Since I'm not really writing anymore - I am way too busy DOING right now trying to get our caucuses off the ground - I resemble a classic rock dinosaur band that trots out on the circuit during state fair seasons and plays the greatest hits. This is a rewrite of a post I write every cycle, in 2007 (covering 2004) and again in 2016 (looking at 2008).
Since the Iowa Democratic caucuses are a representative democracy,
not a straight one person one vote, not every caucus goer carries equal
weight. Several of the candidates have spent a lot of time in small
courthouse towns. Amy Klobuchar and the hapless John Delaney have completed the "Full Grassley" 99 county tour. That's because the way the results are counted, the small
counties weigh in disproportionately.
The delegate allocation formula is based on past general election voting for the top of the ticket. The caucuses
take place in a mythical, projected version of a general election voting
population. This cycle, it's based on votes for Hillary Clinton and Fred Hubbell; four years ago it was based on Jack Hatch and on Barack Obama's 2012 total.
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.
The problem is, some counties are full of go-to-meeting activists who are more likely to attend a caucus. Others have more people who may vote, sometimes even for Democrats, but are otherwise less active.
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, that's a problem. In fact, the obscure allocation formula likely skewed the national interpretation of the outcome of 2016.
Hillary Clinton won a razor-close margin of the state delegate equivalents (SDEs), the only total that the Iowa Democratic Party has historically released. However, Bernie Sanders won big margins in the college towns - which, as you'll see, had a higher share of the turnout than they did of the delegates. In fact, I'll go so far as to say Sanders probably had more bodies in the room than Clinton, and you know I'm not saying that out of any love for Bernie Sanders.
The impact of this under-allocation of delegates to high turnout areas is mitigated somewhat by new DNC rules this year that will require, in a first for Iowa Democrats, the reporting of a one person one vote raw vote count. But the delegate count still matters toward the nomination and to perceptions. The Associated Press announced this week, wrongly in my opinion, that they will "declare the winner of the Iowa caucuses based on the number of state delegate equivalents each candidate receives."
That means my vote in high turnout Johnson County will matter less than the vote of an Iowan in a low turnout rural county. But exactly how much less will it matter?
An analysis of
2016 caucus attendance shows that, on average statewide, it took just
over 122 people to elect a state delegate equivalent. But that varied dramatically by county, and (while I won't dive into details) by precinct within counties.
The easiest
place to elect a delegate was Fremont County, where it took 45.33
attendees to elect a state delegate equivalent. Five other counties were at or below 61 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.
Four counties are bunched at the top, in a near dead heat. In these places, you needed 211 to 213 people to earn a SDE - nearly twice the state average and 4.7 times Fremont County. Put another way, a vote in Fremont County was worth nearly five times as much as a vote in these four counties.
Jefferson County, with its very active meditator community and Maharishi International University, was at the very top at 213.22. Story and Johnson, home to the two biggest Regents universities, were number 2 and number 4. Poweshiek County was third - and that statistic was almost entirely driven by the 925 people who attended the caucus for the Grinnell College precinct.
In Winneshiek, home to Decorah's
Luther College, it took 154.64 people to elect a state delegate equivalent, putting them in fifth place (they were the hardest place to earn an SDE in 2008).
Another half dozen counties were above the state average of 122 voters per SDE. Two were the two biggest in the state, Polk and Linn. Two were in rural outlier counties, Decatur and Sioux, where the novelty of having a large number of Democrats in one place may have spurred attendance (though the county grand totals are still far below an east side Iowa City precinct).
And two were in high growth suburban Dallas 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.
Ultimately, the apportionment rules mean candidates have
to carefully allocate their resources and fight on all fronts at once,
and part of that allocation is making the effort where the most bang for
the buck is available -- the small towns.
Is that fair? Depends on where you live. I'd like to see someone take on the formula at the state convention this June. 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, 2016 Democratic Caucuses
I have been quite busy since my semi-retirement from blogging, doing rather than reporting. I last attended a candidate event in September. In addition to getting through the city-school election at my day job, I have been doing the leg work for my county's caucuses.
And here we are: the 12 year anniversary of Barack Obama's win, the 8 year anniversary of the Republican dead heat, and one calendar month away from 2020.
One old caucus hand told me I should complain about the caucuses less and do more to help, though I don't know what more I can do besides recruiting almost all the chairs, booking the rooms, helping train the volunteers, answering the questions, and doing more media interviews than I can count.
After doing one of those interviews yesterday via email, I realized that I had more or less written a blog post. It may be repetitive to my long time readers, but I have been shouting the same warnings into the wilderness for four years to no avail, so I may as earn one more right to say I Told You So after the fact.
Essentially nothing has been done to address the issue of overcrowding in the largest urban precincts. But to be fair about this, the Iowa Democratic Party was making a good effort with its plan for a
phone-in "virtual caucus." That was mainly meant as an accessibility program, to include people who could otherwise not attend. The campaigns were not buying in because it counted less than in person attendance, but nearly a third of likely caucus goers were telling pollsters that they would consider it anyway. The Johnson County Democrats were planning to make a big push to encourage Virtual Caucus in order to take pressure off our most crowded sites.
IDP spent nearly a year working on Virtual Caucus, and they
were assured by the DNC every step of the way that it was a good plan -
until all of a sudden in September it wasn't anymore. Had they told us from the start "we think a phone in system is a security risk," we would have had time to come up with another plan (like actual absentee ballots).
But in September, it
was too late to come up with any major new changes and build a new system from scratch. Thanks, DNC. Satellite Caucus was dusted off, basically because it was the only plan that was on the shelf and it had been tried in 2016 with limited success. (Four sites statewide - three flopped but Oaknoll, the biggest retirement community in Iowa City, was a smash hit.)
There are 99 satellite caucus sites this year, but some are very obscure, like a guy's house in Tblisi, Georgia at 4 AM local time (which is caucus hour here). Basically, you had to be in the loop during a very narrow window in October and early November to know you needed to ask for a satellite caucus. It will help a few in-the-know snowbirds, the people at Oaknoll, and the nurses at UIHC and the firefighters at the West Side station who have to work that shift. But it won't get a single body out of our most crowded rooms. Basically everyone at a satellite caucus will be someone who would just not have attended otherwise.
