http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119937680369165081.html?mod=hpp_us_whats_newsSen. Barack Obama won a fiercely fought three-way race for the Democratic presidential contest in Iowa, Sen. Barack Obama won a tight three-way race for the Democratic presidential contest in Iowa, bidding to make history as the first black U.S. president. Mike Huckabee won the Republican nod, buoyed by a huge turnout by evangelical Christians in the Iowa caucuses, as Iowa voters rewarded upstart candidates over the establishment's picks.
Nearly six in 10 GOP voters said they were evangelical or born-again Christians -- a huge portion of the electorate -- and they rallied to Mr. Huckabee. The former Baptist pastor took nearly half of the evangelical votes, with non-evangelicals spreading their support among Mitt Romney and other Republicans in the hunt.
"His belief is my belief," said Carole Schafer, 79 years old, of Urbandale, who was decked out in a pink jacket as she prepared to caucus for Mr. Huckabee. While she thinks Mr. Romney "looks like a president" and is "qualified," she had reservations about his Mormonism. "I'm not sure about his faith," she said.
After spending millions in Iowa, Mr. Romney was set to take second. At his Iowa headquarters, there was a stunned silence as television networks projected he would lose.
Mr. Huckabee's victory was fueled by voters attracted to his unwavering views on social issues and a G-d-infused message from the stump. His strong sense of humor, master story telling and populist promise to represent Main Street over Wall Street added to his appeal.
He advertised himself as a consistent conservative and a Christian leader -- implicit digs at Mr. Romney, who once held more liberal views on abortion and gay rights and whose Mormonism made some Christians uncomfortable.
Campaigning today, Mr. Huckabee got his biggest applause when he said: "If you hear me talk about being pro-life it's not a position that the pollsters gave me last week or a focus group said 'when you go to Iowa be sure to tell them this.'"
The entrance survey found that when asked what one personal quality mattered most, Republicans were most likely to say "shares my values." Among those voters, Mr. Huckabee dominated. Mr. Romney did best with those who were looking for someone with the right experience or for someone with the best chance to win in November.
Mr. Romney now goes on to New Hampshire, where his plane is scheduled to touch down around 2 a.m. Friday and where he faces another stiff challenge, this time from Sen. John McCain. Another loss on Tuesday could mean serious trouble for the man who counted on lapping these first two states.
Among Democrats, half the voters said that having a candidate who can bring about change was most important to them, and as expected, they broke heavily for Mr. Obama. He also won strong backing from the young. One in five participants in the Democratic caucuses were independents, and those voters were most likely to support Mr. Obama, too.
As Rob Moyers stood in line to caucus at the Lovejoy Elementary School in Des Moines, Mrs. Clinton came through to greet voters. After she shook hands with Mr. Moyers he said, "I looked into Obama's eyes and he seemed sincere. Now, that looked mechanical. She's like a robot."
Older voters favored Mrs. Clinton as did those looking for someone who has the right experience and someone with the best chance to win in November.
Throughout their contest, Mrs. Clinton made the case for experience, Mr. Obama argued he represented the best chance for change, and former Sen. John Edwards drove home a populist message that only an outsider can fix Washington's troubles and break the stranglehold of corporate lobbyists.
Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama both have strong operations in New Hampshire and will go onto a rematch there. Former Sen. John Edwards' fate was less certain, as he had invested heavily in winning Iowa. By the time all the votes are counted, he may be third.
A big key to Mr. Obama's Iowa win was a strategy he adopted early of attracting voters who hadn't caucused before or weren't inclined to do so this year. It was a risky, even foolhardy strategy, political operatives from rival camps said, mainly because it rarely works. For Democrats at least, caucusing remains a practice of the committed. Byzantine rules and time-consuming procedures mean that in many precincts, casting a vote can take up to two hours.
During the last week, Mr. Obama staged a poll of sorts, asking those who attended his rallies to raise their hands if they were first-time caucus-goers and whether they remained committed. Right up to the end, both groups remained large, with undecided voters routinely making up a quarter of the audiences.
"I want to create a new electoral math,'' Mr. Obama routinely told supporters. "I don't want to practice division, I want to practice addition.''
The strategy worked: more than half of all Democratic voters were first-time caucus-goers, who heavily favored Mr. Obama.
