Search Results for ‘caucus night’
Barack Obama won the Iowa Caucuses tonight by a significant margin boosted by strong support from registered Independents and first time caucusgoers. However, the most striking example of this was in Eldridge, Iowa. The Obama precinct captain there was 2006 Independent Congressional candidate James Hill. Hill ran with his party affiliation as Pirate and garnered 2201 votes. This exemplifies the lead shown by Obama among self described Independents. Unfortunately though, none of the polls asked prospective caucusgoers if they self-identified as pirates.
January 3rd, 2008
For those who have followed the polls over the course of this election, it may be a relief to know the final numbers on January 3rd. Many dozens of polls have been taken, often showing results ten percentage points or more away from the poll taken next. Pollsters call voters in Iowa and NH three or four times a day. Campaigns add to the telephone traffic. The Obama campaign has made 1.6 million phone calls in New Hampshire, which has a total population of 1.3 million people.
But as the election has gotten closer and the media coverage become more intense, the polls have swung even more wildly. Governor Mike Huckabee was a media darling with low poll numbers until his numbers inched up in a couple of polls; then talk of a Huckabee surge brought the spotlight to him, and he was suddenly up by 22 points in Iowa. But the increased attention brought increased scrutiny. In fact, it was just enough scrutiny to bring Huckabee’s numbers to the level of former Governor Mitt Romney’s, effectively creating a “horserace.”
The same thing happened with McCain in New Hampshire, and to a lesser extent, Obama and now Edwards in Iowa. Remember the pre-Thompson buzz, too?
It all smacks of the rise and fall of Howard Dean. The Media brought him increased attention, and his poll numbers went up. But then they kept going up, and the media went into full-scrutiny mode (remember “Doubts About Dean” for weeks on end?). It was a big story when his numbers finally topped off, and the moment the media was waiting for came on the night of the Iowa Caucuses. The media flexed its muscles, and the ‘default-nominee’ faltered.
Did the media buzz create high poll numbers, or vise versa? Whether the powers-that-be artificially engineered these contests or not, these multi-way horseraces are nothing but good for the political press.
January 1st, 2008
Iowa City is holding a referendum on November 6 over whether to continue to allow people aged 19 and 20 to visit bars. Opponents of underage drinking are fighting to pass the referendum, underaged drinkers, specifically University of Iowa students, are getting mobilized to oppose it (as is every bar owner within a mile of the Ped Mall.) Since this is in Iowa, there has already been an obligatory piece wondering about the effect this might have in the caucuses. In an article on Slate, Christopher Beam seems to think that this is good for Barack Obama because students will be registered in time for the caucuses. Beam neglects the two important facts. First and most importantly, Beam doesn’t realize that you can register at the caucuses. In addition, Beam neglects the fact that none of the students will actually be in Iowa City on caucus night and thus the fact that they are registered there is almost totally irrelevant.
However, this does have one small effect for the caucuses. A voter registration form captures a lot of important information including address, telephone number and sometimes email. Provided that this information is added to the voter file, the Obama campaign (and all other caucus campaigns) will be able to contact hundreds more students than they would before (as they would have no way to contact them as they weren’t registered voters). It doesn’t mean that any of the newly registered students will show up for the caucuses either in Iowa City or in their hometown but it is now a lot more likely that a campaign will ask these newly registered students to show up to the caucuses. It helps Obama slightly (presuming that he is the default student candidate in Iowa City) but it is doubtful whether it will help him net more than a handful of extra caucusgoers on caucus night.
October 24th, 2007
Chris Dodd’s campaign announced that it had received the endorsement of State Rep Ray Zirkelbach today. Zirkelbach served two years in Iraq with the National Guard (and is the second Iraq veteran in the Iowa Legislature to make an endorsement in two days.) However, while Dodd’s campaign found an endorsement by an influential young Democrat in North East Iowa to be valuable in and of itself. It has added value, it’s one of the few Iowa endorsements that Dodd has received by a non-firefighter.
Dodd has been endorsed nationally by the International Association of Firefighters (or IAFF), which provided his only real major boost of the campaign. The only two Iowa legislators who endorsed Dodd previously, State Senators Jeff Danielson and Tom Hancock were firefighters and, of Dodd’s statewide leadership team that was announced this summer, a third of its members were affiliated with the IAFF. Dodd had IAFF-affiliated county chairs in seven of the ten counties that make up half of the caucus delegates and in four of the top five counties.
While Zirkelbach isn’t a firefighter, (he works at the prison at Anamosa), it’s still of concern for Dodd that his campaign’s leadership still has not expanded very far beyond its base labor support and that an endorsement by a non-firefighter is of note. With competition increasingly fierce even among the “second tier” candidates, Dodd is not going to get very far on caucus night if most of his supporters are just firefighters loyal to their International.
October 12th, 2007
I know, I live in Iowa, so a defense of the caucuses that comes from me is just going to seem like I’m greedy. I should say that before I moved to Iowa for college four years ago, I shared the opinion that the importance of the caucuses is unjustifiable, and that a national primary would be more democratic. Then I experienced the caucuses (in 2004), and I changed my mind.
Over on MyDD, desmoinesdem published the second part of her diary series, “How the Iowa caucuses work.” She echoes concerns that we brought up here about inequalities in the caucus system based on delegate assignment, demonstrating that it takes more caucus-goers to elect a delegate in precincts with higher concentrations of activist Democrats who have free evenings than in precincts with lower concentrations of said activists. (E.g., it took about 70 caucus-goers to elect one delegate in the Poweshiek County, where I caucused in 2004, while in less-Democratic and less-populous Fremont County, it only took 22 caucus-goers to elect one delegate.)
