Well, the results of this week's presidential straw ballot were interesting. For the first time in our seven straw polls, Ted Cruz took the lead, with 30% of the first place votes, closely followed by Marco Rubio with 26%, and Donald Trump with 17%. No one else was chosen first by more than 6% of you. Here's the tally: the first number is the percentage of the ballots on which the candidate was selected for first place; the second is the percentage of ballots in which the candidate was chosen for any of first, second or third. Ted Cruz 30% 66% Marco Rubio 26% 60% Donald Trump 17% 32% Ben Carson 6% 28% Chris Christie 5% 28% Carly Fiorina 4% 32% Mike Huckabee 3% 13% Jeb Bush 3% 13% Rand Paul 3% 10% John Kasich 2% 10% Rick Santorum -- % 2% What does it all mean? For what it's worth, these straw poll results are more or less in accord with the impressions I formed from a day and a half in Iowa at the end of last week. I spoke and mixed and mingled at a GOP event, and spent some time with friends and political types from the state. My sense was that Cruz and Rubio were strong, that Trump had solid support but much less room to grow, that Carson was fading, Bush had faded, and that Christie probably had the best chance of moving up from the second tier as a long shot. But my main takeaway from Iowa was this: It's a fluid and volatile race; few Republicans have definitively made up their minds; and a lot depends on what the various candidates say and do, and the cases they make for themselves and against their rivals, in the weeks to come. I can also report that national security, as you'd expect after San Bernardino, was very much on people's minds--and that voters seem to be paying attention to the Cruz-Rubio foreign policy and intelligence capabilities debates, and perhaps to claims such as Christie's to be better ready to handle national security issues By the way, perhaps the most startling thing I discovered from my brief sojourn in Iowa is that Iowans really are nice. On Sunday morning, after Iowa's traumatic defeat by Michigan State in the Big Ten championship Saturday night, a loss that cost Iowa its first chance for a national title in ages, all the Iowans I spoke to were gracious about MSU's victory, grateful for Iowa's exemplary season, and looking forward to the Rose Bowl against Stanford. I expected Iowans to be morose and sullen, as we East Coasters surely would have been after such a turn of events. They were instead pleasant and upbeat. Weird. One additional note about Iowa: The Machine Shed in Urbandale was memorable--though I was disappointed no one in our group had the nerve to order The Hungry Man's Breakfast TM (#11 on the second page of the menu). In any case, here's the menu. It's a great country. And nothing I saw in Iowa dissuaded me from the generally upbeat conclusion of my editorial in this week's issue--that Republicans are in better shape for November than lots of people worried about the current shape of the race think.