(Aside: That term "satellite caucus" is unfortunate. In our county people hear about it and think that means the kind of satellite voting we do, zip into a public library and zip out. They don't realize that it means a mini-caucus at a different location.)
I also appreciate that the severe overcrowding is, to some extent, a "Johnson County problem." I was madder about that type of dismissal till I looked at the numbers and realized that's, well, kind of true.
Of the 11 precincts in the state (out of 1681 total) with over 600 in attendance in 2016, there was the campus
precinct in Grinnell, the campus precinct at Iowa State, two in Des
Moines... and seven of ours. That's a big burden to place on one county.
In 2016 the mean average attendance statewide was 102 people. The median
was just 65.
In Johnson County, the average was 342. We had seven of the 10 biggest
precincts in the state and 19 of the top 40. The last time I saw anyone with 7 of the top 10 and 19 in the top 40 was when Drake dropped an album.
The caucus process was never designed to be a mass participation event that
was the equivalent of an election. It was meant to be the handful of
core party activists in the precinct - 20 or 40 people who were familiar
with process and rules and were meeting at their friend's house.
In
some parts of Iowa it's still like that. In off years it's still like that in Johnson County. And at that size it still works.
As we argued last spring over the way the late unlamented virtual caucus vote was being allocated, it became clear to me that the caucuses are yet another rural-urban split in Iowa. The rural counties are convinced that without mandatory in person attendance to vote, they will not be able to organize their counties - and I understand that, and I understand that we are supposed to be all about Winning Back The Rurals this year.
A 2008 caucus on the east side of Iowa City, with 719 people attending.
But what about the BEST county? What about the county that for the last
three cycles, in every state and federal race, has voted 13 to 15% more
Democratic than any other county in the state? We are ALREADY organized,
and this process hurts more than it helps. Knowing that's it's mostly a
Johnson County Problem does not solve the
problem. And - and this is what I'm still upset about - it does not mean
the problem should just be dismissed.
We simply need a different system for the urban counties, a system that recognizes our lifestyles and needs and political folkways - and that rewards our outstanding performance each general election. Win back the rurals, yes, but give Johnson County and Polk County some credit and some respect. And in Johnson County, what we like and what we want and what we need is convenient multi-option early voting.
The biggest precinct in the state in 2016 was Iowa City 17 with 945 people. (We beat the Grinnell campus precinct by ten voters.) Our biggest in 2008 was 720 in precinct 18 - but remember that 2008 was on January 3 during UI's winter break, which suppressed turnout. We
expect to top 1000 in both these precincts this time. We expect to be over 500 in dozens of our 57 precincts. And a caucus process that was
designed for 20 to 40 people does not scale up well to a crowd of 500 to 1000. Once you get past the grade school gym capacity of 200 to 250, you can't do any "organizing." It's just crowd control and anger management.
You can do a lot to prepare for 500 people. You can train better, you can get more volunteers. But you can't solve the problem of the biggest room in (or near) the precinct being too small to hold the crowd you KNOW will be there. What is my county party supposed to do, build an 8000 seat arena with a 6000 car parking lot on the east side of Iowa City?
We've done better with rooms than we did in 2016. Sometimes that was due to better cooperation from the University and the schools but sometimes it was rented space at considerable expense to the county party. For example, we outgrew the free location at the Iowa City Public Library, so we rented out the Englert Theater. We had a hotel ballroom on the far north side of Iowa City that we turned down for the cost in 2016. We regretted that and we took it, at a slightly higher cost, this time. It's money well spent - but it's another extra burden on a local party, in a community that is already expected to export money to other races across the state.
In some places, residential precincts full of single family homes, there's not an option like the Englert and we have to take a too-small school. There is not going to be enough parking anywhere, so
walk or carpool if you can.
So my advice to Johnson County Democratic caucus goers is to set your expectations appropriately and be prepared. It's important to remember that everyone, including me, is a volunteer
and is legitimately trying to do their best in a tough situation.
I know sports analogies are overdone, but my dad was a coach and my Packers are in the playoffs so I'm using one. Caucus night is like game day. It's exciting and we all want the Hawks to win. But you don't expect to walk in, watch a game highlights clip, and go home. You're there for a long time, two or three hours for the caucuses. And not every play is an exciting thing like a long touchdown pass. Sometimes you're stopped at the line of scrimmage, the ref throws a flag, and you have to sit around and wait while the three refs talk among themselves and figure out the call and everyone else is confused.
And you can't expect to show up 15 minutes before kickoff and get a parking space across the street from Kinnick Stadium. Expect to walk. If you can't, make plans for a ride, and remember that your candidate has more resources for that than the county party.
And frankly, think about whether you should even do this.
My parents are in Wisconsin, not Iowa, and never miss an election. They are 85 and 84 and having more trouble moving around than they used to. I've told them: "If you lived in Iowa City 17 and had to walk four blocks from your parking place to attend a three hour meeting with 1000 people, I would tell you, don't go. Don't do that to yourself. And then I would tell you to call your legislators and tell them what you think of that process."
I'll have more to say soon about some small process changes and maybe some candidate related thoughts.
Yeah, I get that the all white debate optics are bad. But here's the thing: What are Perez and the DNC able or supposed to do about it NOW?
Order Kamala Harris back into the race? The debate rules aren't the problem there - Harris had already qualified.
What else... Magically make voters support Castro and Booker?
Override the First Amendment and force the media to cover the candidates differently?
Unilaterally pass campaign finance reform that keeps self funding billionaires from running? You think if we could do that, we wouldn't have already?
There are a LOT of problems with a system that leads to Steyer and Bloomberg, but the debate rules aren't even in the top 10.
The only option in the DNC's power is changing the qualification criteria - and the candidates who have qualified, and who built their efforts around the pre-set rules, would rightfully scream.
So would the candidates who were previously excluded and dropped out as a result. If you let Castro in now, do you go back in time and re-invite Gillibrand and Inslee?
