If you predicted that Ted Cruz would beat Donald Trump by a larger margin than Hillary Clinton would beat Bernie Sanders, you deserve a special pundit medal of honor. But, the topsy-turvy results of the Iowa caucuses actually make some sense when you dig into the reasons behind them. In looking through the Iowa entrance/exit polls (voters are surveyed before they go into their caucus precincts as opposed to after they leave a polling place), what you find is that while Trump may have brought new people out to vote, he may have brought out as many detractors as supporters. Meanwhile, Sanders was able to hold Clinton to a tie not because he got a bigger group of younger or new voters into the process, but because he won by much bigger margins among those two groups than Obama did in 2008. Donald Trump is a force of nature. But, as we learned in introductory physics class, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The prospect of a Donald Trump nomination indeed expanded the voting pool - but not
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