Why Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses Monday night? video

There is a simple reason why Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses Monday night. He is a master strategist — and he always has been.

Still, while Cruz performed well enough to win Iowa, his rival Marco Rubio may have gained the upper hand in the contest to consolidate supporters by finishing closer to second place than anyone expected, with 23 percent of the vote.

In the waning days of the Hawkeye State contest, as Manhattan mogul Donald Trump built a sold lead in the polls, pundits began to wonder whether America was witnessing a new kind of presidential campaign — a campaign in which celebrity bombast and Twitter broadsides would matter more than the grubby work of getting out the vote.


It wasn’t to be. While Trump’s staffers bluffed about their “fantastic” ground game — yet refused, when pressed, to divulge any details — members of Team Cruz openly boasted about the 5,000 volunteers they had lured to Iowa; the 100 state leaders and pastors they’d signed up, including Rep. Steve King, talk-radio host Steve Deace, and social conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats; and the millions they spent on data analytics and psychological profiling. All of their efforts were carefully calibrated to identify and turn out the most reliable caucusgoers of all: older, evangelical conservatives.

After winning the Iowa caucuses, U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, addresses a rally in Des Moines with his wife, Heidi, at his side Feb. 1, 2016. (Photo: Jim Young/Reuters)

And that’s ultimately who showed up Monday — not Trump’s flakier first-timers. With 98 percent of precincts reporting, Cruz had 27.7 percent of the vote to Trump’s 24.3 percent.