On February 2, national media and presidential campaigns will decamp from Iowa. The state’s citizens will be freed from the barrage of political advertising, and its media outlets will need to figure out how to fill their news holes.
Ted Cruz or Donald Trump will likely “win” the Republicans’ secret-ballot caucus, with Marco Rubio having an outside shot. Hillary Clinton is poised to “beat” Bernie Sanders in the Democrats’ preference-group caucus system.
And in the short term, those relatively clear results will matter about as much as their grand-scheme relationship to each party’s eventual presidential nominee – barely at all. Instead, the media, pundits, campaigns, and donors will all parse the outcomes against conventional-wisdom guesses about how the candidates were supposed to do.
This muddle partly explains why Iowa and other small early-voting states regularly have their prized positions at the front of the process called into question, criticized, and mocked. In September, for instance, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus told the National Journal that Iowa and New Hampshire should watch their backs after 2016. “I don’t think anyone should get too comfortable,” he said. “I don’t think there should ever be any sacred cows as to the primary process or the order.”
The quadrennial arguments against Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina – the four pre-Super Tuesday states – are familiar: These states are small in population, are unrepresentative of the country as a whole, and exercise an outsize and undue influence over the process of selecting nominees and therefore the president. (See sidebar.)
The criticism of Iowa’s role is amplified because of its first-in-the-nation status and the fact that it’s a caucus state – meaning that poorly attended party meetings with weird (or “quirky” or “arcane”) processes set the table for the remainder of the campaign.
On the other hand, those same criticisms form the foundation of the case for Iowa’s role: The relatively sparsely populated state and its caucus meetings represent a small-scale proving ground for candidates – their organizations, their fundraising, their ability to connect with voters one-on-one, and their stomach for local cuisine. If you can’t do well in Iowa, the thinking goes, you’re not going to do well in the country as a whole.
Yet both sides of the argument ignore a fundamental truth of modern presidential politics: Even if Iowa remains the first contest in the presidential-selection process moving forward, the state’s voters are playing an ever-diminishing role. As much as the state sets in motion the story of the presidential campaign, its people don’t much matter.
This is the Iowa-caucus paradox, in which the democratic process is essential to the outcome, but voter behavior is to a large extent irrelevant, manipulated and overwhelmed by loads of money and media.
Continuing to insist on the importance of Iowa and its voters creates a number of problems. It overstates the role of retail politics in a mass-media political culture. It wastes tremendous media resources in terms of news coverage – an opportunity cost as Iowa media outlets heavily emphasize presidential politics over community issues. It’s exhausting to Iowans, and to those who live in Iowa media markets but outside of Iowa itself.
And for what? In the most positive spin, Iowans have performed a civic service by helping to weed out candidates who can’t mount an effective campaign nationally.
But that’s a fallacy, or perhaps it’s just poorly phrased. It’s not Iowans doing that chore; it’s the process itself and those with vested interests – the political parties, the donors, and the media – and it just happens to start in Iowa and include its citizens.
Pay attention to the media coverage of caucus results on February 1 and beyond. It will not much matter who actually won the caucuses; the focus will be on which candidates have momentum coming out of Iowa, and that will be measured largely on comparing performance to expectations.
And “momentum,” “performance,” and “expectations” are all slippery terms defined by the campaigns and the media. Furthermore, expectations are set in a circular, self-reinforcing system encompassing fundraising and organization, a candidate’s intensity of campaigning in Iowa, media coverage, and polling.
To take just one component of that, media coverage strongly correlates to – and certainly influences – how the caucuses turn out, and then media interpretation of those results shapes what follows.
Both the media and the voters are merely cogs in a larger machine fueled by campaign cash.
It’s the Money, Stupid
The title of the 2011 book Why Iowa? How Caucuses & Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process reveals a clear point of view from its three political-science-professor authors.
Yet they make a somewhat startling admission within the first few pages: “Since 1980, all but two candidates who raised the most campaign money the year before the nomination contests began ended up winning their party’s nomination.” The two exceptions both came from 2008 – Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton. (Here is where I must note that the 2016 GOP race will quite likely be another exception, with its crowded field, the apparently unsinkable wild card of Trump, and the perpetually deflated poll performance of fundrasing machine Jeb Bush.)