The bigger debate rules problem was the excessive size of the field and the two night 20 candidate
💩
shows. With fewer no-chance mediocre white men on stage, Harris or Booker or Castro could have gotten more time and focus and maybe have earned more support.
Bottom line is, elections are an open process, and if people aren't going to support Booker, Castro, or Harris, they aren't going to. We can argue about WHY, and race should certainly be part of that discussion, but at this point the debates are an effect, not a cause.
My dual role as press-activist, which was what led to the invention of the beret as the "blogging hat," back in 2007 when I unexpectedly found myself back in a professional journalism job for a year and a half, has been getting in the way of the activist role. (It's actually a TRIPLE role, but we'll leave my job out of the mix for the moment.)
Lately I found myself not able to have conversations that were critical to my activist role. I was getting left out of other things I wanted to do. And I felt less and less like I really "belonged" on press row - including a few nasty looks the last time I sat there at the Hall Of Fame event in Cedar Rapids in June.
It's a lot harder to justify the travel and time at events when it's a hobby, not a second job. I haven't really written enough in a long time to justify a press pass - including no long form blog posts at all the entire month of July and nothing in August but a music post. Twitter has really been my main medium for a long time.
Another problem for me as "press" is that I really, really, really hate doing interviews. As I get more open about being on the autism spectrum I can confess that I always felt extremely uncomfortable and awkward asking the questions. But if YOU interview ME about MY favorite subjects I'll talk all day (again: the spectrum).
So the beret is going into semi-retirement. I'm not going to attend events as "press" anymore. This isn't "quitting" as much as it is an acknowledgement of what my reality has been for some time.
Irony: At the first event where I deliberately decided not to go as press, Elizabeth Warren's Thursday rally on campus. I walked out of the closed door, no-press pre-event and out to the main rally - and Team Warren was playing my song as pre-rally music.
Literally the only good thing about Prince's death is that now you can find his videos on the internet. He was extremely aggressive about blocking his content online.
I'm always happy to be a source for real working journalists. The actual beret may appear on special occasions. And I'll still write occasional long form posts when I feel like it, when that medium works best, and when it's my specialty: number crunchers, caucus process, election law, and history.
Like this.
In a post I first wrote back in 2006 and have updated periodically. I've
looked at and ranked all the caucus cycles back to 1976. As for
history and the caucuses themselves, a mixed bag. Irrelevant nearly
half the time, critical a little less often.
Not Worth The Airfare To Waterloo
20. 1984 and 2004 Republican. The Republican tradition was to hold no presidential vote at all in incumbent re-elect years.That tradition looks likely to end in 2020, not because of Trump's minor opponents but because state party leadership seems to think not having a vote in 2020 hurts the case for First in 2024. Ironically, this is happening as other state Republican parties are canceling their contests.
19. 1996 Democratic.
The word went down from Des Moines to the Democratic county chairs:
“The President would like a unanimous re-nomination and this WILL
happen.” Self-starters in a couple lefty college precincts elected a very small handful of Nader and Uncommitted protest delegates, but those
results got swept under the rug. Clinton came out and campaigned the
final weekend, largely to step on the GOP story (Actually Being
President trumps winning the caucus), but it was in basketball arenas,
not chat n’ chews.
17 (tie). 2012 Democratic. As
close to an unopposed caucus as possible short of “The President would
like a unanimous re-nomination and this WILL happen.” The state party
went to bat for actually having an alignment, which Chicago didn't want. But without a live
person as an Obama opponent (despite Bernie Sanders' suggestion), the dissenters were split between Uncommitted and
crossing over for Ron Paul. In the end the Uncommitteds, mostly made up of folks allied with the simultaneous Occupy movement, made a lot of
noise out of proportion to their 1.5% of the delegates. Rated up one notch because that 1.5% actually got honestly reported, not suppressed as in 1996.
17 (tie). 2020 Republican. Iowa Republicans broke with tradition in 2020, in part because they were concerned that with no actual vote they would put First at risk (this was before the 2020 Democrats removed all doubt). But even though they counted the votes against Trump, Bill Weld and Joe Walsh proved to be woefully ineffective even as protest vote placeholders.
16. 1992 Republican. The Pat Buchanan
Brigade was looking like a serious threat to win New Hampshire - he ended up at 37.5% there - but the
inside the Des Moines Beltway crowd stuck with the tradition of not
having a vote in an incumbent year. That decision was a small win for George HW, and that no-vote decision was more important than the 2020 decision to vote. So this gets the highest rank of the de facto uncontested caucuses.
Ultimately Irrelevant
15. 1992 Democratic.
Hometown boy Tom Harkin runs and wins big, though not as big as it
looked because of some skilled realignment work at viability time. That
76% Harkin delegate count included a lot of stealth supporters of other
candidates.
Paul Tsongas was already on the ground in
Iowa when Harkin announced, but he quickly bailed. There were a couple
feints from Bob Kerrey and Jerry Brown but nothing serious. Everyone showed up for the cycle's lone cattle call, the then-Jefferson Jackson dinner, but between low interest and a blizzard the hall was half empty.
In the end,
Iowa kept first place after `92 only because Tom Harkin was the only Bill Clinton rival who enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon. The other also-rans could barely hide their obvious
contempt for Clinton. (Kerrey and Brown probably wrote themselves in that
November.)
The long term importance of the 1992 caucuses may be that Bill, and by extension Hillary, Clinton did not have to retail campaign in Iowa, and that had a ripple effect into 2008 and 2016.
14. 2000 Both. On the Democratic side Al Gore easily beat Bill Bradley in what was merely the first moment in the overall national dynamic; Dollar Bill made his stand on friendlier turf in New Hampshire and fell just short there, and that pretty much ended it.
On
the Republican side it was like one of those boycott-era Olympics: W
won but the toughest competitor, McCain, was a no-show playing a Screw Iowa strategy. The truly
significant GOP event was the straw poll that winnowed out more
candidates (E. Dole, Quayle, and Buchanan bolting to Reform) than the
actual caucus (Orrin Hatch, as if that wasn’t obvious). Comic relief:
People who took Gary Bauer seriously, Alan Keyes in Michael Moore’s mosh pit.
