Cape Politics

IOWA CAUCUS PRIMER

The Iowa caucuses are almost upon us, and the contests look like they have turned into 3-way races. 

Iowa is a caucus state. Voters gather in person to choose delegates to the state nominating conventions later in the year. Iowans have to show up at a precinct caucus on the evening of January 3rd, regardless of the weather. Each caucus goer stands up at the meeting and declares their support for a presidential candidate.

They then group themselves by who they support and take a head count. It is determined before the caucus how many delegates will come out of that precinct, and depending on the number of  voters in the room, divided by number of delegates designated, each presidential candidate gets one, or two, three (or so forth) delegates.

If after the first head count a presidential candidate does not have enough votes for even one delegate, his supporters are free to move to another candidate. This is where the fun starts. The other camps invite these free voters to join their candidate, hoping to get enough additional votes to qualify for yet another delegate.

After this reshuffle, they take another vote.  In the end, they will report out something like this: 3 delegates for Candidate A, 2 for Candidate b and 1 for Candidate C, and none for the rest.

The results are reported to the State Parties which tally all these reporting precincts and detemine who received the most delegates and in this way the world will know who "won" the Iowa caucuses.

Polls in Iowa are therefore misleading, because not only do most people polled not vote, but even fewer even to go their caucuses. Not like the secret ballot of an all day primary in New Hampshire.

Caucuses favor the candidate who has a good organization.   Count on only the fanatics to show up and the supporters who are dragged there by the candidate's organization. So what does this all mean for the this years's crop of candidates?

For the Democrats; Clinton, Obama and Edwards arguably have the biggest organizations. Clinton has alot of paid workers. Barack has alot of momentum and may benefit from first time caucus goers.  Edwards has the advantage of  having been supported by many caucus goers once before.

They each make compelling reasons for the caucus goer to show up for them: First woman. First black. But Edwards has hit upon the right message at the right time, the disenfranchisement of the middle class. Guess who attends the caucuses? The middle class. 

For the Republicans; Huckabee and Romney seem to be battling for the most delegates, followed by McCain.  Again organization is supreme with the even fewer number of  Republican caucus goers. Romney has organization but no momentum. Huckabee has momentum, but no organization. But McCain may end up getting both the anti-Romney and anti-Huckabee voters, because he has some organization and some momentum.  

But there is no compelling reason driving Republican caucus goers. What ever happened to Iraq as a campaign issue?