Iowa is back. Left out in the cold during the 1990s -- when political circumstances made it irrelevant in the presidential nominating process -- the Hawkeye State has once again muscled its way to the middle of the stage with its nominating caucuses. The Iowa Democratic Party loves the attention, of course, and most of the Democratic presidential candidates are paying the usual deference to a bizarre process. But this should worry Democrats everywhere else, because caucuses like Iowa's are no way to pick a president. They magnify the influence of party activists, exclude too many voters, and tilt toward politicians with slim hopes in national contests. They are, in fact, throwbacks to a bygone era of smoke-filled, backroom meetings.
In 1763, John Adams described the political caucus of early Boston this way: "The Caucus Clubb meets at certain Times in the Garret of Tom Daws, the Adjutant of the Boston Regiment. ... There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one End of the Garrett to the other. ... There they drink ... and there they choose a Moderator ... and Selectmen, Assessors, Collectors, Wardens, Fire Wards, and Representatives." That model for choosing officeholders evolved over the next century and a half into the system of party bosses and political machines against which the Progressives revolted in the early 20th century. The Progressive era instituted a much more inclusive model for nominating political officeholders: direct primary elections, now used in most states.
But a growing number of state Democratic parties today are eschewing primaries for caucuses. Three made the switch for the 2004 presidential cycle -- New Mexico, Colorado, and Maine -- bringing the current total of caucus states to 14, plus the District of Columbia. It's a disturbing trend, and it could get even worse: Four more states -- South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arizona -- have been flirting with the idea recently.
Why the movement toward caucuses? Reduced to their essence, the two basic factors driving the current trend are money and political power. First, the money: In an era of state budget crunches, caucuses allow states to save the cost of running primary elections. States don't pay for caucuses; parties do. But the more significant enticement is power: Because the parties control their own caucuses independently from each other -- and thus do not have to agree on a single date for a primary -- caucuses are a way for state parties to be more nimble in the mad dash to achieve national political relevance in an increasingly front-loaded presidential nominating process. (New Mexico Democrats, for example, have moved their caucuses forward to Feb. 3, 2004, while New Mexico Republicans are lagging behind, sticking with a June 1 state-run primary election -- at least for the current presidential cycle.)
But whatever the reason for the trend, it is bad news, both for Democrats and for democracy. It's bad news for democracy because caucuses are an unrepresentative system that effectively shuts most people out of the process of nominating presidential candidates. And that's bad news for Democrats: Using unrepresentative samples of party activists is exactly the wrong way to pick standard-bearers who can rally the broad coalitions Democrats need to win national elections.
To be sure, today's presidential nominating caucuses are a far cry from the system of exclusive meetings of members of the House of Representatives -- the so-called "King Caucus" that was used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Nor are they clandestine gatherings of local party bosses, as they often were until the Progressives came along at the turn of the 20th century.
But contemporary caucuses do generally require participants to be registered party members, thus shutting out independents. And they do generally involve a several-hour time commitment, as a docket of mundane party business is attended to. Thus, they deter all but the most dedicated party members. And when they finally get to the business of selecting convention delegates, caucuses usually follow an intricate set of party procedures that distinctly favor highly organized activists. No surprise, then, that caucuses reflect the will of a decidedly unrepresentative sample of the electorate.
Moreover, there are no secret ballots in caucuses. This abrogates one of the fundamental tenets of democratic politics. People stand up in front of their neighbors to form candidate preference groups. "This is something you do in public," notes one political observer. "I think it makes it hard for people to operate outside their group." The groupthink dynamic perpetuates party nostrums and stifles independent-mindedness.
Iowa, of course, is the prototypical modern caucus state. The local game there is tilted in favor of dedicated party activists in several ways. State party rules, for instance, reward the core Democratic precincts that have produced the most votes in recent elections for Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket, by giving them greater proportional voting power than other precincts. Caucus rules give well-organized groups another advantage: Groups can pad their preferred candidates' numbers by wooing people whose first-choice candidate is deemed "nonviable" (having the support of less than 15 percent of those attending a precinct caucus). To consistently pull off that delegate-padding maneuver -- by successfully wooing reluctant second-choice voters in precinct after precinct around the state -- a candidate's troops must ideally be ready with designated spokesmen and prepared talking points. This clearly favors highly organized groups, such as unions.
Caucuses produce lower, more base-oriented turnouts than standard primary elections do. Only about 100,000 people are expected to turn out for the Iowa caucuses next Jan. 19 -- just one in five of the Democrats registered in the state. And with a crowded field of nine candidates in the race, there is an odd voter-candidate, supply-demand crisis that gives cohesive blocks of voters extra leverage in the nomination process. Unions, for example, represent just 15 percent of Iowa's workers, but they generally account for one-third of Democratic caucus-goers. "The caucuses play right into us," says Mark Smith, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor (IFL). In a blunt response to a question about the secret to the unions' success in getting their people out to the caucuses, he adds, "It's a pretty simple operation -- we harass the s--- out of them."
