POLITICS
Skipping Iowa
By Stump Connolly
Sorry boys, I’m not coming out. Not yet. Not until you all cool your jets and settle in for the long slog. You’ve already booked every motel room inside of 100 miles of Des Moines, but I’m telling you now, on the eve of the first presidential voting, Iowa is a sucker’s bet.
I’m going to watch this mythical end to your mythical media campaign on television like most Americans, switching back and forth between your on-scene coverage and the Orange Bowl, where Virginia Tech and Kansas will be playing the same night in sunnier climes. I’ll tune in long enough to hear who “won” Iowa, but I won’t place much credence in the reports. Here’s why:
When Iowa goes to the polls next Thursday, there will be no polls. Instead, there will be 3,562 legion halls, school gymnasiums and local taverns that, at 6:30 PM, will turn into gathering points where loyal Republicans and Democrats in every precinct in Iowa will meet to kick off the presidential season.
Some will have several hundred people in attendance; others as few as a couple dozen. The legal purpose of these precinct caucuses is to select some 14,000 delegates to attend county conventions in March that, by June, will narrow themselves into state party conventions where Iowa’s 40 Republican and 57 Democratic delegates will ultimately be named to attend their national conventions.
What draws the major presidential contenders and the national media to Iowa every four years is the fact that somewhere in the middle of these proceedings, attendees are also asked to show their preference for a presidential candidate.
Republicans do this by putting names in a hat (not binding on county convention delegates selected); Democrats by dividing themselves into different corners of the room based on their candidate preference. If any one corner has less than 15% of the total caucus attendees, that group must disband and align with another. It’s an arcane, outdated process, but leads to a lot of grassroots discussion about who best represents Iowa.
At the end of the night, each caucus calls its results in to state party officials. State party officials then round off the number of county delegate slots assigned to each contender (based on a weighted measure of the voting) and use a mathematical algorithm to simplify the totals into “state delegate equivalents” that are released to the media on election night to show who “won.”
As imprecise and convoluted/off-putting/indecipherable as the process is – even in a good year, less than 10 percent of Iowa’s eligible voters participate – winning Iowa has somehow become ingrained in the American political psyche as the first critical step on the road to the presidency.
But this may be the year that theory collapses under the weight of its own popularity, especially if the race is so close it exposes the inherent flaws in the system.
The attention lavished on Iowa over the last nine months has been an order of magnitude greater than in any other previous campaign. John Edwards has spent 187 days there; Barack Obama has spent 119; Mitt Romney, 113; Mike Huckabee, 111; and Hillary Clinton, 105. Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, a long shot to begin with, moved his family to Des Moines and enrolled his kids in the public schools.
There are estimates all the candidates will spend a combined $50 million on radio, TV and junk mail advertising this year (roughly five times 2004's record-setting pace.) Even after it all, 40 percent of Iowa’s voters say they are still undecided six days before the voting.
Whatever the candidates wind up spending on Iowa, the media outlets covering the race will probably spend more. The largest caucus convening in Iowa next Thursday will be at the Des Moines Convention Center where some 2,500 reporters are expected to draw media credentials.
If the candidates have spent more time in Iowa than ever, so have the reporters covering them. Not one or two old veterans with big-pocket sponsors fulfilling the promise of “all the news that’s fit to print." Gaggles of them –– often outnumbering citizens at candidate events –– reporters, stringers, citizen journalists and others feeding the cable channels, newspapers, blogs and entertainment shows with much that is not.
Running for president is the new national sport. You yourself don’t have to do it because you can watch others do it on TV and the Internet (and post your opinion as a “comment” on the story you are reading.)
It has its own cable channels (MSNBC and Fox),
websites (Drudge, Politico), blogs (too many to name) and even its own XM/Sirius
outlet (The Political Channel). They’ve all been hard at it covering
the race. All they need now is for someone to vote.
Those of us who do not live in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina probably
haven’t seen a single paid political commercial by any of the candidates.
Yet we feel like we’ve seen them all on the nightly news, Sunday talk
shows and cable news stations. We’ve read all the candidate profiles
on the front page of The New York Times; seen the YouTube clips of their gaffs;
surfed the blog reports on their staff shake-ups; and, most insidiously, been
subjected to opinion poll on top of opinion poll –– as many as
40 in a single month –– telling us who is surging, sinking, and
sunk.
So Iowa going to the polls is a welcome relief from all the bluster, or a reminder that, in a race where 17 candidates are still lined up at the starting gate, 16 of them will lose.
It is the media’s craving for someone to win that stokes this madness. My favorite moment in the campaign so far came in early December when an NBC reporter accompanying Obama on his tour bus asked, “Now that the campaign is coming to an end, do you feel you’ve gotten your message across?” Obama looked at him with a suppressed smile. Coming to an end? This is still the pre-season, dude. Get a clue.
It will be interesting to see how the TV networks report from Iowa on election night. Many of the caucuses will still be going when they first break into their regularly scheduled programming. As Roger Simon noted in Politico.com, they will hang these early returns on the most dubious of concepts – “entrance polls” conducted at 40 Republican and 40 Democratic caucus sites semi-scientifically selected by the same people who predicted Al Gore would be president and misled John Kerry into thinking he would.
As attendees walk into the caucus, they will be asked not only their candidate preference but 16 questions on issues, attitudes, impressions and outlook. In a close contest, the candidate preferences will be withheld. But there should still be plenty of grist for the mill of pundits and commentators that will grind away over the course of the night showing off the new sets, graphics, websites and political teams each network will be fielding this season.
Sometime around the third quarter of the Virginia Tech-Kansas game, there should be enough precincts reporting for the networks to put percentage totals up on the scoreboard next to candidate names. Maybe, in the fourth quarter, even a check mark for the “winner” will appear.
Don’t expect any actual vote totals to go up on the leader board. Iowans don’t tally votes. They meet and discuss the issues at hand. They test the candidates with tough questions and talk among themselves about the answers. That was once what made Iowa so appealing to reporters trying to get a handle on the campaign ahead. Now it may be Iowa’s downfall.
Too many people have invested too much time in Iowa not to come away with a winner.
But whoever that winner is, remember this: they probably won’t win more than 16 delegates and the runner up could well wind up with 15 –– out of the 4,417 Democrats and 2,516 Republicans who will take seats at the national conventions next fall.
There’s plenty of racing ahead. So pack up your laptops, bid a fond farewell to the butter cow at the Iowa state fair and get your ass up to New Hampshire. I’ll be waiting.
See you on the tarmac.
