Sometimes you need to explain things again. And again. And again.
That's what I've been doing for the last nine years when it comes to the failure of the Iowa caucuses. That whole discussion is bubbling up again thanks to the Iowa Democratic Party's "Family Conversation" survey (please particpate).
There's nothing new here for people who have been following me for a long time. This is just a re-organization in the hope that it will finally click for a few more people.
I've taken the most common pro-caucus myths, the ones the die-hards always repeat, and made the case against them. Unfortunately, some of those items require long, deep in the weeds answers, so I've tried to sum them up in one-liner shorthand. If you're on my side in this discussion, bookmark this for later.
Preamble: A word from Basil Exposition.
Historically, only a few states had public presidential primaries, and New Hampshire was generally first. Most states had the old smoke-filled room system of obscure conventions and sparsely attended caucuses.
Starting in 1972, the Democrats reformed their nomination process to make it more open, and Iowa accidentally scheduled its caucuses before the New Hampshire primary. Jimmy Carter noticed, and from there the Iowa caucuses grew into what we know now.
After a decade or so of games, Iowa, New Hampshire, and the national parties agreed that Iowa would have the first caucus and New Hampshire the first primary. Both states passed laws to that effect.
New Hampshire spent the next 40 years policing Iowa’s
caucus process to make sure it did not become an election, without
giving Iowa much guidance as to what that meant, and threatening to move
their primary date ahead of our caucus if they didn't like something.
The national parties went along until the Democratic National Committee revised the calendar in December 2022 - moving New Hampshire to third and removing Iowa entirely from the early states. (Republicans left the existing calendar in place.) Now the process-obsessed Democrats are reviewing the calendar again for 2028.
Myth: "The caucuses" and "First in the nation" are the same thing.
Short answer: The two terms often get used interchangeably. But when people say "we need the caucuses back," they usually mean "we want First in the nation back."
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| Quasimodo predicted all this. |
Facts: “First in the nation” (or “First”) is about the year before – the in person visits, the command performances at party fundraisers, the organizers on the ground, the money flowing into the state, the hoopla. In a nomination system where states vote in sequence, most states don’t get that kind of attention. Historically only the two earliest states, Iowa and New Hampshire, have gotten that. In recent years, and to a lesser extent, Nevada and South Carolina have had some of that. The other 46 states get some TV ads and maybe an airport rally.
When I'm talking about “the caucuses” I mean the actual meeting at which votes are cast and party business is done. These meetings are run by the parties and not by county auditors like a normal election. Historically the caucuses have required in person attendance with no absentee voting. In recent cycles, most states have phased out caucuses in favor of primaries.
The reason “First” and “caucuses” are often incorrectly used as synonyms is because of New Hampshire. “New Hampshire won’t like it” has long been used as an excuse to shoot down reforms and to keep our process frozen in the past.
Part of that excuse making has been to say “the caucuses” when what’s really being discussed is First. That's deliberate, to reinforce the message of “we have to have caucuses instead of a primary or else we won’t be First.”
I’m actually agnostic on the whole question of First, and I recognize the historic benefits. But there are serious issues with caucuses as a process, and for a lot of reasons I believe the flaws in a caucus process outweigh the advantages of First.
Myth: State law says we have to vote First.
Short answer: Not really.
Facts: The state law, and the corresponding New Hampshire law, often get used to justify our complicated process. But despite the way it's usually spun, Iowa law does NOT say we have to vote for president first. It only says that we have to hold a caucus to elect precinct level party officers before other states vote for president. The law does not even require a presidential vote at all at the caucus. For decades, Iowa Republicans skipped the presidential vote in re-election years.
In 2024 Iowa Democrats followed the letter of the law. They had a January caucus for party business only, eight days before New Hampshire's rogue primary. They then held a mail-in presidential vote, with a March deadline that was in compliance with the DNC calendar.
There were a few bumps in the road, as there are any time you try something new. The caucus attendance and mail-in turnout were low - which is normal in a re-election year. (Yes, I know a lot of unprecedented stuff happened later.) But it pretty much worked, and it's probably the only way we can comply with both current state law and the likely 2028 DNC rules.
