What the Hell Happened in Iowa?
This piece on the Iowa caucuses and the process of a caucus first appeared on my Facebook page as a note on February 2, 2016.
“So someone tell me, what the hell happened last night?”
For some strange reason, it seems that far too many people were curious this morning as to what this political aficionado saw last night. Today, the day after one of the most incredible Iowa caucuses ever on both sides, the confusion was not about who won — well, maybe for the Democrats — but about what the political phenomenon we call Iowa even is.
For young people, the confusion was not entirely their fault. The caucus is a practice dating back to before the Constitution was even drafted, however neither the lengthy caucusing process nor the arguable importance of the one that occurred last night are mentioned in more than a sentence in any textbook on politics, government, or United States history. It’s not just the students that are confused, but plenty of adults as well. Over the years, the two major political parties have tweaked the caucus process so much that the Democratic and Republican caucuses in Iowa are almost two entirely different types of electoral events. So what exactly is Iowa’s caucus? Why does it matter? And most importantly, who ‘won’?
What is a Caucus?
The first mention of a caucus comes from the personal diary of John Adams. In an entry dated February of 1763, Adams talks about how party members chose candidates to run in the next elections:
“This day learned that the Caucas Clubb meets at certain Times in the Garret of Tom Daws, the Adjutant of the Boston Regiment. He has a large House, and he has a moveable Partition in his Garrett, which he takes down and the whole Clubb meets in one Room. There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one End of the Garrett to the other.”
Not only does Adams show us that even back then the real political decisions happened in dark, smoke-filled rooms, but that caucuses have been around since the inception of our system of government.
Of course, things have changed. In Adams’ time, it was common to promise favors in return for attending and voting in a caucus. Adams says of an attending townsperson:
“ Captn. Cunningham says they have often solicited him to go to these Caucas, they have assured him Benefit in his Business.”
Supposedly, this no longer happens, but corruption may still be lurking. That’s an entirely different story altogether.
Essentially, a caucus is simply a meeting of a party where a goal or agenda is established. For the purpose of an election, a caucus is an alternative form of voting that is held in place of a traditional, ballot based primary — i.e. how most states, including Massachusetts, pick the nominees for the Democratic and Republican Parties.
There’s unique methods of caucusing for the Democrats and the Republicans, but the basics of an electoral caucus are the same as in a primary for both parties, at least at first. Voters are all assigned precincts, or population-based locations at which they will meet on caucus night. These precincts are located in a variety of spaces — churches, convention centers, schools, and even gun shops and grain elevators. Sometimes, if a county has a substantial number of precincts, the precincts are combined into one location, but the votes are tallied as two precincts. For example, Blackhawk County held all of its caucuses at the UNI-Dome in 2012, where the University of Northern Iowa football team takes the field for home games. Iowa has a total of 1,681 precincts spread across 99 counties.
In both Democratic and Republican primaries in Iowa, anyone is allowed to show up to either party’s caucus. The only requirement is that upon arriving, new voters register with the party they are caucusing for, and voters who wish to transfer into the party must reregister before entering the precinct. Interestingly enough, seventeen year olds who would not be legally eligible to vote in elections in most states are allowed to caucus so long as they will reach the age of eighteen before or on the day of the general election, which takes place this year on November 8th.
All Democratic and Republican caucus sites open their doors at 6 PM local time. The caucus itself begins at 7 PM. Because the caucuses are traditionally cloistered events, those not in line by that time are excluded from the caucus, regardless of a voter’s ability to make it to their precinct within the hour window. The similarities end here.
The Democratic Caucus: Bring A Book
In Iowa, voters can spend hours discussing and debating politics at their voting places due to the complex nature of the Democrats’ caucusing.
After entering into their precinct, caucus-goers split into voting groups called preference groups. This year, there were four preference groups at each Democratic precinct; one for Bernie Sanders, one for Hillary Clinton, one for Martin O’Malley, and one for undecided voters. These undecided voters can make up a very large percentage of the vote or very small depending on the precinct. When it becomes apparent that there are a decent amount of undecided voters as the clock heads towards seven, precinct captains work the room to draw in support. Precinct captains are mostly volunteer supporters of a candidate who pledge to not only caucus for their candidate, but advocate for their candidate with undecided voters. Think of this phase of the caucus as an extension of a political discourse: neighbors discuss politics with neighbors and try to convince them to move to one candidate or another.
At seven o’clock, silence falls over the precincts. All caucus-goers take their seats in their candidate’s preference group for the first round of voting. Different volunteers from all campaigns and no campaigns count the votes to ensure the process is fair. In Iowa, however, having a few voters in your preference group is not enough to continue to a second round. To continue on into the second round of voting, a preference group must meet or surpass a ‘viability threshold,’ or a predetermined percentage of the vote that proves a candidate to be viable for the nomination. In 2016, the magic viability threshold was set at 15%.
If a candidate does not meet this threshold, then the members of said candidate’s preference group are released; their candidate is no longer in the running in that precinct. After this release, the precinct captains for surviving candidates are allowed to lobby for newly released candidates to join their preference group. The votes are recounted a final time.
This is where things get tricky.
After all that work, the people of Iowa still do not directly vote for their nominee. The first caucus — the precinct caucus — is a vote for a delegate. The system of delegates that is used in this precinct caucus is not the statewide delegate system that sends representatives to the national convention in an equally confusing but more widely-known process. Each precinct in Iowa has a set number of delegates to award based on its population. In total, Iowa has 1,405 of these delegates within the state.
