"The Iowa Democratic Caucuses As We Knew Them Are Finally Dead," reads the Friday headline at New York. 

The truth is, The Iowa Democratic Caucuses As We Knew Them died on December 1, 2022. That night the incumbent Democratic President of the United States said "Our party should no longer allow caucuses as part of our nominating process," and announced a calendar of five early states that did not include Iowa - a decision quickly ratified by the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee.

What followed was ten months of denial and secrecy by the Iowa Democratic Party which finally ended Friday with an announcement that the party would release the results of the "mail-in caucus presidential preference" on March 5, Super Tuesday, the earliest date allowed by the DNC.

And after all that delay, the final plan looks a lot like what I recommended on December 10: hold the caucus meeting on the same night as the Republicans (which turned out to be January 15, 2024) but only conduct the legally required business of electing precinct level officers and uncommitted delegates. Then after the caucus, at a later date that was compliant with the DNC calendar, we could conduct the mail-in presidential vote.

That's exactly what IDP is going to do, according to an email sent to "SCC Members, Leaders, and Friends" just three minutes before the Friday press conference, which is basically no different that reading it in the Des Moines Register.

What took so long? No one really knows, because IDP leadership was very tight-lipped about the "vigorous and lengthy negotiations with the DNC" from December till this week. Rank and file Democrats deserve to know the details of that. I have a strong opinion but no evidence. Let's just say I think Georgia removing itself from an early Democratic state slot scheduled for February 13 or 20, because Georgia Republicans would not cooperate, was a key factor in the delay.

The entire process was too closed, too secretive, and too long. We should have been discussing how the 2024 process could and should work, in public, way back last winter, with Iowans and not with national committee members, and made the announcement in spring or early summer. That would have set expectations and reduced confusion.

The delay also made it impossible for President Biden and his supporters to start planning for the fall 2024 campaign, because of extremely strict rules against campaigning in non-calendar compliant states. We had to watch fringe candidates Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chaos agents who could care less about rules, speak unanswered at the Iowa State Fair and get free media, while local activists had to worry about whether we were allowed to dust off an old Biden-Harris 2020 sign for a parade - all because IDP refused to set a contest date.

One thing we do know, from the last minute message to the grassroots leaders, is that IDP is playing for the future. "A fight right now over the early state calendar only weakens Iowa Democrats’ future chances," said IDP Chair Rita Hart. "I have repeated reassurance from the Rules and Bylaws Committee and its co-chairs that the presidential nominating calendar discussions will once again be opened up for 2028."

DNC Member Scott Brennan is more direct: "We intend to be first in 2028." Slow down, Scott.

True, Hart and Brennan recognize an important reality: 2024 doesn't matter. It matters even less now that Kennedy is taking his ball and going home for an independent campaign. And there is a certain benefit to Iowa's somewhat cooperative approach to the DNC, as opposed to New Hampshire's defiant insistence that they will break the calendar to stay First. (If they follow through, their delegation could and should not be seated at the national convention at all.)

But this Play For 2028 approach is one more sign of denial. Treating 2024 as a temporary setback means we won't be focused on building an Iowa Democratic Party for a post-First future. We'll still be counting on the national campaigns, organizers and money to come in and do it for us, like they have for the last 50 years - just not this one cycle. And we'll be spending 2025 and 2026 distracted by the Rules And Bylaws Committee again, just like we spent 2022 and 2023.

As for this year, the Iowa Democratic Party is preparing to spend a lot of money which could be used for more important things in order to conduct a pointless vote in an uncontested renomination race, simply to prove that we have learned how to count votes after our problems in 2016 and 2020, in the hopes that if we succeed, all will be forgiven and we will be restored to our "rightful" place on the calendar. We have county auditors who can count votes, at taxpayer expense, but more on that later.

The reality is, there are no "Iowa Democrats' future chances." The whole point of the DNC calendar reform was to get rid of Iowa (and take New Hampshire down a notch). They didn't like our process, they didn't like our demographics, they didn't like our recent election results, and they didn't like our arrogant attitude that First was our birthright.  

Four more years won't make us significantly less of a red state - rebuilding will take Iowa Democrats much longer than two cycles. It won't make us any less old or any less white or any less rural. And exile from the early states for one meaningless re-election cycle won't be enough punishment for a lot of corners of the party. Maybe we'll get some other small token of appreciation for behaving better than New Hampshire, but Iowa doesn't deserve to be considered for an early state slot until we get a state-run primary and until we win some elections.

For now, I need to be just a little positive and look at some details. The timeline announced Friday is as follows:

• Iowa Democrats will be able to request a presidential preference card (sic) starting November 1, 2023.
• Presidential preference cards (sic) will be mailed starting January 12, 2024.
• Iowa Democrats will hold our in-person caucuses January 15, 2024.
• The last day to request a presidential preference card (sic) is February 19, 2024.
• The Iowa Democratic Party will release results of our 2024 mail-in caucus presidential preference (sic) on March 5, 2024.
• Iowa Democrats will accept presidential preference cards (sic) postmarked on or before March 5, 2024.

First of all, let's use honest language. Now that we don't have to play word games with the New Hampshire Secretary of State, let's drop the stupid and confusing term "presidential preference card." It's a ballot. And it's not a "mail-in caucus presidential preference" - it's a party-run primary.

The first ballot request date, November 1, is really, really soon. It's still not clear what form those requests will take. If they're on line, accommodation will need to be made for those without computers. If they're paper, they'll need to be distributed somehow. And there are many people who will only be able to get a request form if someone prints it and mails it to them, which is an expense. Who does that - the state party or the locals?

Ballots will be mailed January 12. There is a five week overlap period when requests will be coming in and ballots will be both be coming in and going out. This overlap period includes Caucus Night. That means some people will come to the caucus with their ballots in hand and will want to turn them in. I would also expect IDP to include ballot requests in the caucus materials. That's a lot of stuff to juggle for a volunteer caucus chair and there's a risk of ballots getting misplaced. It might be better to hold off on mailing the ballots just four days, until after the caucus.