Myth: There is no way to organize rural Iowa without in person visits by presidential candidates and without outside money and organizers. The caucuses are still first for the Republicans and we can't cede the field of debate to them.
Short answer: It's over and it's not coming back.
Facts: Yes, this hurts. Yes, it’s going to be hard to change. But for reasons I explain below, the DNC is not going to willingly give us back this privilege. And if we go rogue and vote first anyway, the DNC can effectively prevent candidates from visiting Iowa and keep us from gaining the historic benefits of First.
We build this mess ourselves through 50 years of making unrealistic
demands and setting unrealistic expectations that candidates absolutely HAD to be
seen in person in the very smallest Iowa towns. We insisted, indeed some of us continue to insist, that Iowa First is the "natural order" (a phrase I saw used this week!), and we have no idea how entitled we sound to the 48 other
states that managed to organize without it.
We have already wasted three years in denial since the December 2022 day that we lost the early state slot for 2024. We have continued to feed false hopes that will only make our rural counties resent it even more when it's 2027 and the candidates aren't here.
Our party leaders need to lead. We need to respect our small county activists enough to be honest with them, and we need to work with them on how to best replace that old system - because we don't have the political clout to make it come back.
Myth: The caucuses are a great organizing tool. (When they really mean "First.")
Short
answer: Maybe. But your mileage may vary. (And as you'll read below, we
make some unacceptable moral compromises to have this privilege.)
Facts:
First certainly helped with fundraising, which is probably why the
state’s political establishment loves them. There's a lot of money in
multi-candidate events and in selling database access. And the overall
level of interest and excitement isn't a bad thing.
But what does that do in terms of actually rounding up volunteers and votes for November?
I
attended a lot of candidate events for candidates of both parties from
2007 through 2019, when I was wearing a beret and doing more writing.
Those events have long since been corrupted by the media spotlight. The
glorified ideal of Ordinary Iowans Who Are Trying To Make A Deliberative
Choice is in fact pretty rare. Iowans are getting their information off
the internet like the rest of the world.
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The Notch Babies were a big group in 1988.
This issue, um, resolved itself with time. |
Instead, events are packed with four types of people:
1)
"Bird dog" representatives of single issue groups who are trying to get
their candidate on record on their pet cause and their specific
wording. They certainly have the right, but they tend to hog the mic.
And those demands, aimed at a national audience, can paint candidates
into the corner of taking positions that don't help in an Iowa general
election.
2) Trackers from the other party, other campaigns, and reporters looking for a gaffe.
3)
Selfie collectors – who are often already committed to other
candidates!
And 4) People who are already
strongly committed to that specific candidate. And of this group,
almost no one sticks around and joins the local party if
their favorite candidate is not the nominee.
Myth: The caucuses are a great organizing tool. (When they mean "the caucus meeting itself.")
Short answer: Tell that to the 500 people in my caucus room.
Facts: The biggest myth of all is the carefully curated image of the
caucus as an idyllic town hall setting of people calmly and patiently discussing The Issues Of The Day. When people say "we want the caucuses back," and actually mean the caucuses instead of First, this is the misty-eyed memory they are talking about. That may still exist in some
small rural counties. But that is not the modern experience for most people
who attend a caucus.
Half of all 2020 caucus goers attended just 260 of the 1678 precinct caucuses,
precincts with attendance of 191 people or higher. That's close to the
point where a grade school gym is fire-code overcrowded, and close to
the point where a meaningful meeting doesn't work. All you can do is crowd control and anger management. It's not possible to organize in a room of 500, 700, or 900 people, especially when a 90%+ majority of attendees do not want to be at a "party organizing meeting," they just want to vote for president.
Myth: A lot of people at the caucus is a good problem to have.
Short answer: Meetings of that size do
active damage to local organizing.
