimed at Rubio, had a pretty good night, too.
All of this is pretty good news for the guy who wasn’t there. But maybe I’m wrong. As I write this, Frank Luntz has one of his focus groups warbling about Marco Rubio. I seem to recall that Luntz’s focus group after the first Fox News debate thought Megyn Kelly had all but destroyed Donald Trump’s candidacy. So we’ll have to let Monday night’s caucusers have the last word.

In this era of gridlock in Congress, enforced by a policy of Republican obstructionism, there has been one bright flickering hope: for criminal justice reform, which has been promoting by a fragile but wide-ranging left-right coalition convinced that the mandatory minimum sentences and mass incarceration associated with the “war on drugs” and other law-and-order measures of past decades has been a failure with massive human and fiscal costs. But now that initiative is under fire from the Right, as I explained this week at New York:

The temptation of law-and-order politics is pulling more and more conservatives away from the carefully cultivated, Evangelical-blessed, libertarian-influenced, bipartisan criminal-justice-reform movement, which was moving toward fruition in Congress.
The immediate flash point is in the Senate, where a bill to allow for reconsideration of federal sentences imposed under the idiotic regime of mandatory minimum sentences had been considered a very good prospect for enactment in this legislatively barren election year. Two of its most prominent backers were hyperconservative senators John Cornyn of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, and it had overcome its supposedly most difficult obstacle when Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley approved it.
But now a backlash — I am using the term very deliberately — is building, led by freshman Republican senator and conservative superstar Tom Cotton of Arkansas, supported by backbenchers who pretty clearly want to show off their law-and-order credentials. Politico‘s Seung Min Kim reports Cotton’s efforts could convince Mitch McConnell to deep-six the legislation for this Congress:

Cotton, the hawkish upstart who’s already made waves on the Iran nuclear deal and government surveillance programs, is now leading a new rebellion against a bipartisan effort to overhaul the criminal justice system — hoping to torpedo one of the few pieces of major legislation that could pass Congress in President Barack Obama’s final year.
GOP tensions over a bill that would effectively loosen some mandatory minimum sentences spilled over during a party lunch last week, when Cotton (R-Ark.), the outspoken Senate freshman, lobbied his colleagues heavily against the legislation, according to people familiar with the closed-door conversation. The measure passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall with bipartisan support….
Cotton isn’t alone. Other Senate Republicans, including Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho and David Perdue of Georgia, also registered their strong opposition during the lunch, even as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) vigorously defended the bill, which he helped negotiate. Risch stressed this message, according to one Republican source: Shouldn’t the GOP be a party of law and order?
Risch declined to elaborate on his concerns over the bill, saying he was displeased that his private remarks made during a party lunch were made public. But the deepening Republican split over reforming key elements of the criminal justice system — an effort years in the making that has been powered by an influential right-left coalition — may imperil whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ultimately will take up the measure later in this election year.

It’s easy to laugh at Risch’s displeasure at being caught in mid-demagoguery, but he is unquestionably articulating views that are in the air. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, after all, likes to talk about an immigrant-driven “crime wave” that requires a new crackdown on the lowlifes and losers who are challenging police authorities in the cities. And his attitude seems to have softened the commitment to criminal-justice reform of his sometimes Mini-Me and now-deadly rival, Ted Cruz.
But what may most be animating this collapse of bipartisanship is not the 2016 presidential election, but the next one or the one after that: whenever it is that Tom Cotton makes his inevitable move toward the White House. Possessor of a mile-long pre-political résumé (two Harvard degrees, circuit court clerkship, military service in Afghanistan and Iraq, a stint with McKinsey & Company), and already distinguishing himself as the hawkiest of hawks, Cotton is the purveyor of a grim, Calvinist, old-school conservatism that still has a lot of support in the GOP. As a House member he talked about the prospect of a debt limit breach and an ensuing recession as though it might be a good, bracing tonic for a nation too accustomed to easy credit. He’s just the guy to slam the prison door shut on those who might have gotten a tardy but life-saving reprieve from hammer-headed sentences.

I’d hate to guess when this rock might be pushed back up the Hill again if Cotton rolls it down.

The “surprise” endorsement of Donald Trump by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin didn’t surprise me at all, as I explained at New York the night the deal went down:

Notwithstanding the howls of pain and rage from supporters of Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin’s decision to endorse Donald Trump for president makes perfect sense when you think about what she has distinctively represented in the Republican Party….She represents almost perfectly the passion and resentment of grassroots cultural-issues activists. When John McCain vaulted her into national politics, she was known for two things other than her gender: She was a “walk the walk” role model for the anti-abortion movement, thanks to her small child Trig, and she had taken on the “crony capitalist” GOP Establishment in Alaska and won. Thus she was a fellow “maverick” with Christian-right street cred and a “game-changing” identity.
The remarkably widespread belief that Palin lost the 2008 presidential election for her party is even more far-fetched than the hope that she could win it. And so the many fans she made in that campaign developed — with a lot of help from Palin herself — a deep resentment of all of the Democrats, Republicans, and media elites who belittled her. In a very real sense, she was the authentic representative of those local right-to-life activists — disproportionately women — who had staffed countless GOP campaigns and gotten little in return (this was before the 2010 midterm elections began to produce serious anti-choice gains in the states) other than the thinly disguised contempt of Beltway Republicans. And after 2008 she generated a sort of perpetual motion machine in which her fans loved her precisely for the mockery she so reliably inspired.
Unfortunately for those fans, St. Joan of the Tundra was never quite up to the demands of a statewide — much less national — political career. So she opportunistically intervened in politics between books and television specials and widely broadcast family sagas, mostly through well-timed candidate endorsements. It’s striking, though not surprising, that Palin is now endorsing the nemesis of one of her most successful “Mama Grizzly” protégées, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, on the turf of another, Iowa’s Joni Ernst.
But in many respects, the Trump campaign is the presidential campaign Palin herself might have aspired to run if she had the money and energy to do so. Her famous disregard for wonky facts and historical context is but a shadow of Trump’s. His facility with the big and effective lie can’t quite match Palin’s, who after all convinced many millions of people in a Facebook post that the Affordable Care Act authorized “death panels.” And both of them, of course, exemplify the demagogue’s zest for flouting standards of respectable discourse and playing the table-turning triumphant victim/conqueror of privileged elites.
Conservatism for both Trump and Palin simply supplies the raw material of politics and a preassembled group of aggrieved white people ready to follow anyone purporting to protect hard-earned threatened privileges, whether it’s Social Security and Medicare benefits or religious hegemony. So it’s natural Palin would gravitate to Trump rather than Cruz, who’s a professional ideologue but a mere amateur demagogue. The endorser and the endorsee were meant for each other.

And it’s a token of Palin’s esteem for The Donald that she didn’t expect him (or so it seems) to offer her the same position on the ticket she had in 2008. She’ll be happy as his Secretary of Energy, where she can continue her feud with oil companies even as she encourages them to “Drill, Baby, Drill.”

Each day that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz fail to self-destruct as presidential candidates is a bad day for the Republican Establishment. The panic that is incipient in their ranks was expressed in a very graphic way earlier this week by New York Tiimes columnist David Brooks, who is calling for a “conspiracy” to thwart the deadly duo. I wrote about Brooks’ fears and fantasies at New York:

It’s odd enough to see Brooks identify himself as a Republican, panicked or otherwise. He typically likes to position himself far, far above the ignorant partisan armies clashing by night, a condor wheeling and soaring in broad, high-minded arcs before eventually landing on ground that happens to coincide with the short-term positions of the GOP. But it seems the present emergency is now too dire for these sort of dialectics.

Rarely has a party so passively accepted its own self-destruction. Sure, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are now riding high in some meaningless head-to-head polls against Hillary Clinton, but the odds are the nomination of either would lead to a party-decimating general election.

So what is to be done?

What’s needed is a grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism, built both online and through rallies, and gets behind a single candidate sometime in mid- to late February. In politics, if A (Trump) and B (Cruz) savage each other then the benefits often go to Candidate C. But there has to be a C, not a C, D, E, F and G.

I suppose this is an advance endorsement of the idea that whichever Establishment candidate wins that “lane” in New Hampshire — whose primary is right on the brink of “mid-February” — should have it all to himself thereafter. But who will insist on Jeb’s super-pac disgorging its money, or Kasich not holding on until Ohio, or Rubio and Bush not holding on until Florida, or Christie throwing in the towel while his ego still rages unappeased? Oh, that’s right: a “grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism,” whatever that might be. Seems it will have to be something different from the usual Republican formula:

This new movement must come to grips with two realities. First, the electorate has changed. Less-educated voters are in the middle of a tidal wave of trauma. Labor force participation is dropping, wages are sliding, suicide rates are rising, heroin addiction is rising, faith in American institutions is dissolving.
Second, the Republican Party is not as antigovernment as its elites think it is. Its members no longer fit into the same old ideological categories. Trump grabbed his lead with an ideological grab bag of gestures, some of them quite on the left. He is more Huey Long than Calvin Coolidge.

So the “Republican conspiracy” needs to preempt that appeal:

What’s needed is a coalition that combines Huey Long, Charles Colson and Theodore Roosevelt: working-class populism, religious compassion and institutional reform.

Does any of that sound like Jeb! Bush to you? Or Marco Rubio? Or Chris Christie? Or John Kasich? Will this new “grassroots movement” that’s supposed to arise in a matter of weeks recognize its hero, and will that happen to coincide with the wishes of a plurality of New Hampshire primary voters? Is there any remote chance the tepid “Reformicon” agenda Brooks alludes to in casting about for something “governing conservatives” can talk about will light fires in the electorate?
Hell if David Brooks knows. But he’s laid down his marker and will now presumably flee back to higher ground.