That said, many people will not trust the post office with a ballot and will want to return it in person. In earlier versions of the plan, IDP talked about county drop boxes. How will county parties be expected to manage and safeguard that? The average county chair does not have a box that's built like a tank and a 24 hour security camera like an auditor does.

The party plans to both announce results on March 5 and accept ballots postmarked March 5. That's going to mean a second set of results after caucus night to include the late arrivals. I think this is a rhetorical point. IDP wants to complain about the recent Republican driven change in state law that requires ballots to arrive before polls close on Election Day. Fine - but we'll need to set some specified cut-off date.

As for March 5, I was hoping for a different date. Iowa's results will be buried in the flood of results from both parties in other Super Tuesday states (to the extent that anyone cares about Biden 98%, Williamson 2% results). I would have preferred county convention day, March 23. This would have been a fun news handle for the county conventions (to the extent that anyone cares about Biden 98%, Williamson 2% results). But, as I expected, IDP clearly decided that the important thing was to go as soon as possible to emphasize that we really, really want to be an early state again.

Not discussed in the party release: Whether or not names will be printed on the ballots, and if so, the process to qualify. Will they be machine countable, which is way more accurate than a hand count? If not, are we going to quibble about whether "Joe" or "Biden-Harris" or "Bidin" votes will count?

So there's a lot more details to be fleshed out, and that will need to happen in less than four weeks before those requests start coming in.

In the big picture, there is good news. The most important change happened months ago, even before Iowa Democrats were demoted in the calendar. The old system where people had to stand in the corner for hours of endless headcounts and realignments, in crowds of up to 900 people, is over. Anyone who simply wants to vote for president does not need to attend a meeting at one and only one specific time and place. Since Iowa Republicans will not cooperate with an auditor-run primary election, a mail-in party run primary is as good as Democrats can do. The party of voting rights needs to contrast our improved, inclusive system with the same as it ever was Republican caucus where if you cannot attend, you cannot vote. And we should push for more.

The next legislative session starts very close to caucus night. Democratic legislators should emphasize voting rights by introducing a bill for a real, auditor-run Iowa presidential primary. It doesn't matter that Republicans won't assign it to a committee. It's a point that should be made and it's a point that will make national news. And, if you think trying to get back into the early states is important, it's a point that will help our standing with the rest of the national Democratic Party.

I never said the blog was dead. It's only semi-retired, and I have always reserved the right to don the beret as needed for special occasions. So on this Easter Monday the blog rises from the grave.

It's been a long Iowa caucus tradition that the two parties set aside their policy differences and work together on process issues. It's also been a long tradition that the parties don't tell each other how to conduct their own business.  You want to have a straw poll and call it a caucus? Fine. You do you. We'll be over here counting our preference groups.

That tradition has been stained to the breaking point in the months since the two national party committees made different decisions about Iowa's traditional First role - the Republicans keeping Iowa first, the Democrats completely banishing Iowa from the early state window.

This week, that bipartisan tradition snapped entirely. The final break was House Study Bill 245, a late session surprise from Rep. Bobby Kaufmann - a Trump campaign advisor and the son of the state party chair. Given the prominence of the sponsor, the unusual method of introduction, and the late date, I'm assuming this will pass.

The bill makes two key changes in caucus process. The first change ends the long bipartisan tradition that Iowas can register to vote or change party on caucus night. The bill would instead require voters to choose and register with the party 70 days before the caucuses.

It's clear what's at play here. The Trump wing of the Republican Party of Iowa is worried about anti-Trump Democrats and no party voters crossing over. But guess what? Crossovers happened EVERY time there's a caucus in a re-election cycle, as independents go where the action is. 

But if Iowa Republicans suddenly see that as a problem, they can change their process without changing the law. They can simply make the 70 day requirement a party rule. Is that mean spirited and vote suppression? Sure, but it's their party event and thus their business. You set your rules, and let us keep our doors open to people who want to join the Democrats on caucus night.

The other change would lock the caucuses into the status quo of 2012 and earlier by requiring caucus voters to attend the precinct level caucus in person. 

This is designed to kill the Iowa Democratic Party's plan to separate the presidential vote from the caucus itself, and conduct a by mail presidential preference process. It would also kill the satellite caucuses that were attempted in 2020 and on a very small scale in 2016 - even though most of those were at the same time as the precinct caucuses. There were serious flaws and inconsistencies to the satellite caucuses, but they did open up the process to some people who could not attend.

Even the Republicans had a very limited caucus participation program for military and overseas voters. I look forward to the Kaufmanns explaining to our troops why they can't vote.

Republicans may be concerned that the New Hampshire Secretary of State will call the Democratic mail-in process an "election" and move New Hampshire's date in front of Iowa. They are also worried that people might vote a Democratic absentee ballot, then attend a GOP caucus.  

That seems to be an exaggerated fear for this cycle, since the Democratic nomination is not likely to be seriously contested. No one's going to want a Democratic mailed ballot except the committed party activists and the leftists who want to cast an anti-Biden protest vote. Neither group is likely to show up at a Republican caucus. The people who might be inclined to monkeywrench the Republican process are the same people who care about being on the county central committee or about getting their platform resolution passed.

Going forward, if  there even is a going forward, double caucusing is legitimate concern and a challenging problem. But it should addressed by the two parties working together and finding an answer that works for both of their processes.

You know what system works to allow absentee voting and prevent people from participating in both parties process? A state run primary election.

But that's clearly not going to happen - even Democrats didn't introduce a for-show bill - and this bill clearly is. So what do Democrats do?

The Republicans clearly want us to run our caucuses just as we did in 2012 and earlier (with the elimination of the questionable "improvement" of the satellite caucuses, and the addition of the early party registration requirement). That is the absolute last thing we should do, for all the reasons of disproportionate representation and inaccessibility and exclusion that I have talked about for years.  (Granted, the overcrowding would not be as bad in a re-election year.)