Just like in the national system, anyone selected by the local Democratic Party can be a delegate. These delegates then go to the caucus of the county in which their precinct is located and vote for the candidate who they are pledged to represent — i.e. if in a certain precinct, Bernie Sanders wins five delegates and Hillary Clinton wins four, five delegates will, when polled at the county caucus, vote for Bernie Sanders and four will vote for Hillary Clinton. In some cases, due to voodoo math tricks that are tricky to comprehend, a candidate who gets a lower percentage of the popular vote can get an equal number of delegates as a candidate who beat them. This happened in one precinct CNN was broadcasting from last night; with eight delegates to award and Clinton leading Sanders 55% to 45%, both candidates got four delegates. Because of the system of delegates, the Democratic Party of Iowa controversially elects to not release the actual popular vote totals from the caucus. Instead, those percentages with razor thin margins — Clinton: 49.9%, Sanders: 49.6% — do not represent a percentage of the population, but percentage of the fourteen hundred some odd delegates mentioned above.
While this caucus is used to calculate the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ that are used to display results, there’s still more work to be done. After the media has packed up and moved on to the next primary race in New Hampshire, which occurs on February 9th, the precinct delegates meet at the county convention and in turn select delegates to go to the congressional district state convention; Iowa has four congressional and those delegates choose the delegates that go to the national convention. Bet you’ve never seen the word delegate so many times, have you?
If you’re confused, that’s okay. Many people are. The amount of research it takes for even those who love politics like I do to understand this process is evidence enough that the Democratic caucus in Iowa is one of the most complex and misunderstood aspects of our political system.
The Republican Caucus: One and Done
It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that an electoral contest in which there are fourteen candidates, including virtually unknown candidates such as Jim Gilmore, Andy Martin, and Jack Fellure, is more straightforward than a contest such as the Democrats’ three-way race. Then again, ‘Iowa’ isn’t exactly intuitive to begin with.
As soon as the caucus doors close at seven at Republican precincts, all caucus-goers take their seats in one large room. Because of this, churches and gymnasiums make ideal locations for Republican caucuses; they require little change to make them suitable for a large group of people. A caucus chair assigned to each precinct then calls for each present precinct captain to, if they so choose, give a five to ten minute speech. This speech serves as one final push for votes, and tends to be delivered by a dedicated supporter of a candidate or, in some cases, the candidate him or herself. After all speeches have concluded, the caucus-goers vote in a secret ballot — a name written on a piece of paper. The ballots are totaled, and a winner is declared.
Unlike the Democratic caucus, the Republicans do publish and evaluate the popular vote percentages to determine to winner of their caucus. When the reports state that Ted Cruz won Iowa with 27.6% of the vote, they mean that 27.6% of the caucusing Republicans voted for Cruz.
Why Iowa Matters
While it’s great to understand how Iowa works, understanding why Iowa matters is clearly the bigger issue. The math points to Iowa being statistically insignificant; for the Democrats, Iowa represents only 44 delegates of the 4,047 up for grabs with 2,064 needed to secure the nomination. For the Republicans, it’s 30 out of 2,380 total delegates, of which 1,191 are needed to win the nomination. That’s 2% and 2.5% of needed delegates for the Democrats and Republicans, respectively. Shouldn’t effort be focused on the bigger states, on places where the number of delegates up for grabs surpasses five, even ten percent? It certainly isn’t Iowa’s predictive power for the Republicans: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush all lost Iowa then became Commander in Chief, while Mike Huckabee, Dick Gephardt and Tom Harkin — the latter two hardly household names for the new generation — all won Iowa yet lost miserably and failed to clinch the Republican nomination. Donald Trump was right: Iowa never picks winners.
The value of Iowa is not in its numbers, but its power to show who can go the distance in the other forty nine states and ultimately the general election. Two candidates dropped out last night alone, and more might be headed that way. Historically, the race slims down after Iowa. Most importantly, and perhaps related to this last point, Iowa is the first opportunity for the American public to get actual numbers. It’s one thing to poll well, but polling high is not necessarily indicative of what will happen in the voting booth. Just ask Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, and John Edwards; all three of these candidates who did not get their party’s nominations in the elections in question — 1988, 2008, and 2008, respectively — had ‘summer averages’ in the June-August period preceding the election year that were in the high twenties and low thirties. Donald Trump is the newest example. Quinnipiac, Bloomberg, and NBC had the controversial billionaire turned politician polling first in the most recent polls by a substantial margin. Trump finished second with 24% of the vote to Ted Cruz’s 28% — by all accounts a role reversal.
Iowa’s Future
There have been many questions surrounding the Democratic caucus system in general, especially in the aftermath of the virtual tie seen between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Allegations of paid Clinton campaign staffers working as precinct captains and deliberate miscounts abound. It would surprise no one if the Iowa Democratic leadership finally acquiesces to ancient calls for the use of popular voting in caucuses rather than the complex delegate system currently in place. What has been most controversial is the ‘coin toss’ rule; believe it or not, the Democratic leadership advises the use of a coin toss to decide where delegates go if a precinct is too close to call. Hillary Clinton won all five ‘coin toss’ counties last night — an event that has a 1 in 64 chance of occurring.
While someday in the next fifty years Iowa may lose its importance in a rapidly changing political system, for now it seems that the mystical midwestern state is here to stay. Like it or not, Iowa is a fascinating electoral phenomenon that promotes a unique form of political engagement, and may just shake up this election cycle. So for those who missed it this time around, look closer at the Hawkeye State in 2020. You might be surprised at what you learn.