The conclusion of all of this? The caucus system (according to our own Geraldine) “favors the old over the young, the rural over the urban, Western Iowa over Eastern Iowa.”
Why is this wrong? Well, while the caucus system seems to create inequalities on the surface, it can compensate for deeper inequalities. Many have complained, here and elsewhere, that the Iowa Caucuses are unfair to families with young children, workers who have evening shifts, handicapped persons, and, generally, people with busy schedules, because it requires them to take several hours out of a weekday night to argue with their neighbors about politics. Not everyone can do that, and it’s understandable.
That is why precincts are assigned delegates before caucus night: if a disproportionate number of Democrats in X precinct have to work the night shift or have young children (or even if there’s a blizzard), the system currently in place ensures that their precinct will still be important. And precincts are the smallest geographic unit our election officials recognize for general elections, so it is assumed that others in your precinct likely represent similar interests to yours. Think of it as a much more geographically specific version of the electoral college. (Maybe you have your problems with that system, too, but at least this caucus math has a constitutional precedent.)
Aside from that, though, here’s a question nobody has asked: what is the harm in giving Iowa’s downtrodden rural hamlets and agricultural areas a little attention from the rest of the country every four years? It isn’t like John Edwards is going to spend the last week before the caucuses camped out in Keokuk and Grundy Counties just because each caucus-goer is worth more there. At the end of the day, Keokuk and Grundy still represent a tiny fraction of the total delegates needed to win, and putting on events and doing GOTV work is easier and far more efficient in urban areas like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
While disparities in caucus-goer to delegate ratios from county to county may seem a little alarming, the truth is that urban areas are still immensely important, and that a candidate can win the caucuses without putting practically any resources into the less populous half of Iowa’s 99 counties. A campaign will hire more than 10 full-time field organizers for Polk County before they will hire a single full-time organizer for Grundy County. And most importantly, I don’t know a single Iowa Democrat who will argue that Polk County (Des Moines area) Democrats don’t have enough influence on state politics, the state party, or the caucuses.
I hope this will be the start of a series of posts written here as a defense of the Iowa Caucuses. Toward that end, I’m looking for more arguments to respond to. So, dear readers, please participate: What arguments against the Iowa Caucuses do you find most compelling?
March 6th, 2007
The Politico has this profile of the head of the far right Iowa Christian Alliance, Steve Scheffler. Scheffler has become a major player in Iowa Republican politics over the past six years as the far right has reasserted its dominance over the Republican Party of Iowa as Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature, Iowa congressional delegation and our control of the Governorship attest to. Scheffler brags in the article that three quarters of the Republicans who show up to caucus “will be down the line on life, immigration, marriage and spending.” Aside from that fact that these aren’t all typical social conservative hot-button issues, it gets to the question of what the actual composition of the caucus crowd will be.
Every candidate tries to draw out special niches that they think that they will get a lot of support from. In 2004, as Roger Simon’s classic piece about the caucuses noted “Dick Gephardt targeted family farmers; Howard Dean went after the young and disenchanted; [John] Kerry pursued veterans.” With both parties holding highly competitive caucuses, there will be a lot of competition for both groups. It’s fair to say though that we can tell some of the core demographics that candidates will go after in 2008. McCain will go after veterans (and Giuliani may too), Romney will go after fellow Mormons (there aren’t a lot in Iowa but enough to make a difference), Huckabee and Brownback after fellow evangelicals (perhaps special denominational focuses after Protestants and Catholics respectively). All the candidates will go after people in all of these communities but there are some communities where they have a more significant appeal. So why does this matter? Because every person who goes to the Republican caucuses is someone who cannot go to the Democratic ones. In 2004, the fight for the Republican nomination was not competitive. This meant that only diehard Republicans attended the caucuses. In 2008, both parties will feature highly competitive primary battles. That means there will be big advantages for candidates whose niche voters are also their party’s base voters. Of all the candidates mentioned, this has big ramifications for John McCain, his special appeal is with veterans and he will probably try to emulate John Kerry’s strategy of wooing veterans in 2004. Kerry was able to attract quite a few veterans who were Independents and Republicans to come caucus for him in 2004. The problem for McCain is, many Democratic veterans will be participating in the Democratic caucuses. Another problem is that all the Republican veterans who showed up to support John Kerry will getting harassed by Democratic candidates as well, since they showed up to a previous Democratic caucus. This means that they’ll be getting a ton of phone calls from Democrats, which will drown out any attempt by McCain to reach out to them. This puts McCain at a disadvantage and it makes more likely that a right winger will triumph in Iowa on caucus night.
March 1st, 2007
The Des Moines Register reports that Tom Vilsack is ending his bid to be President today. Vilsack will apparently cite his inability to raise the money necessary to compete successfully for the Democratic nomination. It had long been rumored that Vilsack had serious financial woes due to weak fundraising and the need to pay the large field staff he had already hired. Although Vilsack had attracted quite a bit of grassroots support in Iowa and was still neck and neck with first tier candidates in a recent poll of caucusgoers, his support outside the Hawkeye State was minimal.
Tom Vilsack was the first serious Presidential contender to announce he was running and is the first to drop out. Although it’s not a surprise that Vilsack campaign didn’t pan out. However, that he’s dropping out almost a year before the caucuses and only a week after Vilsack made a relatively successful appearance on the Tonight Show is a shock. What the most disturbing thing is that Vilsack’s campaign is ending this early. In 1960, John F. Kennedy didn’t start his campaign until December 1959, in 2000, George W. Bush didn’t start to run until June 1999, now we have candidates dropping out 21 months before the election. It is a disturbing trend.
February 23rd, 2007