That gets us in even more trouble with the DNC than we're already in. First off, the sitting Democratic president and presumptive nominee has directly said "Our party should no longer allow caucuses as part of our nominating process." Second, we are likely going to be dragged along by the Republicans into holding our caucus on a date that does not comply with the DNC calendar. Eliminating the mail-in vote would break yet another rule - the requirement that caucus states have an absentee process. It seems increasingly unlikely that Iowa's national delegation will be seated at the Chicago convention. 

Making Iowa Democrats look bad is not the GOP's main motivation here - I'm convinced this has more to do with internal Republican politics - but it's a nice bonus.

As I outlined in December, it was possible for the Iowa Democratic Party to both comply with state law and still follow the DNC calendar rules. State law does not say that we have to vote for president before any other state. It simply says that we need to hold a caucus and elect precinct level party officers before other states vote for president, The law does not require a presidential vote at the caucus - and I see nothing in HSB 275 that changes that.

Iowa's original plan, as presented by then-chair Ross Wilburn to the DNC Rules And Bylaws Committee last August, was to conduct a mail in presidential vote in the weeks before the caucus night meeting, announce the results on caucus night, and then conduct the legally required party business at the caucus. My proposed variation on that would be to have the caucus meeting, but then hold the mail in vote later, at a calendar compliant date.

Maybe such a vote in March of 2024, or a straw vote at a county convention, could be called something other than a caucus and used to allocate the national delegates. Or maybe it can't.

Another piece of bipartisan cooperation has fallen by the wayside. It's a lousy trick to blindside Democrats this late in the session. 

Iowa Democrats were blindsided by our own national party in 2019. In order to address the new requirement of an absentee caucus system, we spent months planning a phone-in "virtual caucus" system - only to be told with no warning just four months before the caucuses that it was unacceptable.

Now we're getting blindsided by our fellow Iowans - who used to be our allies on caucus issues.

If the Republican position was always going to be "Democrats doing a vote by mail caucus is unacceptable" - and I'm pretty sure that was the case - they should have signaled that ASAP. We should have know that before Wilburn even presented the idea to Rules And Bylaws. Months of planning time have been lost.

Also lost are all the benefits Iowa Democrats used to gain from first. Now we're boxed into a position where we will have to scramble just to comply with state law and have a meeting, and where the biggest win we can hope for is getting seated at the national convention with hotels closer to the United Center than to Davenport.

A couple years ago I raised the idea that Iowa Democrats may have no presidential nomination process at all - that our caucus process would be prohibited and that at some point the state party leaders would quietly choose a delegation. The first part of that has already happened. It's looking increasingly likely that rank and file Iowa Democrats will never get any chance to express their personal presidential nomination preference.

Why I'm Quitting The Caucuses

I never set out to be The Caucus Organizer for the Johnson County Democrats. The role landed on me by accident in 2004. Nearly every experienced party activist was involved in a presidential campaign, and almost no one was doing the logistics work of finding rooms, recruiting chairs, stuffing packets, and getting training done. The skill set overlapped closely with my job at the county auditor's office, so I stepped in to help. 

Each cycle, my role got bigger and bigger. By 2016 I was seen as the Person In Charge, a role I repeated in 2020 and again in the recent midterm caucuses.

But after a lot of struggling, I've decided it's a role I won't take on again.

Each cycle, the job got bigger because the turnout got bigger. I don't mind hard work. I regularly put in 80 hour weeks during election season. But I do mind work that's futile. I do mind work that's counter-productive. And I'm no longer comfortable with enabling a system that I believe is wrong.

The first year I was involved in caucus planning, Johnson County took a great leap forward in turnout, from 4000 attendance in 2000 to over 11,000 in 2004. For the first time, we saw rooms that were crammed beyond capacity. 

So we started getting bigger rooms. But the turnout kept growing - to 18,363 in 2008, even though the January 3 date meant most of our students were out of town. We jumped to 19,513 in 2016 and 21,436 in 2020. My personal caucuses kept getting bigger, too - from 100 in 2000 to 300 in 2008 to 430 in 2016 to 750 in 2020.

Some might think that such high turnout is a blessing - wow! you must have signed up a lot of new volunteers and committee members! Nothing could be more wrong. 

The change of the caucuses from neighborhood meeting to mass attendance event means more new people not trained in tradition and parliamentary procedure, and less committed to organizing the party, who just want to vote and go home - which 90 percent of attendees do as soon as the delegate counts are locked in.

But first we make them stand in line for 45 minutes, and then we make them stand in a corner for three hours to vote. And this chaos is their first impression of the local party.  

The rules of a caucus are set up for 40 people in a living room. Once the caucus grows above the capacity of a grade school gym - this isn't just a Johnson County problem, the average Iowa Democratic caucus goer attended a caucus of 191 people - those rules just don't work anymore. You can't organize in a crowd of 945 people, the biggest Johnson County caucus on record. You can only do crowd control and anger management.

Each cycle, I started earlier. Each cycle I booked bigger and bigger rooms, sometimes at costs in the thousand of dollars, until we were in the biggest indoor spaces that existed in each precinct short of Carver Hawkeye Arena.

Better organizing and training and planning can only do so much, even if your county's volunteer organizer has 24 years of professional experience in election administration. All I managed to do was make a bad situation slightly less bad.

Spaces larger than a grade school gym, in or near neighborhoods, are few and far between. Smaller precincts, one suggestion I keep hearing, won't help - that just means we would need three grade school gyms where only one exists. All we can do is book the one gym that exists and pray that no one calls the fire marshal.

When the biggest room in or near the precinct is no longer big enough, the only answer is to get some of those people out of the room.

But the overcrowding isn't even the biggest problem. Fairness and access is the biggest problem, and that's not just logistics - it's a challenge to us to live up to our ideals.