Facts: Someone wants to attend your meeting and first you tell them "stand in line 45 minutes to sign in, then stand in a corner for three hours to vote." And it is always the locals who get blamed. Never "the Iowa
Democratic Party." Never "the DNC." Never "the New Hampshire Secretary of State who won't let me have an absentee ballot." It's always the precinct and county volunteers who did the most work and had the least to do with making the rules who get blamed.
We don't lose Democratic
votes over it in the fall, and eventually they
caucus again, only because they have no choice. But we lose
people who might be donors or volunteers, who instead sit on the sidelines because
their first experience with the party was so awful.
In fact, if we decouple the presidential vote from the caucus meeting, like we
did in 2024, the much, much smaller number of people in attendance will be the people who actually
care about party committees and platform resolutions and will have a better experience.
But if you think the only way to organize your county is forcing everybody who just wants to vote for president into a
mandatory meeting, that's not a good plan.
Myth: Overcrowding is "only a Johnson County problem."
Short Answer: No it's not, and that doesn't solve the problem.
Facts:
17 counties had at least one caucus with more than 200 people in attendance.
These are the biggest and best Democratic precincts where we need to run
up the score in November to win.
And blaming Johnson County (and other big precincts in blue counties) for our own success and enthusiasm does not solve the problem. Are we simply supposed to suffer?
I
understand that it may be hard for a rural county activist to imagine a
900 person caucus. But that's our reality. In 2020 Johnson County had
40
caucuses (out of a then 57 precincts) with 200 or more in attendance.
That's not a caucus - that's three dozen simultaneous congressional district conventions that we're being forced to manage.
IDP has told us, verbatim, "you blue counties
are on their own, what resources we have need to go other places, and you need to help your smaller neighbors." We
haven't complained. We've done the work and gotten the results. We don't
ask for a lot of help.
Well, this is the thing we need help on.
We are forced into a one size fits all caucus process that simply does
not work for us. We need the rest of the state to understand, to care,
and to let us have the solutions we need.
Myth: Just get bigger rooms, then.
Short Answer: There aren't bigger rooms.
Facts:
Once attendance gets over about the capacity of a grade school gym,
public spaces (free or otherwise) are hard to come by. The
urban counties are already paying thousands of dollars to rent
theaters and hotel ballrooms. (IDP and the DNC have never offered to
chip in for that.) The number of people who want to attend - correction: want to vote for president but have to attend - is larger than the capacity of the largest
public spaces that exist.
The only way to solve the problem is to get
the people who only want to vote for president out of the rooms with
absentee ballots or with a real primary.
And we can do that. We just have to let go of First.
Myth: Caucus night can be fixed by holding a Republican style straw vote or by other rule changes.
Short Answer: That helps a little but not a lot.
Facts: Getting rid of realignment, the
least popular part of caucus night itself, could make the event shorter
and less miserable. IDP made some minor reforms in that direction in 2020. I fully expect that if we are forced back into a
mandatory in-person caucus system, it will use the Republican vote-and-leave procedure.
But that won’t solve the overcrowding.
You’ll still have to park everyone, often many blocks away. You still
have to sign everyone in, re-register a lot of people, and get them into
the room long enough to hand out ballots. You'll still need the 500
person room - you'll just need it for two hours instead of three.
So
why not let people check in early, vote, and leave? That’ll spread out
the sign-in crunch, rotate more people through the parking spaces, and
allow for somewhat smaller rooms. Not a bad idea.
Do you start that at 6 PM? 5 PM? What if some sites let you have
an early check in all day long but others, especially schools, don’t?
And how many hours of early sign in and voting can you have before the
New Hampshire Secretary of State decides that’s not a caucus, it’s an
election?
Which doesn't matter... unless we are trying to be First.
If
we're going to defy the DNC by going rogue on the date, and defy New
Hampshire by allowing absentees, that begs the question: why not just go
all the way and have a primary?
Myth: So we'll do it like we always
did it before, only with absentees.
Short Answer: Run that by the New Hampshire Secretary of State.
Facts: I'm all for absentees at the caucus. Nevada had a good early voting program at their 2020 caucuses. But New Hampshire didn't care what Nevada did, because Nevada voted after New Hampshire.
