Take, most recently, The Good Wife. One of the few awkward elements of the show—an otherwise excellent drama enjoying an otherwise excellent seventh season on CBS—has been this: its tendency to relegate to a B-plot the fact that its protagonist’s husband is running for president. (Of the United States.) Audiences have gotten reminders of Peter Florrick’s presidential bid every once in awhile—an extremely reluctant Alicia Florrick was once forced to appear, with her mother, on the local talk show Mama’s Homespun Cooking—but for the most part, the show has insisted that its characters live in a world in which campaigning to be First Lady is a forgettable side gig.

For Iowa, though, The Good Wife shed its illusions. The show dedicated a full episode to Peter’s attempt to come in second in the caucuses—an attempt that found the entire Florrick family, enthusiastically (Peter, Zack, Grace) and less so (Alicia), traveling together on a bus through the state’s counties and precincts. (On advice of the Florrick campaign manager, Ruth Eastman, the family attempts a “full Grassley,” or a visit to every county in Iowa.) And yet the real contest of the episode is not the campaign (which rather awkwardly makes mention of “Hillary” to put things into a 2016 IRL context). It is instead the long-simmering uncertainties between Alicia and Peter about the future of their marriage. Alicia spends her time on the campaign bus immersed in her memories of the man she’d loved before marrying Peter. She spends her time in the episode doing the duties of a “full campaign wife,” but dreaming, all the while, of what might have happened had she married the other guy.

The caucuses, in the episode, come and go—and yet their political outcomes (and here is the show reverting to its traditional posture) are secondary. The real stakes here are emotional. The real caucus here has an n of 1: The real decision, the episode suggests, is the one Alicia is making about Peter and her relationship to him. As per Iowa’s wont, Push is coming to Shove; it’s just that the collisions between expectation and reality aren’t, primarily, about politics.

House of Cards’s Iowa episode—the series’s third season finale—offers a similar emotion-over-election theme. These caucuses find Frank Underwood engaged in a neck-and-neck fight against his Democratic challenger, Heather Dunbar. And while it’s an open question throughout the episode, whether Frank—by now the sitting president—will be able to eke out a victory in the caucuses, the real drama, as in The Good Wife, concerns the fate of the protagonists’ marriage.

The episode opens with Claire informing her husband that “we have been lying to each other”; it closes with the question of whether Claire will show up to support him as he delivers his speech—regardless of whether that speech be a matter of victory or concession. Quickly, though, things escalate—so that the real questions become existential: Can the Underwood marriage survive Frank’s campaign for president? Are Claire and Frank a true partnership? Were they ever a partnership at all? “We used to make each other stronger, or at least I thought so,” Claire tells her husband. “But that was a lie. We were making you stronger.”