Iowa Stubborn
Happy New Year to you, dear readers!
After a couple of months hiatus, Cross-pollination returns. Because I am still at work on an academic book, my plan for this newsletter remains to produce a post and a puzzle for you once each month. I am grateful for your subscriptions and trust that you enjoy these opportunities to read and solve. Feel free to send comments and suggestions.
And now, here is this month’s Crossword (courtesy of Crosshare): Iowa Stubborn
In all the years that I taught U.S. politics, presidential election years tended to dominate my consciousness. They provided an extraordinary opportunity to capture student interest long enough to teach significant lessons (hopefully lasting ones) about the nation’s political system. Each election year, my students seem to enjoy watching and talking about campaign ads and debates with their colleagues.
The most compelling election years, though, were the two (2008 and 2016) in which I took student groups to experience presidential campaigns first-hand in Iowa. Each student had a chance to meet candidates face-to-face, do campaign work for one of their favorites, and talk with journalists, political observers, and Iowa voters in cities and towns throughout the state. The highlight of those two trips was being present on caucus night in 2008, so that my students and I observed the process unfold in both Republican and Democratic precincts. We all enjoyed (and, I hope, fondly remember) our time during the caucus campaign in Iow, which one wag called “Disneyland for political junkies.”
As the 2024 presidential nomination campaign begins in earnest, first major test of the year—the Iowa caucuses—occurs on January 15. By the way, as distinct from primary elections, the caucuses essentially are meetings of party activists and voters who come together in their precincts on a single winter evening. The central purpose of each caucus is to discuss and decide on party rules, officers, and policy stands. In presidential election years, they have the additional purpose of expressing Iowans’ preferences for particular candidates. Caucus attendees listen to speeches of support, discuss matters with each other, and start the process of electing the people who will ultimately be delegates to the national party conventions.
Iowa has had pride of place in election years going all the way back to 1976, when Jimmy Carter won the Democratic Party’s nomination and subsequently the presidency itself. Ever since then, politicians, journalists, and political scientists have descended upon Iowa every four years to visit with community leaders, talk with voters, eat at more than one Pizza Ranch, buy a witty Raygun t-shirt, and possibly do the “full Grassley” (named after Iowa’s senior U.S. Senator, it means to campaign in all 99 counties).
This year, the situation in Iowa is rather different. First, with an incumbent president, the Democratic caucuses are far less dramatic and consequential than they would otherwise be. Second, the Democratic Party decided to reorder the nomination contests so that Iowa’s caucuses are no longer first in line. The caucuses have long been denigrated from a demographic standpoint (Iowa’s population is not as diverse as the party’s national electorate) and from a political standpoint (the caucuses did not always select the eventual nominee, nor did it necessarily help Democrats win the presidency). Moreover, it didn’t help Iowa’s standing among Democrats when the state party had difficulty reporting timely and accurate results in 2020. Third, in order to fall within the party-sanctioned time frame for delegate selection contests, the presidential preference aspect of the caucuses will not be held in person on caucus night. Instead, Democrats in Iowa will mail in their preferences and the party will announce the statewide results on March 5.
Though Iowa stubbornly remains “first in the nation” (and perpetually in conflict with New Hampshire for that title), only the campaign for the Republican caucuses has attracted much attention from the national media. Traditionally, pundits have declared that there are only “three tickets out of Iowa”—meaning that if a candidate finishes in the top three, they were likely to be viable in the campaign to come, particularly in the New Hampshire primary. At present, and for most all the campaign, the competition for Republicans this year has been for who can garner second place. In the polls, former president Donald Trump has led the field by double digits for the last year. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has only recently closed a gap to become practically tied with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Regardless of the polls, though, the critical element to doing well or winning the caucuses is organization. A candidate needs to locate supporters, keep them engaged, and mobilize them to go out on a night in January to attend their local caucus. That is one of the reasons why candidates supported by evangelical churches have tended to win the Republican contest—Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Ted Cruz in 2016, for example.
Overall, the track record for presidential campaigns suggests that whichever candidate is leading in the polls or has raised the most money (or both) at the start of the election year is most likely to win the nomination. Occasionally, there will be stumbles along the way, as one state or another opts for a different candidate, but the front-runner usually perseveres and succeeds in the end.
With Trump having such a commanding lead and a cult-like hold on the Republican base, it is hard to see him losing Iowa as he did in 2016. However, for the same reasons, I think that his voters may not be as likely to turn out in numbers approximating his standing in the polls. So I also expect his margin will likely be smaller than it seems at present. The race between Haley and DeSantis is indeed a toss-up and likely a true test of the organizational skill of their respective campaigns. The stakes are high for them both because each candidate needs a boost in media coverage and fundraising returns in order to have any chance of doing well in (let alone winning) the New Hampshire primary on January 23.
Given the circumstances surrounding this year’s election, the relevant question no longer seems to be Why Iowa? We are not likely to spend time wondering aloud why an electorally unrepresentative state continues to be first on the nomination calendar. Instead, we are more likely to be wondering what explains the results that we will see emerging from the Republican caucuses, particularly as they set the stage for the contests to come. These days, the question we’ll be trying to answer is Why, Iowa?