Secondary event in nomination contest
13. 2016 Republican. Whichever contest was first would have narrowed a field that peaked at 17 candidates. The biggest event of the cycle was actually a non-event - the Ames Straw Poll that had been the dominant pre-caucus event from 1987 to 2011 was first moved out of Ames, then canceled entirely when the leading candidates refused to show up.
The field was down to a mere 12 by caucus night. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio, in that order, each took about a quarter of the vote, with the other nine splitting the remaining 25%. The immediate two past Iowa winners, Huckabee and Santorum, fizzled, and that effectively ended their campaigns.
Rand Paul failed to keep his father's coalition, because all of the "he's alternative, dude!" vote was caucusing for Bernie Sanders. The dudebro overlap between Ron/Rand Paul and Sanders supporters, which makes little ideological sense but is clearly a Thing, is a Ph.D. dissertation for someone.
Cruz's win turned out to be an anomaly and a relatively minor event. Cruz wasn't even Trump's final opposition - that turned out to be John Kasich, merely because he refused to quit.
12. 1980 Democratic.
The incumbent won the first test of Kennedy-Carter, but that battle of
giants was played out on a national, even global, stage and Iowa was a
bit player.
11. 2008 Republican. Important to the dynamic of the contest, but not central to the result.
Mitt
Romney was looking like the guy to beat in December 2007. Which Mike
Huckabee did in January 2008, after first beating Sam Brownback at the
straw poll to win the mantle of THE religious conservative candidate.
Had Iowa Republicans gotten behind the Mitt, they may have headed off
the chaos that was the GOP field in January. Instead, we proved that
there was no there there for Fred Thompson, and that the Ron Paul Яэvo┘utionaries
were noisy in disproportion to their actual numbers (but see 2012
below). But really, we just stirred the pot, and the decisive event was
in Florida between two men with Screw Iowa Lite strategies, Rudy
Giuliani and John McCain.
Our next contest was very similar, but the tiebreaker is that the Iowa winner actually won the nomination:
10. 1996 Republican.
What might have been: Pat Buchanan was within 3% of Bob Dole, but the
social conservatives in Cedar Rapids backed Alan Keyes instead; Keyes
thus won the second biggest county. One minister at one mega-church
makes a different choice, and we’d have had a major upset.
Some all too obvious field winnowing (Dick Lugar???) happens. Phil Gramm
gets out too, but his real stumble was in Louisiana’s
jump-the-starting-gun contest a week earlier.
Comic relief: Easily the funniest caucus! Dole, genuinely witty
in his non-Satan mode, Steve Forbes the android, Alan Keyes… but they
all pale next to Morrie Taylor, the tire magnate who literally tried to
buy a win one vote at a time. Failed miserably but looked like he had
more fun than the rest put together.
9. 1988 Democratic.
Other than Tom Harkin's favorite son run, this is the only time in the post-Carter modern era of the caucuses that Iowa Democrats did not vote for the eventual nominee. The nomination contest came down to Dukakis vs.
Jackson, neither of whose fortunes were affected by Iowa.
In `88 Al Gore, dirty Prince lyrics still ringing in his ears, was the
first candidate to use the Screw Iowa strategy. It's never worked (save
for the Harkin year), but nevertheless Gore wound up outlasting the
two Iowa leaders.
There's a story, long told by Paul Simon loyalists, that a county chair
sat on his Simon-friendly results until the Register had printed its
GEPHARDT WINS headline, which mattered in the pre-internet era. Rules got changed after that so that results are reported direct from the precinct to the state without going through a county chair, but this one proved the
winner-take-all-news theory that was prevalent at the time (and which was supposed to be the anchor of my aborted masters' thesis).
Comic relief:
Gary Hart’s last minute return to the race, campaigning with his wife.
8. 2012 Republican. The real importance of the 2012 Republican caucuses was not its
relatively small role in designating the nominee. That was always going
to come down to Mitt vs. Not Mitt. Rick Santorum never really got the bump from the
win, because of the dead heat, the botched result announcement, and the recount that delayed the final result. And also because Sheldon Adelson kept Newt Gingrich on life
support far too long,
No, the real importance was what happened to the Republican Party of Iowa after
the presidential vote. The Romney and Santorum people both said "yay,
we won," went home, and both in turn were right. The Ron Paul people
stuck around, elected themselves as all the delegates and committee people, and
took over the state party structure.
The consequences
had a huge ripple effect through state, and even national, internal
Republican politics for the next two years, until Terry Branstad, Jeff
Kaufmann and the rest of the grownups took party control back in 2014
(the most important OFF-year caucus). This one may move up the charts depending on the
long-term fate of the caucuses, and so may the next:
7. 2016 Democratic.Iowa was a big deal - in the same way that the first post in an epic flame war that eventually breaks Godwin's Law is a big deal.
Had Hillary Clinton solidly beaten Bernie
Sanders in Iowa, 2016 would have been over as fast as you can say "Bill Bradley"
and the whole Sanders phenomenon would never have happened. Oh, he
might have stayed on some ballots and accumulated a few votes. But
without the dead heat in Iowa, and the money and attention that followed, he would have been an asterisk, like Dennis Kucinich playing out the string in the late states in 2004 after John Kerry had clinched and everyone else had quit.
I have long said that half the Sanders vote was simply Not Hillary, and that
alone would have gotten Martin O'Malley to 30 points in Iowa had Sanders not
run. Indeed, that was probably O'Malley's whole strategy, to be the only person willing to run against Clinton.
The fact that Sanders was even allowed to run in 2016 without joining the Democratic Party was a decision by the DNC - ironically, headed at the time by the same Debbie Wasserman Schultz who supposedly "rigged" the nomination against Sanders. DWS's inability to take Sanders seriously as a threat to Clinton, and her under-estimation of Clinton's negatives, are just more signs of her ineptitude.
Sanders himself may have faded (from 49.9999% in Iowa on Caucus Night to 11% in last night's Register poll) but his campaign mainstreamed a progressive stance that other candidates without Sanders' negatives, most notably Warren, are now seeing success with. The long range ranking of 2016 may move up if this turns out to be a permanent change.