One of the few things New Hampshire has made clear to Iowa over the years is that they consider an in-person meeting to be an important part of the difference between a caucus and an election. They also believe that absentee ballots transform a caucus into an election - and New Hampshire will do whatever is necessary to have the first primary election.
Describe for me an absentee system that will not cause New Hampshire to object.
Iowa Democrats invested a huge amount of time and effort in a phone-in "virtual caucus" system in 2020. But IDP undercut it by under-counting the votes, so the presidential campaigns didn't buy in. Then the IT crowd at the DNC shot it down entirely as a security risk.
So at the last minute IDP dusted off a "satellite caucus" system. It helped a handful of people who would not otherwise have been able to attend, but it did little to address overcrowding, and people still had to attend an in-person meeting at one place and time.
(The other flaws and inconsistencies in the satellite caucus process would take up another dissertation-length post, that I may need to write if it looks like that dead plan is going to be dug up again.)
It would be easy to have a caucus with the kind of absentee votes people actually want - mailed ballots and early voting locations. Again: all we have to do is give up on First.
But a lot of Iowa Democrats believe the next myth:
Myth: First is the only thing that matters.
Short answer: "There's always
next cycle."
Facts: In a
way, I almost admire Scott Brennan, the former IDP chair and current DNC
member. When a New York Times
reporter told him the story of an emergency room worker who was going to
miss the 2008 caucuses because she could not get the shift off, Brennan was honest enough to say the quiet part out loud (paywalled):
Brennan, (then) chairman of the Iowa
Democratic Party, said the party had no responsibility to ensure that
voters can participate. "The campaigns are in charge of generating the
turnout," he said. The voters who truly care, he said, will find their
way to their precincts. As for the emergency room worker, "There's always
next cycle."
Brennan should be permanently excluded from any position of influence in the Democratic Party for that answer, yet he gets re-elected to the DNC at every state convention.
The sad truth is: A lot of Iowa Democrats agree with him.
In the 40 year battle with
New Hampshire, Iowa has always been willing to throw voters who can’t
attend an in-person caucus under the bus, and there’s no reason to think
2028 will be any different. Both parties do it - but Democrats are at least supposed to act like we care.
Democrats are the party of voting rights. We cry foul
every time the Republicans make early voting harder. We push our voters
to bank their votes early...
...except at caucus time, when we
demand that people attend a one time one place only hours long meeting.
And we tell the people who can't attend "There's always
next cycle," because First is more important.
If you're only going to take one thing away from this whole deep read, that's the thing. People who are arguing that First isn’t everything, it’s the only thing (apologies to Vince Lombardi) are, in the end, arguing it's just too bad if some people don't get to vote.
That's morally unacceptable. What good is First to people who are disenfranchised by the process?
Here's another way people try to explain away that problem:
Myth: The caucuses aren’t an election.
Short answer: The people have decided otherwise.
Facts: If you want to be a “well, ACTually” bro about it, you’re technically correct. The caucuses were never meant to be a mass participation event. They were designed as a living room sized meeting of the long time regular party activists. They were intended to elect local delegates, not produce the kind of precise results we see in elections.
Then Jimmy Carter showed up, then the national media showed up. And then the public made them a mass participation event by showing up.
In every way that matters, the caucuses have long since become an election. The voters of Iowa have decided they are an election. They’re just an election with complicated and outdated rules. And we learned the hard way in 2012, in 2016 and especially in 2020 that the parties will be held to the timeliness and precision standards of elections.
Myth: The DNC hates Iowa.
Short Answer: This one's actually true - but maybe we kind of deserve it?
Facts: National Democrats hate that we have so dramatically trended red since 2012. Maybe we can change this.
They hate our unrepresentative demographics. We can't change this.
They hate caucuses as a process - and rightly so. We need to show that we want to change this.
They hate our arrogant sense that First is somehow our "natural right." It's too late to change this.
And they don't think that Iowa missing out on one uncontested nomination cycle is sufficient punishment for the results meltdown of 2020, no matter whose fault it actually was.
