Iowa: 15 Minutes Too Many of Fame

Like many election junkies, I spent tonight watching the Iowa caucus returns. It was a surreal experience. Rarely, when watching election results scroll across the bottom of the screen, do the percentage numbers in each precinct that go to a particular candidate actually top the number of votes each candidate receives. But there it was - "Huckabee: 23%" for one county, with the number "16" listed on the vote count side of the ledger.

Apparently the tone for our whole presidential election is being set by ridiculously small numbers of people. On CNN, one commentator spent several minutes describing what happened in one precinct where Sen. Joe Biden scored six votes in the first round. Since this didn't reach the 15% bar necessary to advance in the Democratic Party voting process, those six voters had to go elsewhere. Breathlessly, the commentator told us that most had gone to former Sen. John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama. Pundits had long been telling us that everyone had already made up their minds about Sen. Hillary Clinton, so she wouldn't be anyone's second choice. These six voters bore that out.

Six voters. I sat there on my couch wondering who these six people were. Normally, commentators make a big deal about polls of 500 people. This was a poll of six. It's been asked a million times before, but it bears saying again. Is this anyway to choose a president?

Yes, the regular men and women on the street (or in the senior center; it's cold in Iowa) interviewed on NPR these past few days all sounded knowledgeable. Many were politically precocious; one 20-year-old young man talked about his experience running a business and said he was therefore drawn to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who also had experience running a business. Perhaps the retail politics Iowa's small size nurtures voters who are more informed than the rest of us.

But there's so much not to like that the whole process stinks like an ethanol plant on a hazy day. Iowans are whiter than the rest of the country. Even the Democrats are more conservative. They have certain interests - ethanol, for one - that have become politically untouchable due to their outsized influence. The Republicans' choice of Gov. Mike Huckabee seems to indicate an unfortunate protectionist streak - and an odd belief that the laws of economics, unlike the laws of physics, can be suspended at will. And, most importantly, there's just so few of them. Normally, for six people in some small rural town to justify many minutes of national airtime, they'd need to be in a school bus that crashed into another school bus due to a deadly tornado. Last night, six Iowans garnered that kind of attention merely by being obstinate enough to vote for Joe Biden.

Other states have tried to undermine this Iowa-centric start to the presidential race by moving their primaries deeper into the winter. Iowa has thwarted these moves by shifting its caucus to just after New Year's. Reform is not going to be easy. But if 25 states responded to this foolishness by passing laws stating that their own primaries would, by definition, be held a week before Iowa's caucus, we could have a lovely flurry of date setting and resetting until no one knew when to vote and saner heads at the national party level would intervene. Maybe then they'd set up four major primary dates involving 15%, 20%, 25% and then 40% of the delegates. Or something. But anything has to be better than letting so few folks determine who is deemed dead or alive in this process. Though, come to think of it, with Pres. George W. Bush winning by just 537 Florida votes in 2000, maybe Iowa is more like the national election than I'm willing to admit.

Comments

[Kristin11]

While I respect the statements you make on the general imbalance regarding the importance of the Iowa caucuses, and agree that a reform of the caucus and primary system is necessary, I am really shocked that someone writing for a well-respected political blog would not bother to learn about the caucus process before dismissing it.

The number "16" you saw for Huckabee in one county was the number of *delegates*, not the number of total voters. Let me give you a brief caucus lesson: each voting precinct is assigned a certain number of delegates, based on population. Those delegates are then divided among the candidates based on the percentage of votes for each. How many votes it takes to win one delegate is based entirely on the voter turnout for a particular precinct. In your other example, regarding the 6 voters in one precinct for Biden; I don't think it seems all that outrageous to think that in a small rural precinct, with perhaps only 2 delegates, with a low turnout, that 6 votes would be less than the 15% needed to be considered viable. For the record, I'm an Iowan, and I participated in the caucuses this year. My precinct had record attendance with over 500 participants, and from what I recall, Biden had just over 20 votes in round one. As much as I respect him, that's his problem, not the system's.

There are many reasons to be critical of the caucus process (including, in my opinion, the fact that one vote does not always count for one vote, as delegates are divided up by population, and not by actual turnout), but if you can't be bothered to make sure the points you are making are accurate, it doesn't bode well for your argument.