Significant event in nomination contest
6. 1988 Republican.
Pat Robertson pushes George HW into third place. Robertson was
insignificant thereafter, but the blow made Bush go on a fight of his
life attack against Bob Dole in New Hampshire. Dole took the bait and
was goaded into “stop lying about my record.” This convinces HW that
hard negative was the way to go. That road went through the flag factory
and Willie Horton, and ended at the White House. Comic relief: Al Haig.
5. 1984 Democratic.
Gary Hart barely squeaked past his old boss, George McGovern. But
second, no matter how distant, was enough to make him the Not Mondale
and propel him up about 40 points in eight days for a New Hampshire win,
a brief but genuine shot at the nomination, and (pre-Donna Rice) 1988
front-runner status. The Right Stuff sank like Gus Grissom’s capsule,
and you're an old timer if you catch that reference.
Decisive event in nomination contest
4. 2004 Democratic.
Iowa was the whole ball game in 2004. Nothing that happened after Iowa mattered nearly as much as what happened in Iowa. The guy who won got the nomination, and the guy in second got VP. And the guy in third?
The Dean Scream goes down as the single most memorable caucus moment, but everyone forgets The Scream was after The Much More Important Disappointing Third Place. After Dean had been the front-runner for months, Iowans got scared at the last minute - mostly thanks to Dick Gephardt, who went on a suicide attack that took them both out and set Gephardt up for reward in the Kerry Administration.
Made History
3. 1976 Democratic.
This one made both Jimmy Carter and the caucuses themselves. Carter
didn’t actually win this, you know. He was second to Uncommitted. But I
know folks who still brag “Jimmy Carter slept on my couch.”
I’m torn about ranking a caucus that directly produced a president below one that didn't. But read on.
2. 1980 Republican.
In the first true Iowa Republican caucus, an obscure former ambassador,
spy boss, and failed Senate candidate George Herbert Walker Bush
shocked the ten foot tall colossus of the GOP, Ronald Reagan. This one
win puts Poppy on the map and ultimately on the ticket (after the
botched Ford “co-presidency” deal at the `80 convention).
So
why rank this ahead of Jimmy Carter, especially since Bush Sr. lost
that 1980 nomination? The ripple effect. No Iowa win = no Bush 41. And
with no HW, do you REALLY think Bush 43 or 45 (please clap) would have made it
on their own? 1976 made a president, but 1980 made a dynasty.
Number 1: 2008 Democratic.
There's no question the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses created a
president. Iowa was the honing ground for Barack Obama's message and
appeal and ground game. We eliminated the entire second tier, and proved
that voters in one of the whitest places in America would support a
black candidate. Remember, a lot of African-American voters were
sticking with Hillary Clinton before Iowa, because Obama "couldn't win."
Iowa shattered that myth and the perception of Clinton's inevitability.
It's too soon to tell, and Trump's win blurred things, but the 2008 caucuses may have ushered in not just one president, but a whole era,
a new alignment of states that ends the 1968 Nixon-Wallace
southern-western coalition for good, at least at the presidential level.
2008
was a whole new map. As late as the first John Edwards campaign, people
were sill seriously saying it was impossible to break the Republican
"electoral college lock" without southern rural white male voters. Trump has since proven those voters are gone forever - maybe in the urban and exurban North as well.
But that old
South has been replaced by the new South, driven by suburban voters who migrated from the North, women, and minorities. Virginia three times, Florida twice,
North Carolina once, Georgia becoming an in-play mega-state, and even Texas on the horizon. Barack Obama fueled this alignment, which would not have been possible without that Iowa win.
The
1976 caucuses made one president, but his victory is a mere footnote to
a Republican era, brought about by the intensity of Watergate and the
Nixon pardon. The 1980 Republican caucuses made two presidents, but they
followed the electoral footsteps of others.
How many
presidents in an era? Obama wasn't able to transfer
this alignment to a successor, because some anchors of the old coalition fell in 2016 (Trump essentially drew three cards to an inside straight with his narrow Wisconsin-Michigan-Pennsylvania wins). If the 2008 caucuses ushered in an Obama
Realignment, like the FDR Relignment or the Nixon-Wallace Realignment,
they could lead to four or five presidents.It's a weaker case than it was four years ago, but 2008 still deserves the number one spot.
That became official today when a Democratic National Committee rules and bylaws meeting confirmed what was loudly leaked last week: that the phone-in "Virtual Caucus" plan that the Iowa Democratic Party developed, with nods of approval from DNC every step of the way, was unacceptable because of security concerns.
The most likely outcome, hinted at already last week, was that DNC would be willing to grant a waiver to Iowa and fellow early caucus state Nevada from the new requirement that caucus states be required to provide an absentee voting process.
The uncomfortable truth is: No one really wants the Iowa Democratic caucuses to have an absentee process.
Iowa Democratic leadership - both in the official Iowa Democratic Party structure sense and in the elected official-donor-activist base sense -doesn't want it because they're scared about risking First.
The bully of Concord, inscrutable New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, doesn't want Iowa to have absentees either, because he thinks that's an election and HE insists on the first election.
The DNC doesn't really want Iowa absentees, despite lip service to the new absentee requirement, because they are really more concerned about the much older standing fight about preserving the early state calendar.
The DNC found out the hard way in 2007, when Florida and Michigan broke the rules and went too early, that a broken calendar is unenforceable against states that are unwilling to cooperate. In part that's because election law is mostly state law, and in part that's because the only possible penalties are so nuclear that they won't be used. There was no way the DNC was ever going to refuse to seat the delegations from two huge swing states at the 2008 national convention, and everyone knew it. It ends up making the party look weak and they want to avoid having to referee between Iowa and New Hampshire.
Iowa haters and caucus haters don't want the caucus to have absentees because they think this may finally be the way to kill us. (And they have cynically recruited the tech security community as allies.)
The presidential candidates, despite rhetoric from one or two campaigns, don't really want the Iowa caucus to have absentees. They have already made battle plans that actively discouraged Virtual Caucus because "it counts less."