Unlike Mrs. Clinton and especially Mr. Edwards, Mr. Obama cast himself as the candidate most equipped to end Washington gridlock. It was a positive message, underscored by the word "Hope,'' a word that carried an almost talismanic quality in the Obama campaign. "I've noticed that some of the other candidates are almost scornful of the word, the implication being that if you're hopeful you must be naïve,'' Mr. Obama said. "That's not what hope is. Hope is not ignoring the challenges ahead. Hope is working for and fighting for what seemed impossible before."
Though an uneven public speaker, Mr. Obama seemed to get his rhetorical sea legs in the final sprint, even as his speeches grew exponentially in length. In the last few days, he spoke for more than an hour at each of his events. Often quick with a quip, the man who described himself as "a skinny guy with a funny name" maintained a self-deprecating style that clearly delighted many of his supporters.
On the Republican side, Mr. Romney dominated the race for most of 2007, but by late November, Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, had taken the lead, as religious voters frustrated with the better-funded by flawed competition gravitated to the candidate seen as most dedicated to their issues.
Mr. Huckabee told audiences that victory would shake the political world and, indeed, the former Arkansas governor overcame a massive financial mismatch. Mr. Romney spent a total of $7 million on TV ads over the course of the Iowa campaign to Mr. Huckabee's $1.4 million, according to an independent estimate. Over the last three weeks, much of the Romney spending went to a barrage of negative ads attacking Mr. Huckabee's record on immigration, crime and foreign policy.
But Mr. Huckabee resisted putting attacks of his own on the air, convinced that Iowa voters would respond to an optimistic, positive campaign. Just three days ago, he was set to run a harsh ad attacking Mr. Romney, only to pull it at the last minute. The move was ridiculed by the national press but played well into Iowans' sense that he was above the fray.
"Every piece of political advice is you got to go and attack those guys right back," he said on New Year's Day in Council Bluffs. "It came down to, if a man gains the whole world and loses his own soul, what does it profit him?" he said, quoting Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. "And I decided, even the presidency, as important as it is, if I can't do it with self respect and can't do it with decency, it's not worth doing."
While Mr. Romney sported a much more organized campaign, with a network of supporters built over months, Mr. Huckabee relied on coalitions of voters passionately dedicated to his cause: pastors, home schoolers and supporters of the "fair tax," a national sales tax meant to replace federal income taxes.
In Iowa, the final results rest heavily on candidates' ability to get voters to turn out to caucus; each party held 1,781 caucuses in schools, church halls and fire stations across the state. Just over 10% of the state's voting-age population was expected to participate, giving a couple hundred thousand voters enormous influence over who will be the nation's next leader.
Iowans were inundated with television ads -- more than 50,000 of them at a total cost of $42 million. But the hallmark of Iowa campaigning remained the one-to-one contact between voters and the candidates who sought the nation's highest office. Amid the large-scale rallies were countless handshakes at diners and questions in living rooms.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for months the national front-runner, opted not to compete in Iowa, where his socially liberal views are anathema to many voters. He's also not expected to do well in New Hampshire, which votes Tuesday, and is banking on a good showing in Florida on Jan. 29 and the raft of states that vote Feb. 5. He'll be in Florida tonight.
The fight for third place was on between Sen. John McCain, former Sen. Fred Thompson and insurgent Rep. Ron Paul. Mr. McCain hardly campaigned in the state, knowing his moderate views on immigration and opposition to ethanol subsidies would go over poorly. But even a third-place showing could give him momentum going into the New Hampshire primary, where he is challenging Mr. Romney for the lead. Mr. Paul, who has raised large amounts of money over the Internet on an antiwar, anti-establishment message, was doing considerable better than Mr. Giuliani.
Meanwhile, Mr. McCain looked ahead to Michigan. His new television ad brags that he's not afraid to make people angry. He got a boost with the endorsement today from the Detroit News, which joined more than two dozen papers in backing the Arizona senator. Their pick was a slight to Mr. Romney, a Michigan native early in life and the son of a former governor.
Mr. Thompson, whose lackadaisical campaigning has disappointed many would-be supporters, has suggested he would drop out if he failed to place in the top three in Iowa.
Annoyed by the outsized influence that Iowa and New Hampshire have on the nominating contests, many states moved up their primaries and caucuses, hoping to attract candidates' attention. But the resulting cramped calendar only served to heighten the importance of the early states, where winners may gain momentum that challengers will have little time to blunt.