The Democratic Party is the party of voting rights, and we need to be the party of voting rights not just on Election Day, but on Caucus Night. We need fewer people in our caucus rooms but we need more people in our nominating process.

We already limit who can attend a caucus by making it a mandatory must attend in person meeting - even the satellite caucuses we had in 2020 still required attendance in one place at one time and required more advance planning and pre-registration than many people's schedules allowed.

The overcrowding makes attendance a physical and mental endurance test - walking many blocks in the dark from the nearest parking space, and sitting uncomfortably or standing for hours, large cavernous spaces with bad acoustics, and high confusing noise and stress levels that strain the capacity of those of us on the autism spectrum. I've seen seniors near tears at our office, begging for an absentee ballot.

A state or district party that only has to pull off one large convention can or should manage to check off all the ADA boxes. It's asking too much for a county party, with no financial help from the state party, to conduct dozens of district-convention-sized caucuses all at the same time, and be 100% compliant and legally liable if someone sues. It's not that we don't care - it's just that there aren't that many sound systems and babysitters and sign language interpreters available all at once.

There's other barriers to participation - schedules, transportation, and physical presence in your community. This one hits me close to home. My wife missed the 2008 caucuses because our sons were small and did not want to go, and in 2016 she had last minute mandatory overtime. I would have missed last month's mid-term caucus if my county had not decided to go virtual, as I was out of state helping care for my aging parents.

I'm no longer willing to book the rooms and recruit and train the chairs for the same old Must Be Physically Present process. I'm not even willing to attend anymore, knowing that there are so many others who can't.

I want to pass my experience along to anyone else who wants this role, and I'm willing to help implement new ideas - not minor repairs, but real changes.

Our long range goal should be a presidential primary. I understand all too well that Republicans control our state government and are not interested in changing. But it should still be our goal. I'm working to get it into our platform, and I'm hoping that at some point a legislator will be brave and introduce a primary bill.

While we pursue that goal, we should also work to make our last caucuses better. 

The mid-term caucus, where dozens of counties converted to a virtual or hybrid format in just two weeks, shows that we can be really creative and inclusive when we're given the chance. 

2024 may be our opportunity to try new things. President Biden is likely to run for re-election, which will largely take questions of Who Benefits? out of the mix. And with the long time New Hampshire Secretary of State retiring, we may have a chance to do what we haven't before.

Give people what they want. Let them vote and go home - let them vote all day long and go home. Give them absentee ballots - real ones that they can mark at home in secret. We should experiment with true absentee ballots, or multi-day early voting like Nevada did in 2020, or a "firehouse caucus" format where voting is open all day long at caucus sites, or all of these things.

I'm not here to argue about First, or about how representative my state is. That's up to the national committee. But I will say that we can no longer accept First as an excuse for a flawed process. For me, it's time to work on improving that process rather than enabling it.

Fixing The Caucuses, Part 5: Friendly (?) Advice

Because I'm openly in favor of ending the caucuses and going to a primary, even if it costs Iowa First, I've been persona non grata at Iowa Democratic Party headquarters since the Dvorsky Administration. It was worst while Andy McGuire was chair, when I was very pointedly and publicly excluded from a caucus review committee, even when they re-opened it to add more members. I'm well aware that the 2016 committee was a Remain Calm, All Is Well sham, but excluding me was still a slap in the face.

Actual footage of caucus sign in at Iowa City Precinct 17.

So for the last few years, since I'm not allowed behind closed doors and no one ever reaches out to me, I've had to make my case in public. I don't have a lot of followers, but I know that the people who do hear what I say are people who matter in this process.

I've know new IDP chair Ross Wilburn a long time, back before his Iowa City mayor days, and I like him. I know he's reasonable, but I also know he has to deal with a certain set of expectations regarding First. So I'm still going public here, but I look forward to talking with anyone who will listen.

So here's my suggestions for how we can improve the caucuses, in decreasing order of severity. 

Have a primary.

I won't go too deep into that here, especially since that would require legislation and bipartisan cooperation, and the Republicans have no interest in changing the process. But the bottom line is, a primary is a more democratic process than a caucus. We need to talk about this and we need to stop the denial. 

Even if the Iowa political/media establishment will not give up First and the caucuses willingly, we need to prepare for the likelihood that it will be taken from us. At some point soon, the DNC is going to ban caucuses, and we will need to adapt. In fact, assuming President Biden runs again, a re-election year when the stakes in the nomination contest are low would be the best opportunity for the DNC to make that change.

I'd like to see legislative Democrats make an actual effort to go along and introduce primary legislation, even though, given the Republican trifecta and their party's commitment to not changing the caucuses, it would be doomed to fail. Still, I  would like us to be national team players.

Maybe you could still have a small, off-year style caucus for party business. I don't really care. I've long argued that the whole platform process should be abolished, because it's not binding on candidates and officials and thus, to me, meaningless. And in other states, the delegates and party committee members are either slated by the campaigns or appear on the primary ballot itself. You can argue about those things if you want - but presidential preference should be handled in the most democratic way possible.

The math is easier with a primary, too.

But I'm not just about "have a primary." If we are going to have a 2024 caucus, which I expect even if the DNC bans caucuses, I want a better caucus. So let's keep improving...

Put the needs of ordinary voters first, not the needs of the political and media elite.

Who cares about first? 

The bipartisan political elite - the inner circle of activists and the next circle out who love the attention and the selfies and the big names at small county fundraisers and the personal phone calls from senators. And the state news media who love to play out their national anchor fantasies. That's a big part of why the state media downplays anti-caucus views.

I know how much losing First would cost these elites, because I'm one of them.  I know that losing First means we will never see a presidential candidate again. And I'm not going to argue that my adopted home state should not be first.

But most Normal People do not care about First. They don't attend candidate events. They don't meet candidates. Regular people have busy lives and busy schedules outside of politics. They just want to vote, and we should give them what they want.

Stop caring about what New Hampshire thinks. 