The Des Moines Register in particular, and the rest of the Iowa media in general, are against absentees at the caucuses because they believe it risks First - and thus risks their polls, editorial boards, national TV appearances, and bottom line.
Iowa Republicans don't want Iowa Democrats to have an absentee process because they are worried about First and about double voting - people voting for the Democrats early and then attending the Republican event on caucus night (because they want to vote against Trump twice?). That's technically illegal - but can only be discovered after the fact and only with an unusual level of bipartisan cooperation.
Rural Iowa Democratic county activists who like to brag about how badly their county swung from Obama to Trump don't want absentees because they worry that without forced attendance in order to vote, no one will show up and they will not be able to organize their county committees.
No, no one really wants the Iowa Democratic caucuses to have an absentee process...
...except for two small groups. And no one seems to much care what we think.
The first is made up of actual normal Iowans who don't want to or can't spend three hours on a Monday night just to vote, and who care more about that than about the benefits (?) of First. These are not the people asking questions or getting selfies or even going to candidate events. They don't care how many candidates are at your county party event or how the platform is worded or who is on the county central committee. They just want to VOTE.
These are also the people who work second shift or get mandatory OT or are traveling or who have small children or can't drive at night or who have problems standing or who (like me) can't handle the stress of large and sometimes hostile crowds.
The other group that wants absentees is also like me - actually, I'm pretty sure I'm the loudest: Urban county Iowa Democratic activists who are concerned about literally not being able to fit into the biggest room that exists in the precinct. No one at IDP
has ever given us any constructive suggestions as to what we should do
about it. Even honest acknowledgement is rare. We just get the
occasional "it won't be so bad" pep talk.
You cannot "organize" and "party build" when precinct attendance is approaching quadruple digits. You can't fix The Biggest Room Is Too Small with "better planning." You CAN fix it, you can ONLY fix it, with absentee ballots.
If you're with me in those last two groups, we have two weeks to convince Iowa Democratic leadership that we NEED an absentee process and that the apparent direction from both Iowa and DNC - a waiver from the absentee requirement - is the wrong way to go.
In today's conference call, DNC Rules and Bylaws chair James Roosevelt (yes, grandson of FDR and Eleanor) said:
Roosevelt notes that Nevada's delegate selection plan includes in-person early voting, which is "already an expansion from what they did in 2016 and is clearly within the rules." He says Iowa is exploring other options to expand absentee participation within their constraints.
If Nevada can have in person early voting for caucuses, Iowa can and must do the same.
It is time to stop caring about New Hampshire thinks. It is time to stand up to Big Bully Bill Gardner.
DNC approved a calendar with Iowa first and New Hampshire second. They also approved rules that said caucus states need absentees, and we should not let New Hampshire break the rules just because we are following the rules. If New
Hampshire moves in front of Iowa, let them - and then throw their
delegation out of the national convention, the way Florida and Michigan
should have been thrown out in 2008.
We also have one last chance to convince Iowa Democratic leadership that the 10% delegate cap, no matter what the attendance, on an absentee process is unfair. Absentees should be reported back to the individual precincts and counted equally, and should also be actively encouraged in order to address overcrowding.
We need real early ballots and we should not settle for anything less.
One of the great rituals of my youth was the release of a major album by a major artist. Some of my fondest memories are the treks to the actual physical vinyl record store on release day to buy Synchronicity or Born In the USA or Purple Rain or, later, the midnight trip to the CD store for Use Your Illusion.
Such moments are rare in our fragmented era of infinite selection and the death of the monoculture. An Avengers movie opening was as close as we got, and before that a new Harry Potter book.
But yesterday something important happened. A major musician, probably the most important of our time, released an album.
Popular music is supposed to be, well, popular. Even Joe Strummer
knew that. The ideology that commercial success was UnCool literally
killed Kurt Cobain. But as Cobain re-proved but never understood, popularity does not preclude great art. The most popular
rock group of all time is also universally acknowledged as the
creatively greatest of all time.
Which brings us to the most popular artist of our time.
Taylor Swift transcended the narrow niche of the country market segment as long ago as 2012, with her brilliant singer-songwriter album Red and her first pop number one hit "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together." She was bigger by that point than country music itself.
Some. me among them, would argue that she outgrew niche popularity as long ago as her breakthrough 2008 album Fearless - still very country in sound but with the massive crossover success of "Love Story" and "You Belong With Me."
Which sets up part of the problem. Swift was introduced to us as a VERY young artist, with her first record at 16. She wrote of that stage of life in a style that was at once eloquent, realistic, and, well, girly. The imagery of that era, lyrically and in videos, was literally set in high school, cheerleaders and band uniforms and prom dresses and crying with your best friend over her first broken heart. "When you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them," she wrote as a wise old woman of (checks notes) eighteen.
And it connected. Deeply. Which is what art is supposed to do. The emotions were universal, but they connected most deeply with Swift's peers, young women.
From there her popularity exploded into tabloid celebrity, with more attention to the identity of the inspirations of her songs than to the excellence of the work itself. "If I could talk to my 19-year-old self I'd just say, 'Hey, you're going to date just like a normal twenty-something should be allowed to, but you're going to be a national lightning rod for slut-shaming,'" she said in 2016, as people forgot that Swift was first and foremost a musician - and first and foremost within that a songwriter.
I’m so sick of running as fast as I can Wondering if I'd get there quicker if I was a man And I'm so sick of them coming at me again 'Cause if I was a man, then I'd be The Man
Taylor Swift, 2019
Genres and works of art made and enjoyed largely by female audiences and young audiences get taken less seriously. Double that if the artist is female. Square that if the artist is a young woman. Cube that if the artist in question is working in a field other than acting or modeling, and is tall, slim and blonde. And add yet another dimension if the artist comes from a background of family wealth and privilege that unlike, say, diplomat's son Joe Strummer, Swift readily acknowledges - because we ALL know that Real Art comes from the streets, right?
Taylor Swift is not a mere pop star. She is a serious artist using pop music as a medium. That's how I have approached her work since Red and that's how Lover should be evaluated.
