Most of the time, Americans call Iowa "flyover country," a state to look down upon from an airplane. It's not a place to go unless you have to, which is what wannabe presidential candidates do every four years.
There, they find politically engaged citizens, who, by virtue of that very passionate engagement and their own particularities, are massively unrepresentative of the U.S. electorate as a whole.
More than half the Republicans who partake in the Iowa caucuses are evangelical Christians, a huge over-representation even within that party, let alone the country. Swaths of Democrats are from university and college towns. They tilt left, this time way to the left to support Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Jimmy Carter, an obscure Georgia governor, "discovered" the Iowa caucuses a year and a half before he became the Democratic nominee for president in 1976. Ever since, these caucuses have been the most over-covered and often the most misleading event of the U.S. political cycle. But because Iowa is the political test, the caucuses get saturation media coverage, the bulk of which is not about where candidates stand on the issues but where they stand in the polls.
Ted Cruz won on Monday night among Republicans, who fielded the weakest team of pretenders, third-raters, ideologues and nobodies since this primary business began. If Iowa did nothing else, it will, or at least should, cause most of the hopeless cases to leave the contest.
Mr. Cruz, a first-term Texas senator, will not win the party's nomination. He is too far to the political right even for most Republicans, which is really saying something in a party that would have no room today for Dwight Eisenhower or George H.W. Bush.
Mr. Cruz's base of support among the evangelicals is too narrow for the country at large. He might even be the most disliked person in the Republican Party among those who know and have tried to work with him in Congress, except perhaps for Donald Trump, who isn't really a Republican but a one-man ego trip.
It always seemed likely – and now it seems more than likely after his third-place finish in Iowa – that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida would be the nominee. Not because Mr. Rubio is brilliant or anything like that. Not because he has much experience as a first-term senator, which, if you think about it, is exactly the criticism Republicans heaped on Barack Obama, a freshman senator from Illinois apparently in over his head in the White House.
No, it always seemed likely because Mr. Rubio has one of those up-from-the-bootstraps, son-of-an-immigrant personal narratives that presidential candidates find useful. He is also handsome, from an important state, of Hispanic origin and articulate in a cue-card way, and, critically, because he is not Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump was a spectacle, and will always remain so, given the gargantuan size of his ego and bankroll. In a crude way, this billionaire intuitively tapped into some of the resentment middle- and lower-middle-class whites feel about the state of their country, and their diminished place in it.
Money and ego got Mr. Trump further than "experts" expected, although he flopped in Iowa, finishing second whereas he had been expected to finish first. He will score in other states. But, as time goes on, the party will look for someone who can win the entire country, and that will not be Donald Trump.
As Winston Churchill, an Americanophile, is reported to have said, Americans will look at many bad options, pursue some of them perhaps, but ultimately do the right thing. Or so Churchill hoped.
What a strange time in the United States: Its currency is rising, its economy is booming, unemployment is at around 5 per cent, its military is unassailably strong, its ingenuity is intact and it is a beacon for immigrants.
And yet American politics, dysfunctional in so many ways, has become a swirl of resentment and anger – for evangelicals that the country has gone all secular on them; for Republicans who feel cheated, even by their own party, that government just keeps getting bigger; for Trumpites that immigrants and blacks are being favoured at their expense; for workers who have lost their jobs; for ordinary Americans, even in far-removed Iowa, that terrorism lurks around every corner, and that this once great, and recently uncontested power, has lost its standing and its way in the world.