Do the Iowa caucuses predict who will be president? The VERY mixed results since 1972 on how successful the winner is in the rest of the White House race

The Republican presidential candidates and their surrogates are blanketing Iowa this weekend, braving snow and freezing temperatures, hoping for a strong performance Monday night in the Iowa caucuses.

Since the 1972 Democratic caucus in Iowa, the rallies were the first opportunity for voters to have their say in the presidential race.

While Republicans and Democrats view their caucus results differently, they are both rallies that voters must attend in person and are held throughout the Hawkeye State.

The momentum that comes from winning the caucuses, or simply exceeding expectations, has helped propel candidates to the White House, while the results have killed many a presidential campaign.

But do Iowa voters actually predict who will become president?

Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was the first Iowa caucus winner in modern times to ultimately win the White House. Carter was a peanut farmer who was elected governor of Georgia but had a limited national profile when he won the 1976 Iowa caucuses

The short answer is no.

Since caucuses got their modern start in 1972, they have only three times correctly predicted who would win the presidency if there was no incumbent on the ballot.

The first time was in 1976, when a peanut farmer turned governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, won the state for the Democrats.

Carter was not well known, but his efforts in Iowa took him to the White House, where he served one term after defeating incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford, who took power after President Richard Nixon resigned amid the Watergate scandal .

The only time the caucuses elected a Republican president was in 2000, when Texas Governor George W. Bush, the son of former President George HW Bush, handily won the Iowa caucuses.

Iowans tend to vote for more conservative candidates — like Bush — so the candidate who became the Texas governor’s chief rival, Sen. John McCain, turned his attention more to winning the New Hampshire primary, which he also did. did.

Bush and McCain fought it out in South Carolina, where the race became particularly vicious. Bush won the first primaries in the South and performed better on Super Tuesday than McCain, who dropped out the morning after.

Texas Governor George W. Bush holds up a baby in Iowa in August 1999. Bush went on to win the Iowa caucuses in 2000. He won the Republican nomination over chief rival Senator John McCain and then defeated Democratic Vice President Al Gore in the general election later that year.

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is captured while walking around the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines in August 2007. Obama defeated front-runner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses and, after a tough primary, eventually won the White House from Senator John McCain in 2008.

Bush then defeated Democratic Vice President Al Gore in the general election, one of the nation’s closest presidential elections.

In 2008, then-Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois jump-started his White House victory by unseating New York Sen. Hillary Clinton in Iowa.

Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, was considered the frontrunner and Obama trailed her in the polls in the months leading up to Iowa.

The race then moved to New Hampshire, a state that Clinton won after becoming famous during a campaign stop.

The 2008 Democratic race dragged on for months, with Clinton eventually dropping out of the race in June.

Obama went on to win the White House from McCain, who became the Republican nominee in 2008 after losing the 2000 nomination to Bush.

Now President Joe Biden also vied for the White House that year – and dropped out after his poor performance in Iowa.

In all, Iowa voters have elected candidates who failed to become commander-in-chief 16 times — and elected politicians eight times who didn’t even win their party’s nomination.

Four years ago, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg narrowly won the Democratic caucuses in Iowa, which were not scheduled for caucus night due to a technical glitch.

Biden, the eventual nominee and current occupant of the White House, finished in fourth place in the Hawkeye State, behind Buttigieg, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

He only corrected his campaign in South Carolina, where he easily won the primary, prompting several moderate Democratic candidates to drop out of the race and paving the way for Biden to dominate Super Tuesday.

Four years earlier, in 2016, Texas Senator Ted Cruz won the more conservative Iowa caucuses over Donald Trump, the eventual nominee and winner of the 2016 election.

Trump rolled away his opponents after winning the New Hampshire primary.