Bigger that a genre? Taylor Swift now is phrases-entering-the-language big, bigger than the music industry itself - able to get Apple Music to back down and offer artists more money with little more than an Instagram post, and probably able to blow up a $300 million industry deal by simply talking about re-recording her old music (which I do NOT actually expect to happen - it's a negotiating tactic). And able to get bodies into stores to buy physical copies of music which is unheard of in 2019.
But set aside the notion that art made with mass popularity in mind is a least common denominator. Taylor Swift is an important artist, my children's generation's equivalent of the great singer-songwriters of my generation and the 60s generation.
I fell in love with Swift's music because it reminds me of being young. So I revived the old ritual for a release day trip to a store.
Just 36 hours and four or so listens in, I am still getting to know Lover the album. I know I prefer it to 2017's Reputation, and I see it rivaling 1989 and my personal favorite Red in quality. The title song, issued a week ahead, is one of the greatest odes to stable and serious love I have heard in a very, very long time. And near album's end, she offers continuity between her past tales of broken hearts and her current state of mind:
🎶🐣 | Lyrics from ‘Daylight’ reference RED and it’s album prologue #LoverOutNOW
“Realizing that real love shines golden like starlight... maybe I’ll write a whole album about that kind of love if I ever find it”
So along with enjoying the art, I feel personal happiness for an artist closer to my children's age than my own who has given so much of herself to her fans - not just the music, but a personal touch that goes far above and beyond the call of duty. So far this cycle she has invited fans into her homes for private listening sessions, paid a fan's college tuition, sent her dad with dozens of pizzas to fans waiting in line, and showed up at a Target to greet fans checking out with CDs. That's just THIS MONTH.
And she's making six figure donations to gay and pro-choice groups.
While this summer's ubiquitous "You Need To Calm Down" was sometimes mocked for placing the straight cisgender Swift at the center of a pride narrative, it's inherently powerful for someone with such massive popularity to send a positive message. Far from a least common denominator, mainstreaming pride still matters in vast purple and red swaths of America. . So does the unspoken touch of casting a black man as a love interest in a video, and so do Swift's emerging political thoughts. An ally with more than 80 million followers is a good friend to have, and I hope and expect that Swift will use this powerful voice between now and next November.
Unity is rare in both our culture and our politics. So as Lover takes over the world, in this moment now, capture it, remember it. There are few moments like this anymore and this moment matters.
Well, Joe Biden is in trouble for something he said again (evergreen tweet), this time for discussing his long-ago personal friendships with long-dead segregationist senators James Eastland and John Stennis.
Obviously this is a mistake - but maybe not quite in the way you think.
Biden has premised his candidacy and his prospective presidency on the idea that Trump is an anomaly and that with The Donald out of the way, the collegial folkways of the past can return to government.
Now, political Twitter knows that those days are gone forever, and have probably been gone since Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill shared their last Irish whiskey some 30 years ago.
But, hear me out, what if Biden knows that too?
What if Biden is not simply nostalgic for the past, in a sign of his age, but instead is positioning himself in a popular niche? The salient political question is not "can we bring the bourbon and branchwater era back." The important question is: How many rank and file primary voters either think or wish that era could come back?
Over and over we see polls and hear voters saying they want politicians
to "cooperate" and "get along." Biden knows this too. Is he deluding
himself thinking this era can come back - or, I think more likely, is he just playing to that
sentiment in a segment of the electorate?
Personally, I think it's a myth that there's all that much real support for
Getting Along and The Sensible Center - because people are taught by the
Objective Journalism paradigm that we are supposed to Vote The Person
Not The Party, and because if you scratch the surface "compromise" usually means "compromise by YOU changing to MY position."
But at least it's an argument one could reasonably make with some data to point to, and I think it's a more plausible explanation for Biden's approach than "he's old and dumb."
If that's what he's doing, then his mistake was not arguing that
personal friendships across the aisle can fix things. His error was in
naming the wrong friends, men who while they may have been genial in
person were committed to the wrong side of history and justice. Had
Biden named colleagues like, say, Bob Dole or even Barry Goldwater, very
conservative men yet men who were not primarily (despite Goldwater's
vote against the Civil Rights Act) identified as segregationists, he
would have made his point more effectively.
Joe Biden is a lot of things, and in many ways he is the last son of a
bygone era. He may be far enough behind the times that he won't win the
nomination.
But Joe Biden is absolutely not dumb, and I think his longing for the past is more strategic than nostalgic.
It used to be a presidential election had an "Invisible Primary" stage before the early states. Candidates tested the waters with low profile visits and events in the midterm cycle, gathered their families and core people, and made a decision. Many opted out, and only a few opted in.
It's not unusual for two dozen people to think about running for president and look into it.
But what is unusual, or perhaps is the unfortunate new reality, is that ALL of those people are opting in. In 2016 on the Republican side, and this cycle on the Democratic side, the Invisible Primary phase of the campaign seems to have vanished, and this backstage first phase of narrowing the field is playing out in public with declared candidates.
So today we had the spectacle of NINETEEN candidates giving speeches at the Iowa Democratic Party Hall of Fame event in Cedar Rapids.
Todays #HallOfFame batting order
Booker
Swalwell
Sanders
(Award)
Gabbard
Pete
Harris
(Award)
Delaney
Inslee
Gillibrand
(Axne & Abby)
Ryan
Yang
Williamson
(Award)
Warren
Hickenlooper
Klobuchar
(Award)
Bullock
deBlasio
Bennet
Beto
(Award)
End
The mindset seems to be: Err on the side of inclusion. But it's just so much. Not sure how someone could decide or even narrow from this - or from two nights of 10-candidate debates - unless you start from the self-fulfilling prophecy of polls and limit yourself to candidates that are registering at least a smidgen of support. We got a handy checklist last night:
IOWA POLL:
Biden: 24%
Sanders: 16%
Warren: 15%
Buttigieg: 14%
Harris: 7%
Klobuchar: 2%
O’Rourke: 2%
No other candidate tops 1%. Many rounded to 0% or had no responses. https://t.co/vVm3Jxfch7 via @DMRegister
The problem is, by including EVERYone, you have less time to focus on the serious players. I would have liked half as many speeches but twice as long.