The truth is, the entire calendar review process of 2022 was about one thing: getting rid of Iowa.
With all this against us, any time spent trying to persuade DNC to put us back in the early states is time wasted. Whatever pull IDP has with DNC (next to zero right now) should be used on other items that will help us rebuild.
Myth: If we defy the DNC and go first anyway, the candidates will still come to Iowa and we will reap all the historic benefits of First. They're coming already, aren't they? So what if DNC takes away some delegates. Iowa is about the momentum, not the delegates.
Short Answer: DNC has effective tools to keep candidates from visiting rogue states.
Facts: This gets a little deep in the weeds.
There is no 2028 calendar yet, so there's no rules to break yet and people can do whatever they want.
In late 2026, the DNC will schedule four or five states for dates in February 2028. Other states can begin voting in March. Once the calendar is set, each state party must submit a “delegate selection plan" to the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, which approves or rejects those plans.
One reason for rejection is if the plan violates the early state calendar, or does not include a date at all (which is why Iowa’s plan was initially rejected in early 2023). At that point sanctions take effect against both the state and against candidates who campaign there.
Campaigning (see page 20) is defined extremely broadly.
“Campaigning” for purposes of this section includes, but is not limited to, placing a candidate’s name on the ballot or failing to take action to remove it from the ballot; purchasing print, internet, or electronic advertising that reaches a significant percentage of the voters in the aforementioned state; hiring campaign workers; opening an office; making public appearances; holding news conferences; coordinating volunteer activities; sending mail, other than fundraising requests that are also sent to potential donors in other states; using paid or volunteer phoners or automated calls to contact voters; sending emails or establishing a website specific to that state; holding events to which Democratic voters are invited; attending events sponsored by state or local Democratic organizations; or paying for campaign materials to be used in such a state.
The DNC has two especially strong tools that would keep candidates out of a rogue Iowa.
One, they can exclude candidates from debates. The stronger tool is locking candidates out of the party’s online database (known as “VAN” to all operatives). Maybe a candidate could survive skipping debates. But no campaign could last a week without VAN – especially in a state with a party run caucus. You can’t get data on past caucus attendees from local or state election officials and build your own database – it is ONLY available from the party. Is anyone really going to risk that for a minor media bump from a rogue Iowa?
Myth: They’ll never actually punish us. New Hampshire got away with it, didn’t they?
Short answer: F🤬k around and find out.
Facts: Actually, New Hampshire WAS punished. True, they voted in an official state-run primary ahead of their assigned slot. But they didn’t really get First. They “voted” first but they saw no surrogate speakers or organizers. They didn’t even have Biden on the ballot.
And here’s the part you probably don’t know: in order to get their delegates seated, New Hampshire Democrats had to have a do-over vote in April. The event was scarcely publicized, because New Hampshire wanted to bluster and bluff everyone into thinking they had "won," and only a handful of party activists participated.
Historically the DNC has been reluctant to invoke delegate penalties on states that vote too soon. But the real punishment for Florida and Michigan, who broke the calendar rules in 2008, was that the candidates didn't visit. They got to vote early, but they didn't get First. Same with New Hampshire in 2024 (though Biden wasn’t going to be up in Nashua campaigning for renomination anyway).
But there’s a first time for everything. Those past rule breakers have been legitimate swing states. Iowa, in contrast, is the perfect state to make an example of. They already hate us for all the reasons listed above, and we have no strong federal official to fight for us the way Tom Harkin used to.
Maybe I’m wrong. But if we pursue the "F🤬k the DNC" path, we could very easily end up with no candidate visits and no national delegates.
Eyes on the prize, people.
This "family conversation," while welcome as outreach, is a distraction from more important matters. I'm only devoting so many words to it because it's my particular area of expertise.
Before we start talking about F🤬k the DNC, maybe we should focus on winning some 2026 elections instead? Then maybe Governor Sand, Senator Wahls, and three Democratic House members can go make the case for Iowa as an early state.
