ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
We are now projecting winners on both sides in the Iowa caucuses. For the Democrats, Barack Obama is the winner in a very tight race. With over three quarters of precincts reporting, Barack Obama has about 36 percent of the vote; former Senator John Edwards and Senator Hillary Clinton running neck and neck with about 30 percent each. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee is projected to be the winner by a substantial margin over Mitt Romney.
SIEGEL: And, you know, we just point out that there are, obviously, other candidates and certainly on the Democratic side as it was.
BLOCK: Mm-hmm.
SIEGEL: But of them, according to the counted votes, Bill Richardson is the only one who's gotten over 1 percent.
BLOCK: Yeah.
SIEGEL: And he's under two percent.
BLOCK: Not even two. Right.
SIEGEL: Yes.
BLOCK: And, Michele, it's going to be a very happy time there.
MICHELE NORRIS: For someone who has just pulled off a victory, he is surprisingly calm. But - I had a chance to listen to some of this, and he was thanking the people of Iowa and he was going back to the thing that the campaign has been talking about over and over and over again.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD CHEERING)
NORRIS: There, again, you hear...
BLOCK: A big cheer.
NORRIS: ...another round of applause going up as they look at these results projected on these big screens here in this hall. But Axelrod, in front of me, is talking about the thing that they've been saying over and over again, this all came out to turnout and organization, targeting people who had not participated in the caucuses before, getting them out, training them, making sure that they showed up and that they spoke up.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD CHEERING)
NORRIS: You're starting to hear chants in the room here. Senator Obama and his family, they have not yet arrived. They're back at the hotel watching the results on television surrounded by friends and family. They'll be heading here soon, and you'll really see and hear the temperature turn up then.
BLOCK: And very briefly, Michele, how do they translate this victory in Iowa tonight to next Tuesday's vote in New Hampshire?
NORRIS: You know, you used the word that they never use. They - and I asked why, you know, you won't even - in projecting this one - won't even talk about that. They don't - and, again, that's part of the expectations game - they don't call this a victory. They say that the people of Iowa have spoken and that the senator has momentum, and that they're ready for the next fight in the next state. But it's interesting, they will not use that word, victory.
BLOCK: Michele, thanks very much.
NORRIS: Thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: That's our colleague Michele Norris at Obama headquarters in Des Moines.
SIEGEL: David, running neck and neck for second place, possibly looking at a bronze medal here. It's not the night that Hillary Clinton wanted, I should think.
DAVID GREENE: And, again, not conceding, but you already sort of hear a message coming together. What the campaign is saying is that Hillary Clinton said all along that Iowa was just the beginning and not the end, and that they're ready to land in New Hampshire and push the reset button as one person put it.
SIEGEL: Is there any sense that there's something that Senator Clinton said that she shouldn't have said or didn't say that she should be saying more of in New Hampshire? Do you get any judgment about that for their headquarters?
GREENE: And, you know, a lot of voters who - a lot of caucusgoers who I spoke to, you know, it wasn't so much that they had a problem with her. They liked her. They said they really liked the message. Their concern was, okay, if we send her into a general election, are moderate voters, are independents going to like her? And if they don't, then, you know, the Democratic Party loses, and that was a big worry. So not so much likeability personally for Iowans, but worry about how she would play elsewhere in the country. And I think that's going to be an issue for her as we go forward. We'll see how they'll deal with that.
SIEGEL: She is now running at about 30 percent of the Democratic caucus vote, neck and neck with John Edwards. Barack Obama with, well, about 80 percent, I think, of the precincts reported already. He is almost seven points ahead of them, more than 6 percentage points ahead of them.
BLOCK: That lead seems to be widening just a little bit.
SIEGEL: Yes.
BLOCK: NPR's Mara Liasson is in Des Moines, as well. Mara, let's start with this Democratic result and how turnout seems to have affected the finish here with Barack Obama coming in first.
MARA LIASSON: Well, clearly, turnout was very big tonight. The Iowa Democratic Party says that with - at two-thirds of the precincts reporting - we obviously have a little bit more of that now.
BLOCK: Yeah.
LIASSON: But at that point, they said, a hundred and thirty-five thousand people had turned out; that's about 11,000 more than turned out in 2004, so that's quite a boost. And just anecdotally, we hear our colleague Tom Bevan who's from Real Clear Politics, the very useful Web site that averages all the polls, he came back from a precinct caucus in West Des Moines, where in 2004, a hundred and eight people had caucused. The caucus chairman said he would have been thrilled if a hundred and twenty-five turned out this time.
BLOCK: Mm-hmm.
LIASSON: But 224 showed up.
BLOCK: Do they have enough room?
LIASSON: So you can really see - yes, they barely had enough room. So turnout was higher; clearly, Barack Obama benefited from that. We don't know about the participation of independents. Some of the early entrance polls show that the independent participation was not changed from 2004, but, clearly, turnout was high; that is what Obama was trying to do - get first-time caucusgoers to go to the polls whether they were independents or Democrats, and that clearly seems to have benefited him.