The beret has been semi-retired for a while, but I figured this show was too big to pass up. So I dutifully drove north for what I expected would be a brutally long day and night.
I do not love Sign War. Staffers and volunteers love Sign War. We had two solid blocks of Sign War. But with pretty good collegiality between most campaigns (except the one that does its own thing), it wasn't much of a "war." At one point the
Klobuchar, Harris and Gillibrand campaigns were all chanting "we need a
woman in the White House" together. (Warren was based a block away and
Gabbard's contingent was about six people.)
So Gabbard was the clear sign war loser; the whole experience was too overwhelming to name a winner.
Sanders only
dabbled in the main drag of sign war; his alternative was a Fight For $15 pre-rally at a
nearby McDonalds. On message, and a good cause - but also on brand for
Bernie being the one who does His Own Separate Thing. Their march over from Mickey D's almost collided with Corey Booker's arrival. Buttigeig also did a pre-rally rather than Sign War.
As for Team Biden, they clearly
decided that with no candidate, they were just going to bypass the event
entirely and not even attempt visibility. Not a bad decision, because with no
candidate you have no draw and any effort looks weak. All in or all out.
The speeches began, 14 minutes late. I had turned down dinner tickets from Teams Beto and Booker since I had gotten a press pass, but I thought I might regret that decision by suppertime.
Most candidates stuck close to the podium and the teleprompter, trying to stick to their tightly scripted five minutes that needed to compress the Greatest Hits into one five minute medley, touch as many issue bullet points as possible while at the same time hitting the Overall Campaign Theme and some biography. Each speech flashed by about as fast as a total eclipse.
To the delight of most of the room, the sound crew was ruthless. At exactly five minutes, they turned up the music to play the candidates off. And in a solstice miracle, it worked.
Beat the clock: Beto, Bullock, Warren, Gillibrand, Booker
Did not beat the clock: Klobuchar (barely), Pete (barely), Williamson, Delaney, Swalwell, Sanders, Gabbard
Total clock management failure: de Blasio, Bennet
Did not notice: Hickenlooper, Yang, Harris, Ryan, Inslee
Best Speeches: The two who moved away from the podium, and who gave the strongest speeches, were Warren and Harris. (Yang also walked, but seemed rushed.) Booker, Beto, and Pete were also good, as were Klobuchar and Gillibrand - the two trailing candidates who I can still imagine making a breakthrough.
Honorable mention:
Abby Finkenauer is a better public speaker than several of the presidential candidates. #HallOfFame
Special Category: This event was not a good setting for Bernie Sanders. I'm not especially objective about him - but I have seen him enough at enough different kinds of events to know that his strength is at a rally of his own faithful, and that he's not great at multi-candidate events like this. The audience today was party regulars and elected official types, which is definitely not a Bernie-friendly crowd. His applause was only scattered other than at the Sanders tables, even when the words themselves were acceptable to the whole room.
Biggest gap between audience enthusiasm and position in Register poll: Klobuchar.
Missed opportunity: Jay Inslee was really good on climate change. It could have been a breakout moment (no one had one of those today). But that was only a minute or so of his five. He should have junked the rest of the speech and done five solid minutes on climate - that's where his heart is. But: his ask for a debate focused only on climate change, which is becoming a litmus test for parts of the activist base, seemed to only get cheers from his table.
Weakest speech (serious person category): Most of the small fry were undistinguished, but Michael Bennet failed to even manage a graceful exit when the music played him off. He just kept talking, they had to turn it up and the audience had to applaud to get him off stage. Not good when you speak 18th of 19.
Weakest speech (special category): Marianne Williamson is a joke and we need to find a way to not have to invite her to things like this.
Death Valley: Speaking order was random drawn and we had a brutal mid-show three in a row of Tim Ryan, Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson.
Best self-deprecating line: "I have 8.6 million highly opinionated constituents" - Bill de Blasio
Best stage music: Was hard to hear most of the time but I did note that Beto O'Rourke took the stage to the Clash. They are obviously trying to get a commit card out of me.
Yang attempts a call and response, only his own table knows what the responses are supposed to be
Cheapest shot: Ideological elbows are fair, but Andrew Yang was the one person who criticized Joe Biden for not attending. Now, maybe Biden IS trying to limit attendance at multi-candidate events, but he had a grand-daughter with a graduation which 1) is totally on brand for Biden and 2) most Iowans would count as an excused absence.
Had to look it up: Other than Biden, candidates missing were Seth Moulton, Some Dude Mayor Wayne Messam, and... had to look it up... Julian Castro.
"You will get sick and tired of seeing me in Iowa" - Swalwell, but could be anyone #HallOfFame
Other notes from small fry: Gabbard led with Aloha and talked about peace; Delaney talked Big Tent Party and rural, Tim Ryan was all White Working Class and bringing the Rust Belt back. Bullock played his one Iowa card: the inexplicable endorsement by Attorney General Tom Miller.
Special gold medal: to Troy Price and IDP staff for the miracle of getting the whole show done in 2 hours 57 minutes. Extra special thanks to the sound crew for being ruthless with the play-off music.
I would have been proud to have been represented by Kevin Kinney
in Congress, and I'm also glad to keep him where he is. In 2014, a
horrible year for Dems, Kevin GAINED a seat from the GOP, and that one
seat held the majority for two more years. The excesses of 2017 would
have happened in 2015 if not for Kevin Kinney.
Kevin doesn't look like or carry himself like an Iowa City liberal.
He's a big quiet cop and farmer. But when he speaks it means something.
Kevin has seen crimes worse than most of
us can imagine - and he spoke eloquently this session against the death
penalty. He's the kind of candidate who can win a district like he has -
half is a non-Peoples Republic part of Johnson County, the other half
is two rural counties. There's a lot of turf like that in the 2nd CD.
Plus, knowing Kevin, he's a great guy and a great dad.
Some other good people are still looking at this seat and I look forward to a good primary.
