Monday was an historic night for Iowa's Republican Party. In all of Iowa, 188,000 Republicans showed up to caucus, a huge new record and a rare sign of health within the party.

Before Donald Trump tries to take credit for this, note that turnout would still beat the old GOP record of 122,000 (from 2012) even if you left out all of Trump's supporters, both habitual and first-time caucusgoers. Even so, Trump deserves credit for bringing out many new participants to vote for him, and for bringing out perhaps just as many new participants to vote against him.

Another noteworthy fact, and the more important one going forward, is that in a year with no incumbent president on the ballot, the Republican caucuses drew more participants than the Democratic ones. This anomaly fittingly heralds the end of the Obama era, a period of Democratic victories that history might end up attributing to one man's magnetic personality and nothing more. Only about 171,000 Democrats showed up on Monday night for the extremely competitive race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. That's not a bad number, but it falls far short of the 240,000 who showed up in 2008 to nominate Obama.

Between the turnout and the result, Iowa's caucuses provide an early indicator that Republicans are more excited and Democrats less enthusiastic than usual about 2016. Iowa Democrats' tepid embrace of Clinton, who at one point led in the Hawkeye State by more than 50 points, depended on her winning an improbable six out of six coin tosses in various deadlocked precincts to assign the county delegates. (In fact, because of the way Democratic caucuses work, there might have been more Sanders caucusgoers than Clinton supporters, even though Clinton won more delegates.)

Another telling number about Democratic enthusiasm for Clinton is that among the 24 percent of caucusgoers who said the most important quality in a candidate is that they were "honest and trustworthy," Sanders beat Clinton 83-10 percent, an astounding 73-point gap.

Iowa isn't the only place where Democratic enthusiasm seems to be waning as Obama exits stage left from the theater that is American politics. As the Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard noted earlier this week, Republican pollster Ed Goeas has detected an 11-point enthusiasm gap in favor of Republicans, a gap larger than the Republican advantages recorded for the elections of 2010 and 2014.

Other polls show similar forces at work. A CBS/New York Times survey in January showed 73 percent of Republicans and only 65 percent of Democrats were "very enthusiastic" or "somewhat enthusiastic" about the 2016 election. Also in January, Rasmussen asked a slightly different question and found that only 50 percent of Democrats looked forward to the 2016 election and 44 percent had "had enough." On the other side, 71 percent of Republicans looked forward to this November's contest, with only 25 percent being over it already.

America is about to get a big test of whether the Obama revolution is lasting. When Americans elected him in 2008, did they fall for progressivism, or did they vote for an unusually talented and attractive politician? Assuming Republicans nominate an electable candidate, the 2016 election will provide an answer.