F🤬🤬k New Hampshire. It's not 1984 anymore and New Hampshire is not our friend. We need to plan a nomination process that works best for Iowans, and not worry about what a vain and self-important official in another state is going to do.

I don't see any scenario where we keep First. But let's say by some lightning strikes chance that we do. If we make a change to our nomination process that benefits Iowans, and the DNC OKs it, then we've played by the rules. Then if the New Hampshire Secretary of State says "nope, that's a primary," and moves ahead of us, then it's New Hampshire breaking the rules and New Hampshire that should be sanctioned.

(When we lose First, which we will, I want New Hampshire to die with us.)

In that regard:

Absentee Ballots. REAL absentee ballots, pre-printed with candidate names, that you can mark in secret at home. 

We are the party of voting rights. Every election cycle  we push voters to get their vote in early, fill out ABRs or come to an early voting site.

Except on caucus night, when we insist you show up. And some people just can't.

We need absentee ballots for the sake of fairness and access, and we need absentee ballots to get people out of our most overcrowded caucus rooms. This is the best and fairest solution for rank and file non-activist Iowans.

Virtual Caucus 2.0.

It's ra-a-aaaain on your wedding day ironic that just months after Iowa Democrat's phone-in "Virtual Caucus" was shot down as a "security risk," the entire world adapted overnight to virtual meetings - including the Democratic Party, which held virtual conventions from the local to the national level. A Zoom-trained world might be more ready to handle some sort of virtual caucus. It won't work for everyone, but it's better than nothing. Real absentees are better - but if for some reason that's not an option, Virtual Caucus 2.0 is worth reconsidering.

One person one vote. 

As I've been pointing out for years, Iowa's complicated "state delegate equivalent" formula that allocates delegates by county based on past general election voting skews the results. It undercounts high turnout, high growth, increasingly blue counties, and rewards low turnout, population losing, increasingly red counties. In 2020, Johnson County had 12.3% of statewide Democratic caucus attendance, but only got 7.7% of the state convention delegates.

The convoluted math formula is one of the things the rest of the nation, the press especially, hates the most about Iowa. It's time to end it. We need to lose all the state delegate equivalent crap and just report the vote totals. Base the national delegates on one person, one vote at the congressional district level that the DNC allocates delegates.

That's what the public wants, that's what the press wants, that's what everybody except a tiny handful of small county caucus activists wants. 

If the small counties don't like it, they can do what Johnson County does and show up.

Any absentee process needs to be counted on an equal basis as in-person attendance.

Before the DNC, out of the blue, banned Virtual Caucus, IDP had made a decision that the phone-in process would only count for 10% of the delegate allocation, no matter how many people attended. That was even though up to a third of caucus goers were interested in the option - I think in the end, as word got out, it would have been much higher.

As I was meeting with organizers, I learned that every campaign was downplaying Virtual Caucus, because it "counted less." I argued loudly against it and it's still unacceptable.

I was never able to figure out the math on satellite caucuses, the absentee plan that IDP had to pull off the shelf when Virtual Caucus was killed. I had enough other stuff I was doing. But it was also not weighted 1:1 with in person attendance. 

If absentees aren't counted equally, people won't use them and will continue to show up at the most overcrowded sites...

Overcrowding needs to be taken seriously.

I have been telling higher ups since at least 2008 that the overcrowding in my county was at crisis levels. This concern has been repeatedly and consistently dismissed by IDP. At one time we were directly told, "that's just a Johnson County problem."

Which does not solve the problem.

754 people at my Iowa City Precinct 5 caucus.

Unfortunately, IDP has put the demands of rural counties first here. They insist that mandatory meeting attendance is critical, because otherwise they will be unable to fill their committees. It's possible that one size does not fit all here - but our problem, and the problem in some precincts in other metro counties, is that we literally cannot fit everyone who wants to attend into the biggest room in or near the precinct.

It's simply not possible to conduct a meaningful process, which is designed for 30 people in a living room, when you have crowds of 500, 600, 700... up to 945 in our biggest precinct in 2016. And since we're already in the biggest rooms that exist, the only solution is to get some bodies out of the rooms. Which is also important because...

90% of attendees do not want to be at a meeting. Give them what they want.

Everyone has seen this every caucus cycle: the moment the delegate allocation is locked in, the overwhelming majority of people leave. The crowd dwindles down to the same 30 people who would have been in the living room in 1976, and who will be at the governor year caucus in 2022.

At my 2016 caucus, 430 people crammed into and overflowed a room meant for 200. As soon as I announced the delegate count, 400 left.

Why are we making those 400 people stay for two hours? They're not interested in the platform or the central committee or "party building." They want to vote and go home. Let them. If you are not going to have absentees, and are going to insist on in-person attendance, give people the option of voting at sign-in and leaving.

Literally every person I have talked to who has attended both a Democratic and a Republican caucus prefers the Republican process. You sign in, you vote, you leave if you want. We can probably streamline it even more as I'll explain below.

If we are going to insist on doing this the hard way, we need buy-in from all the key institutions in the state, by law if necessary.

Let's say all my suggestions above are rejected and the IDP is going to continue to require mass in person attendance at a long meeting, we need all hands on deck, and I don't just mean all Democrats or all political people. This is civics. not politics.

We need to stop everything else in the state that night. We need every large indoor space. I've worked on this for years and it's hard. Some publicly funded locations who are on paper required to offer space have found ways to refuse, or provide sub-optimal spaces. Usually the claim is that school events take precedence. My interpretation of the code is that "shall provide" means shall provide, not "may provide unless there's a ball game or choir practice," but we've never had time to test that in court.

We could clear that up in the law. We need to require the schools, pre-K through grad school, to cancel all classes, events, games, and practices and open their doors at no charge. (This has been proposed in legislation that hasn't advanced.) We need to strongly encourage the churches to do the same and we need to work across the aisle to make sure parishioners of one party don't scream at the pastor for letting the other party have a meeting space. Stores and non-essential services need to shut down so people can attend. Absentees would be better, but if we're rejecting that because oh noes, it might make New Hampshire mad, then we need this.

