The democratic (small d) Weirdness of Iowa

There's been some back-and-forth over on the Open Thread about some of the peculiarities of the caucuses. As a Kerry staffer, I got a complete top--to-bottom course in all things Iowa, short only of spending time on the ground there. But many of the staff I worked with ended up going there for the last month or two, and those of you who were on the Kerry blog at the time will never forget the wonderfully insightful and always reassuring blog posts from "Mark from Iowa."

I came to understand what a totally unique phenomenon the whole Iowa election process is. And I never stopped being impressed with how seriously the people of Iowa took their civic responsibilities as the first people to pass judgment on the candidates. For my part, I am less concerned about the quantity of people who show up for the causes than I am about the quality of the commitment.

Yes, it's hard to get people to come out on a cold Iowa night. But the decision that people are being asked to make is not a trivial one, and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that you need to be highly motivated to come out and participate in an hours-long process. I want people in those rooms who have taken the time to get out and see the candidates, and who have spent some time talking with their friends about the strengths and weaknesses of the field. Once past Iowa and New Hampshire (which shares some of the same virtues of retail politics), most voters' exposure to candidates will be through the woeful filters of the mass media, and commercials. Iowa and NH are the two places where the mass media's conventional wisdom does not severely crowd out critical thinking.

For example, in the fall of 2004, Howard Dean was the hot ticket, and John Kerry was polling in single digits in national polls. But Mark and Kerry staff kept telling us that the Kerry operation on the ground in Iowa was in fine shape. And I noticed something peculiar in the Iowa polls. Dean got up to 30 or just a little more, and then stopped. While his national numbers were strong, the polls suggested that despite all his trips there, and the national boom, that he wasn't closing the sale with any new voters, that he was hitting some kind of ceiling.

And as we learned soon enough, polls in Iowa in October/ November didn't predict very much what actually happened in January--the national media treats the public like idiots in this respect, writing story after story all spring, summer, and fall on horse race numbers that don't mean anything. Without Iowa, there is no place else in the nominating process that is as open to underfunded candidates who would never be heard if they had to compete in a money-dominated primary. Look at what's happening on the Republican side, with Romney having spent millions in Iowa, only to see Huckabee surging past him. (And for those of you who think Huckabee is cute or charming or whatever, the guy is a religious nutcase in a pleasant-sounding container. See Mike Taibbi's excellent piece on Huckabee in Rolling Stone).

As to the operation of the caucuses themselves, some people are troubled by the 15% rule, which requires a candidate to get 15% of the supporters at a given caucus, with candidates below the cut forced to drop out. Supporters of weak candidates can then choose to go home, or they can walk over and join up with any of the candidates who made the cut. This system forces candidates to appeal not just to their hard core supporters, but to reach out to supporters of other candidates to be their 2nd choice. Unlike the "first to the post," winner-take-all model that we use in most elections, Iowa voters get a chance to register at least their 2nd choice.

I lived in Cambridge, MA in the early 80s, and the city used a proportional representation system like this one to pick city council candidates, with an 10% ceiling rule. You numbered your choices for city council in priority order, and if you picked someone with less than 10%, then your vote went to your 2nd choice. It was theoretically possible to vote for all 20 or 30 candidates, and have your vote end up going to the person you picked far down the list, if all your earlier choices were for candidates who got counted out. This arrangement made for very interesting politics and coalition building among candidates.

I'm not arguing that Iowa is perfect, by any means. But given a choice between a media-commercial driven, first-past-the-post, secret ballot vote, and Iowa's retail, proportional representation, stand-up-in-public caucuses, I'll take the caucuses any day as the best way we have to kick off the campaign.