Will Iowa decide the 2020 Democratic nomination?

With Cory Booker’s exit, the Democratic field has lost another minority candidate, and revived the arguments — pressed by Julián Castro before his own exit from the race — that the whiteness of the Iowa electorate explains the increasing whiteness of the Democratic field.

The debate over Iowa’s influence is interesting because, as Bill Scher pointed out recently for Politico, the Democratic Party did several things to make the caucuses less important in 2020: tightening the early primary calendar, creating a de facto national primary on Super Tuesday, relying on polls from Nevada and South Carolina as much as from New Hampshire and Iowa in establishing who qualifies for the primary debates.

Scher argues that this worked, as candidates are spending less time in Iowa, and big spenders like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg pushed their chips onto later states. And he dismisses Castro’s argument, noting that Booker, Castro and Kamala Harris all struggled with minority voters too. Even if more racially diverse electorates voted first, the biggest winners would probably still be the old white guys, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

Yet with three weeks to go before the caucus, it’s easy to see several scenarios in which Iowa is decisive.

First, it’s possible that Biden could win Iowa outright, and in doing so basically wrap up the nomination early. Biden’s early Iowa swoon has been reversed, he’s leading the Real Clear Politics polling average and is even with Sanders in FiveThirtyEight’s average, and Elizabeth Warren and Sanders seem headed to war with each other as the race enters the final stretch.

But given Biden’s strength with nonwhite voters, his stable national lead and his perceived electability, if neither of the left-wing candidates can beat him in Iowa, can they really expect to beat him on

Super Tuesday?

In the second scenario, Sanders could win Iowa, Biden could finish a close second, and the campaign thereafter could quickly become a two-man race — with Amy Klobuchar finished, Warren and Pete Buttigieg fading, and no room for Bloomberg in a polarized left-versus-establishment contest.

In the third scenario, Warren could rally to win Iowa — an outcome less decisive for the field’s consolidation because of Sanders’ money and grass-roots strength, but one that would dispose of Buttigieg and Klobuchar and make it likelier that Warren surges past her democratic socialist rival in New Hampshire as well. If Sanders then dropped out, the remaining campaign would be a Warren-Biden tilt, in which case Warren would owe Iowa everything; if Sanders stayed in it could be an easy coast for Biden, who would have Iowans to thank for letting him run against a divided left.

Is it possible to imagine an unimportant or at least undecisive Iowa outcome? Sure.

But all the scenarios where Iowa doesn’t matter much depend on a random-seeming caucus outcome and a national race that’s unstable and vulnerable to early-state shocks and Super Tuesday volatility. And recent evidence indicates the national race is remarkably stable, that Iowa might be the best chance for long shots, and that both Biden and Sanders are well positioned to use the caucus to validate their front-runnership instead.

In that case many of the candidates who planned for a long campaign instead of camping out in Iowa could regret their strategy. And despite all the party’s attempts to create a 50-state calendar and reduce the caucus state’s clout, the Democrats could still discover, well before Super Tuesday, that Iowa has picked their finalists or winner anyway.