Stop giving lip service to accessibility, especially child care.

We're the state of Tom Harkin, the father of the ADA, but when it comes to caucus night we treat accessibility as an inconvenient box to check off. It's expensive and impractical, but by rights every site should have a sound system, a sign interpreter, adequate parking, and unblocked entrances. I think my county did better this time, but we had a long way to go. And of course nothing is truly accessible when 700 people are in the room. 

Accessibility also includes child care. But even if there is sufficient space for a Kid Room on site,  who's going to leave their kid with J. Random Volunteer? Do it the simple way: just give people who need child care the money to pay their regular provider (and give those providers absentee ballots - or, hear me out, just give the parent the absentee ballot in the first place).

Give the locals money.

All those space rentals and disability accommodations we mentioned cost money. We managed, but it was a big expense and luckily we're a big rich county. But we had four figure rental bills for some sites. Once you get up over the size of a grade school gym, space is rare and expensive. As for smaller counties, budgets are one of the reasons some of these items get short shrift.

If the state party is going to insist on continuing this difficult and expensive process instead of supporting a tax funded primary election, and if the state party is going to refuse to let us have absentee ballots and force us to book large venues, then the state party should pay for sites and sound systems and other necessities, not locals.

(Also: End the old school legal publication in a dead tree newspaper requirement. It's the 21st century. Post it on line. The print papers should be running the list of sites as a community service anyway.)

Expand the use of out of precinct volunteers.

Some precincts have a surplus of activists, while others just don't have a person who can handle running a caucus. We had a very limited program in 2020, which was kind of a holdover from the canceled Virtual Caucus: Local parties were allowed to name one chair and one secretary per precinct from outside the precinct. That's why my wife and I caucused in a campus precinct rather than where we live - we had a student chair, but he was a rookie and wanted help, so we were "chair" and "secretary" on paper until the caucus elected the real chair.

For that matter, assuming we have a one person one vote system (which we should) and assuming we are still requiring in person attendance (which we shouldn't), just let people caucus at any precinct in the county. If you have to be present to vote, you can't be in two places at once. People could avoid known overcrowded places and go someplace with more space and better parking. (Of course, every precinct in our county is overcrowded, but they could go someplace less bad.)

Make the "preference cards" more intuitive.

I knew this was going to happen as soon as I saw them: 

You're really going to give a person who has waited in line an hour something that looks like a ballot, and that a reasonable person not versed in the nuanced history of Iowa vs. New Hampshire would call a "ballot," and then tell them, "don't mark it yet"? 

You're really going to tell people that if they spell "Butigeieieiegegegeg" wrong you have to spoil your ballot - oops, preference card? You're really going to tell people "Mayor Pete" or "Bernie" doesn't count?

You're really going to expect a person managing the chaos of a 300 person mob to carefully log all of that?

Here's how we should have done it: 

"Welcome to the caucus. Here's your ballot. Write your first choice on side one. Do you have a second choice? Side two. Do you want to stay for the platform and stuff? No? OK, you can go home now. Thanks for voting."  

That would make us more like a Republican caucus. And literally every independent-swing-go-where-the-interesting-contest-is voter who I have ever spoken to who has attended both a Democratic and a Republican caucus likes the GOP process better and expects that kind of process: Show up, vote a secret ballot, leave right away. 

Vote-and-leave at the sign in table would also mean not everyone would have to cram into the room at the same time, so you could get by with smaller spaces.

Accept that many supporters of non-viable candidates do not want to make a second choice, and make the math easier.

This one is really small, but turned into a big deal in one of our precincts.

Under caucus rules, at final delegate allocation, you divide attendees in the viable groups by the grand total of attendees, and because you can't have a fractional delegate, you round up or down based on largest remainders. The problem with that formula is, some of the original attendees are not in viable preference groups. Some people go home, and others refuse to realign.

In the past, to make any choice at all, you had to stick around until final alignment was done. Sure, a handful of people still left, but not a statistically huge share. 

It became a much larger issue in 2020 because we began reporting the first alignment vote totals. Many, many, many supporters of non-viable candidates considered that first alignment number, not the Delegate Equivalents, to be their real vote, and having expressed their support decided to leave. IDP did not anticipate this.

We had some problems with the caucus manuals.

 The problem is, when more than a delegate's worth of people leave, the math breaks. You end up not allocating all your delegates and having to round up three or even four times. Here's the math in our problem precinct:

Delegates	11
Total attendance	395	Delegates
Candidate A	138	3.8430
Candidate B	107	2.9797
Candidate C	104	2.8962
left or did not realign	46

Viability was 60 people, but in this 11 delegate precinct, 36 people were 1/11 or a delegate worth, and  46 people left or did not realign.

Following the written instructions, our team - a good, smart team including an elected official -  rounded up the largest remaining fraction - three times, for all three remaining viable candidates - and still had allocated only 10 of their 11 delegates. There was no guidance on what to do when you had already rounded up all the viable candidates, and still had delegate(s) left to allocate. They called for help, sat on hold for an hour, got bad advice, and eventually got attacked after the fact by the campaigns and the national press. "Never again," says the elected official.

Change the rules for a simple solution: Instead of using total, beginning of the night attendance, divide the number of people in each preference group by the number of people still in attendance and in viable preference groups. Here's how that would work in our problem precinct.

Delegates	11
Remaining attendance	349	Delegates
Candidate A	138	4.3496
Candidate B	107	3.3725
Candidate C	104	3.2779

(For our purposes, "remaining attendance" means "in viable groups." There may or may not have been a Candidate D supporter who refused to realign but was sticking around for platform.)

Here, we only have to round up once to give the 11th delegate to Candidate B. That gives you a fair ratio of delegates and support, while not requiring multiple rounds of rounding.

Let people realign at the higher level conventions.