BLOCK: Yeah. And we'll remember that four years ago, those same expectations did not pan out at all for Howard Dean.
LIASSON: No. Not at all. But, you know, Barack Obama used a very different method. They went to school on the Dean campaign's failures and instead of bringing in a lot of volunteers from outside, those orange hats that swarmed all over the state four years ago, he used a community organizing model, the model he had learned as a community organizer in Chicago. His volunteers became part of the community, they formed relationships, they really kind of did a mind meld with the Democrats in their precincts and their towns, and that is the model that he used. And, you know, when Evie Stone, my producer who's sitting right next to me here in Iowa, we're out here, watching the Obama organization team a couple of weeks ago. It was extraordinary.
BLOCK: Mm-hmm.
LIASSON: We saw these people forming these relationships, spending hours and hours with the voters they were trying to cultivate, not just calling them or visiting their house, but actually really becoming part of their lives.
SIEGEL: Mara, I was just curious, do we have any sense, because the big Democratic turnout in the caucuses squares with the size of rallies that you and others were reporting on all this time in Iowa, being bigger than the Republicans. Do we know if it was a very poor Republican turnout this year? Other than...
LIASSON: We don't have the Republican turnout numbers yet, but every Republican I've talked to said that they didn't expect it to be much higher than 2004. But we'll know those numbers pretty soon.
BLOCK: And, Mara, let's talk a little bit more before we let you go. On the Republican side with the result, Mike Huckabee coming in first. Substantially - it's a substantial margin over Mitt Romney. Where does that take him heading into the caucus, the primaries to come?
LIASSON: Well, you know, everybody that I talked to said that for Huckabee to have a significant win, he had to win by about five points or more. Now, he's got 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney's 18, and I can't really do the math in my head, but I think he's got a significant win here. Now, he goes on to New Hampshire where Mitt Romney has a strong base, but he's got a very significant challenge from John McCain.
BLOCK: Mm-hmm.
LIASSON: The state is very, very different, not as hospitable to Mike Huckabee because there are fewer numbers of evangelical voters among the Republican primary; immigration isn't as important an issue. So - and he has so much less resources than Romney. So I think that the big question is: How much legs does Huckabee have?
BLOCK: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
SIEGEL: What does it mean? Well, we're going to ask some of our analysts just that right now. Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review is with us in our studio in Washington. Hi, Rich.
BLOCK: Hello.
SIEGEL: Andy Kohut of Pew Research Center is here in our studio.
BLOCK: Hi, Robert.
SIEGEL: How are you doing?
BLOCK: I'm doing fine.
SIEGEL: Barack Obama just under 37 percent of the Democratic caucuses, almost 7 percent lead over John Edwards; Hillary Clinton in third. What do you make of it?
BLOCK: Hillary didn't win because she didn't do very well among women. She did relatively well among women, she did moderately well among moderates, but she never really has - really doesn't have a very strong constituency relative to Obama's strong support from these building blocks of his victories - men, younger voters, liberals, independents.
BLOCK: I'm going to interject just for a second. We've got the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mike Duncan, on the line. Welcome, Mr. Chairman.
BLOCK: Good evening.
BLOCK: And would you characterize these results tonight as a GOP upset? Mike Huckabee toppling Mitt Romney?
BLOCK: I'm the chairman of the Republican Party, my job is to prepare the party for the general election, and I don't take sides in this. I'm like Switzerland, so I won't get into handicapping any of the candidates tonight - on the caucus tonight.
BLOCK: Well, one thing you have to contend with is you have a candidate who has done very well against - done very well on the back of a huge percentage of evangelical voters in Iowa, which is not necessarily representative of the voters who will be voting in other parts of the country and certainly in the general election. Does that trouble you?
BLOCK: Well, I've heard the story before. I've been involved in politics since 1972; that was my first convention as a delegate. And I heard this in 1988 when we were - when it was said that, gee, the party will split, that we had an economic conservative who was running and who was going to take one side of the party, and we had a socio-conservative running who was going to take another, and there was a sitting vice president. And you know what, at the end of the day, we all came together; this is going to be the same thing in 2008.
SIEGEL: But, Chairman Duncan, if you had an electorate, if you had a Republican vote that's 60 percent evangelical, you would be a minority party, wouldn't you?
BLOCK: Well, the evangelicals are part of a coalition just as the social, economic conservatives are part of our coalition, just as the people who believe in a strong national defense are part of our coalition. And we're very pleased to have all of them there, and I'm happy that they participated today. I encourage more people to participate on both the Republican and Democrat side.
BLOCK: Briefly, Chairman Duncan, would there be a candidate on the Democratic side whom you would say would be the easiest for you to beat?
BLOCK: Well, that's very interesting. I think all the Democrats are in a pretty narrow spectrum from my standpoint. They all believe in more government, bigger government. They believe in bureaucracies that control health care. They believe in spending less on national defense. They've really not done a good job - the candidates have not done a good job backing our troops this time.
BLOCK: This is NPR.