ES MOINES - It's all over now. The camera crews and newspaper reporters have left for New Hampshire, leaving hotel vacancies and lower prices in their wake. National newspapers will run no more features on ''The New Iowa.'' Campaign signs will be yanked from roadsides, and local talk-show hosts' fancies will turn to football.
In the end, despite the media blitz, just a sliver of Iowa's 1.8 million registered voters made it to the caucuses Monday night. On the Republican side, fewer than 90,000 of about 600,000 registered voters turned out, the worst showing in at least two decades. Figures for Democrats were not yet available yesterday, but experts said they expected an equally dismal showing.
That left the school auditoriums, church halls, and living rooms to more passionate types, especially Christian conservatives. Fully 38 percent of the 1,621 Republican voters surveyed in a Voter News Service entrance poll Monday night identified themselves as members of the religious right. A third of the voters surveyed said they thought moral values were the most important campaign issue. And 11 percent saw abortion as the most important issue.
The poll was conducted by the Associated Press in partnership with ABC News, CBS News, Fox, CNN, and NBC News.
Texas Governor George W. Bush, who courted Christian conservatives more intensely in the days before the caucus, stepping up his antiabortion rhetoric and throwing himself into song at the First Assembly of God church on Sunday, landed the largest single share of them - 35 percent of religious right voters, according to the poll.
But Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, and Alan Keyes, with even more vehement stands on abortion and morality than Bush all appealed to them, too - and with considerable effect. Forbes ended up with 27 percent of Christian right voters surveyed, Keyes with 21 percent, and Bauer with 14 percent. There were plenty of candidates for such voters to love. And that is why Ione Dilley, who is chairwoman of Iowa's state Christian Coalition, was celebrating yesterday. ''It's good to know that the Christian influence is evident,'' she said. That photograph of Bush singing his heart out at First Assembly of God, splashed across the front page of the Des Moines Register on caucus day, made her proud, she said.
Forbes, Bauer, and Keyes had all visited the same church on Saturday night to sign a pledge to fight pornography, homosexuality, and abortion. Bush demurred on the pledge.
''The Christian conservatives have won because their agenda has been accepted almost in total by almost all of the candidates,'' said Hugh Winebrenner, professor of public administration at Drake University.
Though other candidates had given stronger voice to her priorities, Dilley was a devoted Bush supporter. ''Because I believe he has presidential qualities,'' she said.
What Dilley calls presidential, others might term electable: Twelve percent of voters surveyed said the most important quality in a candidate is the ability to win, and virtually all of them voted for Bush.
''Christian conservatives have become increasingly pluralistic as a movement,'' said Winebrenner. ''People who would rather go down with the ship stayed with Bauer and Keyes. Those who felt they wanted to go with a winner went with Forbes or Bush, depending on how much they wanted to compromise. Bush was a bit more of a compromise because his commitment to their ideals is suspect among [Christian conservatives]. He's been saying the right things, but he hasn't been saying them for very long.''
Christian conservatives exerted such influence over this caucus partly because more moderate voters had fewer candidates to choose from. Lamar Alexander and Elizabeth Dole, moderate alternatives to Bush, dropped out of the race long before last night. Senator John McCain decided long ago not to participate in this state.
''Many backers of those candidates never went over to anybody else, and they voted by not participating,'' said Brian Kennedy, former chairman of the state Republican Party and a McCain campaign consultant.
It was all Bush's fault, Kennedy said, for intimidating other candidates with his giant bank balance, thereby derailing the process.
''In Iowa, our role is to provide a level playing field in which everybody can compete,'' Kennedy said. ''We'll decide who goes forward to New Hampshire. That role was preempted this time by the money monopoly funding the Bush campaign. And months before the vote, the field was winnowed to just a few choices. A lot of Iowa Republicans resent that.''
