The Des Moines Register reports that the Iowa Straw Poll is no more, due to several leading Republican presidential candidates declining to participate in the event this year, including Mike Huckabee.
Good decision. Fun as it may be to see a good GOP cage fight, the straw poll was a silly waste of resources with little bearing on the larger presidential campaign. The Iowa paper reports that Republican officials in the state were concerned that continuing with the fundraiser “could potentially damage Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses.”
Here’s the Register:
The governing board for the Republican Party of Iowa voted unanimously Friday to cancel the straw poll, a milestone on the path to the White House that had passed the strategic tipping point. It was no longer a political risk for presidential campaigns to walk away from the straw poll, and too many of the 2016 contenders had opted to skip it for it to survive.
…
Several key contenders — Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee — had decided against dishing out the big bucks it can take to win. Party officials needed at least one legitimate player to participate, but the Iowa frontrunner, Scott Walker, declined to commit.
Ample cover for skipping the straw poll was delivered by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who had declared at the end of the 2012 presidential election that it had “outlived its usefulness.” And a recent Iowa Poll showed that while a slight majority of likely GOP caucusgoers thought it was important for presidential candidates to participate in the straw poll, almost as many dismissed it as unimportant.