By the time of our district and state (virtual) conventions, my caucus night candidate had dropped out. I wanted to support our nominee, Joe Biden. But I was not allowed to change my preference. 

From the beginning of time through 2016, delegates were allowed to change preference at the different levels of convention, but in 2020, for vague reasons that supposedly had something to do with First, we changed. Changing back won't affect many people, but will go a long way toward unity.

Go rogue.

Johnson County gets screwed in every possible way at caucus time. We have to manage our massive turnout with a process that's designed for small counties, yet we are not rewarded for that turnout because the delegate math also favors small counties. Since we can't change the formula, maybe we just have to go rogue.

 

If the state party won't let us do any of these things I suggest, and we go into another contested nomination cycle with the present system and present calendar, and if the state party is still making the locals pay for the venues... 

...then we need to vote people at the sign in table. If we can't have absentee ballots, there's no other way we'll be able to fit into the rooms.

"Welcome to the caucus. Here's your ballot. Write your first choice on side one. Do you have a second choice? Side two. Do you want to stay for the platform and stuff? No? OK, you can go home now. Thanks for voting."

That will no doubt mean a credentials fight at the district and state conventions, with the small counties and with whichever presidential campaign would benefit by throwing out our delegates. That's a fight worth having - I dare them to throw out the best Democratic county in the state. 

And if the DNC bans caucuses and/or moves Iowa out of the early state carve-out, but Iowa has a rogue caucus anyway (because the GOP legislature won't authorize a primary), how can the rest of the state attack Johnson or other big counties for breaking rules?

If we decide to make our own rules which will work better for our crowds and more importantly our voters, that fight will require some solidarity within Johnson County, and with the other big counties that are negatively affected.

 

This system is broken. I hope that this week I've stated my case clearly. I've invested a lot of thinking and time, both in this and in making the caucuses happen - and I feel like that thought and that work has earned an equally thoughtful and serious response from IDP and from state leaders in general. You know where to find me.

Fixing The Caucuses, Part 4: The Apportionment Problem

Iowa Democratic caucuses defenders, which I used to be, will argue that the caucuses are a representative democracy, much like the House of Representatives, where representation is allocated, rather than a direct democracy.

The Iowa Democratic Party's delegate allocation formula is based on past general election voting for the top of the ticket. In effect, the caucuses take place in a mythical, projected version of a general election voting population. In 2020, allocation was based on votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Fred Hubbell in 2018.

This means candidates can't run up the score with big wins in big counties, and it mutes the impact of isolated turnout waves.  No matter how many people show up, the same number of delegates are at stake. That means a caucus vote varies in its impact depending on where you live. Because turnout varies a lot, not every caucus vote carries equal weight.

This is a rewrite of a post I write every cycle:

• 2004 Caucuses
• 2008 Caucuses
• 2016 Caucuses

This data probably hurts my efforts to move away from the caucuses. No one wants to Disrespect The Rurals, and I can already hear them screaming "if we go to one person one vote, no one will campaign anywhere but the big cities." But fair is fair. If Democrats are going to complain about the malapportionment of the US Senate, where small rural states have disproportionate power, we need to look in the mirror as well and implement fairness closer to home.

Some counties, like mine, are full of go-to-meeting activists who are more likely to attend a caucus. Others have more people who may just vote, sometimes even for Democrats, but are otherwise less active. In general, per capita turnout is lowest in rural areas and highest in cities, especially cities with college campuses.

You may not call that a problem - indeed, some caucus old timers will tell you that the formula, which is locked into the Iowa Democratic Party's constitution, was specifically designed to under-count the student vote in Iowa City, Ames, and other college towns.

Obviously, from my perspective here in Johnson County, that's a problem. In fact, the obscure allocation formula likely skewed the national interpretation of the outcome in both 2016 and 2020.

In 2020, for the first time, IDP released the raw vote count from the caucuses - not because we wanted to, but because the DNC forced the issue. Yet we insisted on declaring Pete Buttigeig the "winner" (once we finally figured things out) based on the same tired "state delegate equivalent" (SDE) metric we always used. 

SDEs are an inherently artificial measure, because it breaks delegates into decimal fractions at the precinct and county level in a way that doesn't reflect the reality of the county, district, and state conventions, where delegates are whole bodies.

(If you really need 0.375 of a delegate, I know a guy - but it's gonna be a while before you eat anything from Satriale's.)

I can't stand Bernie Sanders, and I think he should never have been allowed to run in the Democratic nomination process without formally joining the Democratic Party. But dammit, he got the most votes, and I consider him the 2020 caucus winner. 

Sanders almost certainly got the most raw votes in Iowa in 2016 as well, but those totals weren't officially released (though we know the numbers exist in some IDP memory hole, because precincts were required to report alignment totals on caucus night 2016). In both 2016 and 2020, Sanders (and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Warren in 2020) did well in the college towns - which, as you'll see, had a higher share of the turnout than they did of the delegates. A vote in high turnout Johnson County mattered less than the vote of an Iowan in a low turnout rural county. 

But exactly how much less?

An analysis of 2020 caucus attendance shows that, on average statewide, it took 81.67 people attending a caucus to elect a state delegate equivalent. But that varied dramatically by county, and by precinct within counties.

(For this analysis I'm leaving aside the satellite caucuses, which accounted for just 2.4% of the grand total attendance. Though it's worth noting that the two biggest satellites, at the UI campus and the Oaknoll senior complex, were both in Johnson County.)

The easiest place to elect a delegate was Osceola County, where it took just 23.33 attendees to elect a state delegate equivalent. Two other counties, Taylor and Adams were at or below 40 people per SDE, less than half the statewide average. The bottom ten is filled with small, rural, population losing, Republican counties.

And as always, the same places stood out as the most difficult places to elect a delegate: campus communities most of all, urban areas, and high growth suburbs.

Jefferson County, with its very active meditator community and Maharishi International University, was at the very top at 147.42 attendees per SDE. The People's Republic Of Johnson County was a close second at 131.22. Poweshiek County was third - and that statistic was almost entirely driven by the 830 people who attended the caucus for the Grinnell College precinct.

