Cripes what a bore, from the FT:
Ted Cruz, the firebrand Texas senator, has won Iowa’s Republican caucus, as Hillary Clinton secured the narrowest of victories over Democratic rival Bernie Sanders in the first votes of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Mr Cruz’s victory represents a blow to Donald Trump, the New York property mogul who had dominated the GOP race for months. With 99 per cent of precincts reporting in the first state to vote in the race for the White House, Mr Cruz had won 28 per cent compared with Mr Trump’s 24 per cent.
In another setback for the billionaire’s anti-establishment campaign, Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American senator favoured by establishment Republicans, won 23 per cent — an upset for pollsters who mostly forecast a Trump victory and had not predicted the strength of Mr Rubio’s support.
In the Democratic race, Mrs Clinton, the former secretary of state who is making her second White House run, found herself in what Mr Sanders called a “virtual tie” with the Vermont senator, a self-described Democratic socialist.
Once the last precincts reported in the early hours of Tuesday, Mrs Clinton had 49.9 per cent to Mr Sanders’s 49.5 per cent.
Mrs Clinton told supporters she was “breathing a big sigh of relief”. In an implicit acknowledgment of the battle ahead, she said she was looking forward to getting into the debate with Mr Sanders, adding that “we finally began to have one of the most important, substantive conversations that the Democratic party could have”.