That persuasive power means that when labor unions hold campaign-related events in Iowa, candidates greedily descend upon them. An example last summer was the IFL's annual convention, in Waterloo. Several candidates showed up to participate in a political cattle-call-style issues forum. The format called for each candidate, one after another, to answer a similar set of questions centering on issues near and dear to organized labor -- job security, health care, and trade policy. It was remarkable to behold, because in the course of an afternoon, the candidates' answers seemed to melt together into a single gooey mass.
After the cattle call, a small group of rank-and-file union members lingered in a hallway discussing the candidates' performances.
"They all said the same thing," said one.
"Yeah, what we wanted to hear," replied another.
Indeed, this was by design. Political pundits criticize interest group-sponsored candidate forums as panderfests. But labor leaders offer no apologies. They say making the candidates pledge allegiance to organized labor on key issues is exactly the point. Richard Trumka, national secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, told the crowd at the IFL convention that the pundits' criticism "tells me we are right on the mark with the approach we are taking -- grilling the candidates thoroughly and making them declare where they stand on the issues."
On the issues, the net effect of caucus rules and Iowa's demographic makeup produces something approaching a retro New Deal coalition that is out of step with the rest of today's national Democratic Party. A Democratic Leadership Council analysis of caucus-goers 2000 entrance polls found that Iowa caucus participants were older, whiter, more liberal, more interested in social services, and had lower incomes than Democratic voters in the general election nationwide. In fact, state party officials expect 50 percent of caucus goers to be senior citizens in 2004, up from 36 percent in 2000. For Iowa caucus participants, the ideal composite Democratic presidential candidate would be hostile toward economic globalization, dovish on national security, and an ardent proponent of government social programs. In short, he or she would stand for things a majority of voters have consistently rejected in national elections for the past 25 years.
Yet 2004 will be the ninth presidential nominating season in a row in which Iowa is given the first bite at the apple. It moved into its plum spot in 1972, and in 1976 Jimmy Carter pulled off a nifty three-rail shot: He came out of nowhere to win the caucuses, he used his surprise victory to generate the early buzz and momentum needed to roll on to the Democratic nomination, and then he capitalized on post-Watergate distrust of Gerald Ford to win the presidency. It was an anomalous victory, but Iowa has been perceived ever since then as the key to early momentum in a presidential campaign. Every four years, it basks in the national political spotlight with New Hampshire (and, to a lesser degree, South Carolina and a few others) for as much as a year before the nominating season. Reporters obsess over every tangible and intangible sign of the candidates' potential strengths and weaknesses in those early states: money, organization, endorsements, poll standings, gaffes, zingers, ads, and general buzz.
Iowa garners so much attention not because it has been a swing state in recent general elections -- with one Republican and one Democratic U.S. senator -- and not because its Democratic caucus-goers are seen as a particularly good bellwether of how the party can win nationally. No, it is the focus of national media attention merely because its caucuses come first. "It's a chicken-and-egg situation," says former New York Times correspondent Adam Clymer, one of the deans of American political journalism, who was in Des Moines last summer attending a presidential cattle call. "We're here because the candidates are here, and the candidates are here because we're here. But we'd go to North Carolina in the summer if the candidates all agreed to show up and compete in a watermelon seed-spitting contest. We'd report it, and then we'd argue about whether the contest was for distance or accuracy."
To maintain the state's coveted position in the nominating schedule, Iowa Democrats engage in a constant fight with other states and the Democratic National Committee. "Every year, every cycle, it's a battle to stay first," says Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Gordon Fisher. In fact, Iowa and New Hampshire have made it clear over the years that they will do just about anything to maintain their traditional one-two spots in the order -- even if it means they have to move their nominating events into the calendar year before the general election. To ensure that the scheduling race only goes so far, the DNC adopted a rule that allows only Iowa and New Hampshire to select convention delegates before Feb. 3. But other states have been challenging that rule. Michigan, led by its senior U.S. senator, Democrat Carl Levin, who has been critical of the presidential selection schedule for years, made a contentious bid last spring to move its nominating event up to the same day as New Hampshire's primary. (Not that the change would necessarily have done the national party much good, since Michigan Democrats use a so-called "firehouse primary," a nominating event with rules nearly as peculiar as a caucus.) In exchange for temporarily backing off from that plan, Michigan Democrats forced an agreement from the DNC to appoint a commission to look into the party's delegate selection process after the 2004 election.
It's high time. The last time the party paid careful consideration to the nominating process was in 1986, in the wake of Ronald Reagan's 49-state landslide in 1984. And, coincidence or not, Bill Clinton -- the only Democrat to win the presidency since Carter -- skipped Iowa (because Sen. Tom Harkin's native-son candidacy in 1992 took the state off the table for everyone else). Clinton went on to a two-term presidency. Today's Democratic Party needs to ask itself what's more important: that winning tradition or Iowa's.