Ten counties were above the statewide average of 81.67 bodies per SDE - these counties accounted for half of the total attendance. They include all the usual suspects - the campus counties and the largest counties. The top ten also includes, again, Sioux County, the most Republican in the state. My theory there is that being a Democrat in a place like that, like being a Republican in Johnson County, is a statement, and the few-but-proud Democrats are activist types who show up.

And three of the top ten were high growth suburban Dallas, Madison, and Warren counties. High growth makes it harder to elect a delegate from your county. A voter who moved to Dallas County three years ago won't count in the county's presidential vote totals used to calculate delegates, because they voted somewhere else.  A voter who moved in after the gubernatorial election wouldn't count at all toward the delegate count.

The flip side is, people in shrinking rural counties who moved away or passed away still contribute to the county's delegate allocation, meaning it takes fewer LIVE bodies to win delegates.

The gap is less than it's been in past years, in part because Democrats did so poorly in the rural counties in 2018 and 2020 that those places lost delegates, and because Johnson County did so much better for Clinton and Hubbell than anyplace else that we were rewarded with more delegates. Still, it took six times more people to elect a delegate out of Poweshiek than out of Osceola, and that's not defensible.

If you want to drill really deep, to the precinct level, the easiest place to earn a delegate was Sherman Township in rural Story County, where it took just 9.6 people to earn an SDE. In Ames Precinct 4-4, it took 176 people. That's an 18 to 1 difference within the same county.

The single hardest precinct in the state to get a delegate was that Grinnell campus precinct, where it took 247 people to earn an SDE. The caucus I attended in Iowa City Precinct 5, also a campus precinct, was fourth hardest, at 205 attendees per SDE.

I'd like to see someone take on the delegate allocation formula at the state convention next year. If we're going to keep having a caucus, which I don't think we should, we could at least get closer to one person one vote. If the rural counties don't like it, they can do what my county does and show up.

State Delegates and Caucus Attendance, 2020 Democratic Caucuses

Rank	County	Delegates	Attendance	Attendance per delegate
1	Jefferson	12	1769	147.42
2	Johnson	162	21257	131.22
3	Poweshiek	14	1768	126.29
4	Story	83	9877	119.00
5	Winneshiek	16	1874	117.13
6	Dallas	58	5804	100.07
7	Polk	392	37834	96.52
8	Sioux	7	668	95.43
9	Warren	35	2944	84.11
10	Madison	9	740	82.22
11	Linn	189	15113	79.96
12	Decatur	4	317	79.25
13	Mahaska	8	624	78.00
14	Bremer	17	1292	76.00
15	Washington	13	976	75.08
16	Marion	18	1336	74.22
17	Dubuque	72	5186	72.03
18	Allamakee	7	501	71.57
19	Boone	19	1356	71.37
20	Scott	125	8862	70.90
21	Cedar	12	849	70.75
22	Iowa	10	701	70.10
23	Black Hawk	101	7033	69.63
24	Henry	10	688	68.80
25	Jasper	23	1582	68.78
26	Muscatine	25	1711	68.44
27	Des Moines	27	1832	67.85
28	Keokuk	4	271	67.75
29	Audubon	3	203	67.67
30	Page	6	404	67.33
31	Dickinson	10	666	66.60
32	Plymouth	9	596	66.22
33	Winnebago	6	395	65.83
34	Jackson	12	781	65.08
35	Emmet	4	260	65.00
36	Clay	8	514	64.25
37	Fayette	12	768	64.00
38	Montgomery	4	256	64.00
39	Clayton	10	638	63.80
40	Clarke	4	255	63.75
41	Davis	3	191	63.67
42	Woodbury	51	3234	63.41
43	Pottawattamie	48	3043	63.40
44	Cass	6	376	62.67
45	Hardin	9	558	62.00
46	O'Brien	4	248	62.00
47	Lyon	3	185	61.67
48	Grundy	6	368	61.33
49	Louisa	5	306	61.20
50	Butler	7	428	61.14
51	Wapello	18	1093	60.72
52	Fremont	3	182	60.67
53	Buena Vista	9	545	60.56
54	Humboldt	4	242	60.50
55	Mills	7	423	60.43
56	Greene	6	362	60.33
57	Hamilton	9	543	60.33
58	Marshall	24	1446	60.25
59	Appanoose	6	360	60.00
60	Pocahontas	3	180	60.00
61	Guthrie	6	358	59.67
62	Floyd	10	594	59.40
63	Harrison	7	413	59.00
64	Webster	20	1180	59.00
65	Cerro Gordo	31	1828	58.97
66	Buchanan	13	762	58.62
67	Lee	21	1227	58.43
68	Union	6	348	58.00
69	Mitchell	6	347	57.83
70	Adair	4	229	57.25
71	Kossuth	8	456	57.00
72	Carroll	11	624	56.73
73	Sac	4	225	56.25
74	Wright	6	336	56.00
75	Chickasaw	7	389	55.57
76	Clinton	31	1719	55.45
77	Worth	5	276	55.20
78	Lucas	4	220	55.00
79	Crawford	6	329	54.83
80	Monroe	3	164	54.67
81	Benton	15	813	54.20
82	Howard	5	270	54.00
83	Hancock	5	268	53.60
84	Shelby	5	266	53.20
85	Tama	11	580	52.73
86	Monona	4	207	51.75
87	Jones	12	614	51.17
88	Calhoun	5	255	51.00
89	Palo Alto	5	255	51.00
90	Franklin	5	248	49.60
91	Ida	3	147	49.00
92	Van Buren	3	147	49.00
93	Ringgold	3	146	48.67
94	Delaware	9	433	48.11
95	Wayne	3	135	45.00
96	Cherokee	6	266	44.33
97	Adams	3	107	35.67
98	Taylor	3	97	32.33
99	Osceola	3	70	23.33