Additional thoughts after the Iowa caucuses

Here are a few salient points from commentary around the internet that Star Tribune Opinion editors have read following Monday night's Iowa caucuses, won easily by former President Donald Trump. These articles aren't available to us to republish in full, but you can follow the links to the sites where they appeared.

(You'll encounter article count meters or paywalls if you're not a subscriber to those sites.) ••• "It would have been better if Trump had been rebuked early and hard by Republican voters. But that was not to be. Once the first indictment was handed down in New York in the hush money for porn star case, the die was cast.

The party faithful—partly because the Bragg indictment was legally shaky and pretty easily dismissed as politically motivated—rallied round their prosecuted, persecuted hero. I said partly because it wasn't just that the indictment was a stretch, it was also that MAGA Republicans so dearly want the accusations to be false.

To admit otherwise opens the door to considering that he may really have obstructed justice and blithely endangered national security in the classified documents case, lied about and attempted to steal an election, and looked on with depraved satisfaction as his minions searched for Mike Pence—to commit murder.

(Even now, despite everything we've witnessed, I still cannot believe I must write those words.)" Mona Charen in the Bulwark ••• "Former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has become the most articulate voice of sanity on the right, does not want to crush one of the challengers' chances, no matter how slight.

So don't expect her to do anything to foreclose whatever small possibility remains to defeat Trump in the primaries. That said, Cheney has begun to look ahead. Last week, Cheney gave her most succinct and clear answer about her outlook on 2024. It bears emphasizing that she is not giving herself or others an 'out' by suggesting they all hop on a third party train to nowhere.

Instead, she delivered the hard news: 'There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow [President] Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,' she said on 'The View.' 'My view is I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden's policies. We can survive bad policies.

We cannot survive torching the Constitution.' " Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post ••• "Despite some predictions to the contrary, Trump still faced substantial resistance from college educated voters, just as he did in 2016. In the entrance poll Monday night, he drew only a little more than one third of them.

That was enough to push Trump safely past Haley, who split the remainder of those voters primarily with DeSantis (each of them won just under three in 10 of them). But compared with the 2016 Iowa result, Trump improved much less among college educated voters than he did among those without degrees. "Trump's relative weakness among college educated voters in the 2016 GOP primary presaged the alienation from him in white collar suburbs that grew during his presidency.

Though Biden's approval among those voters has declined since 2021, Trump's modest showing even among the college educated voters willing to turn out for a GOP caucus likely shows that resistance to him also remains substantial." Ronald Brownstein in the Atlantic ••• "The wrinkle of controversy last night was that the Associated Press, among others, called the race for Trump 30 minutes after the doors closed and the caucus began, and while some caucus goers were still voting.

The DeSantis campaign accused the media of participating in 'election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote.' "This does, at first glance, appear to be a violation of the stated Associated Press policy: 'Only when AP is fully confident a race has been won — defined most simply as the moment a trailing candidate no longer has a path to victory — will we make a call.' … "It's extremely difficult to believe the early call of Trump's win altered the outcome of the race in any significant way.

… "With that said, if the Associated Press has a written policy about when it can report a projected winner in a race, it ought to follow that. The mainstream media seriously undermines public faith in the process when the institution has stated rules and procedures, and then throws out those rules and procedures at the last second without telling anyone." Jim Geraghty in National Review.