I used the word “startling” because the statement basically negates any discussion of the importance of Iowa in the nomination process. If, far more often than not, fundraising accurately predicts the nomination before any voters have cast a ballot, then the endless build to the drawn-out series of caucuses and primaries leading up to party conventions is manufactured theatre.
Still, one can emerge from Why Iowa? feeling pretty good about the state and its role in the process. The authors argue fairly convincingly that the caucuses engage voters and candidates in a way that wouldn’t be possible with a simple primary election, or in a more-populous state at the front of the process, or in a system with a national primary or a series of regional primaries. They’re compelling in describing how results from Iowa and New Hampshire inform voters further down the line.
And yet I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that Why Iowa? represents a working-way-too-hard rationalization for a system begging for reform – especially when the authors finally make a proposal. The book, I think, makes the best case possible for Iowa at the front of the nomination process, but it’s not a strong one, and the subtitle’s use of “improve” feels like a stretch.
Certainly, the authors believe that early-voting states serve a valuable vetting function. They furthermore argue that caucus rules and processes encourage “sincere” over “strategic” voting.
But Iowa doesn’t need to be first: “We expect that there is nothing particularly distinctive about Iowans as deliberative citizens and caucus-goers,” they write, “other than the fact that they have been blessed for decades with the certainty that their state goes first and thus understand the importance of the role they play.”
The authors support the idea of sequential elections over a straightforward national primary: “Our assessment of voter learning in the sequential nominating process demonstrates that there is something to this idea that Iowans are doing other voters a favor. We find that information originating at the start of the sequential nominating process does provide useful cues to other voters. The quality of those cues, in a normative sense, depends on Iowans (or citizens in any state that goes first) doing the hard work of evaluating candidates.” But, as that last sentence suggests, there’s nothing special about Iowa going first.
Ultimately, the authors propose reforming the nomination system so that there’s a caucus “window” of several weeks preceding a national primary. “Any state that elects to have a caucus could hold their contest in this window,” they write. “As with the existing system, small states ... are not particularly relevant as a means for collecting convention delegates. These nominating events, however, are a way to expose candidates to retail politics and media scrutiny. After this window ... , voters in all 50 states – including those who have already caucused – would be given the opportunity to participate in their party’s national primary.”
What Why Iowa?’s authors offer is based on three premises. First, early caucuses will allow for some retention of that vetting process, and the theoretical possibility that a lesser-known politician can gain traction without having to raise as much money as perceived front-runners. Second, sequential elections in some form are preferable to a single, nationwide primary-election day. Third, presidential campaigns today are already national affairs from the beginning, so we might as well act like it. (Republicans have already had six debates – and none of them were held in Iowa; January 28’s will take place in Des Moines. Democrats have held four debates, with only one of them in Iowa.)
Their proposal is sensible, and preferable to regional primaries, a rotating order of primaries and caucuses, or a nationwide primary with no caucuses. It retains the best components of the Iowa contests, specifically the need for grassroots campaigning at the outset. By condensing the process, it corrects the interminable horse race and endless media echo chamber – as much as it’s possible to correct them. And a national primary acknowledges the reality that the current sequential process doesn’t negate the importance of big money and name recognition.
A Peripheral Role for the Public
In a 2008 paper titled “The Invisible Primary & Its Deleterious Effects on Democratic Choice,” Duke University’s John Aldrich argued that “we have now reached the point where the standard nomination setting has sufficiently reduced the role of the public to the point that it can barely be considered truly a democratic selection at all.”
He continues: “To be sure, the system is sufficiently rich, complex, and uncertain that (even with no further changes) the situation will on occasion be ripe for the public playing its once regularly critical role. The balance of influence, however, has altered sufficiently that it has changed from a case in which the public generally rules to one in which their role is secondary, perhaps even peripheral, to the roles of those whom we might call the ‘nomination elite’ (officeholders, activists, resource providers, campaign specialists, media personnel, and the like).”
Aldrich argues that this trend became most notable in the 1990s: “Two facts of campaign life have changed fundamentally since the 1970s when outsiders could run as unknowns and convince people to vote for them – and win nomination. One is the spiraling cost of campaigns. ... The second fact of life ... is front-loading. ... Lots more money is needed today than in 1976, and it is now needed much more quickly.” In 1976, he notes in a graph, it wasn’t until that 15th week of voting that more than 50 percent of delegates had been awarded; in 2008, 60 percent of delegates were awarded by the fifth week – Super Tuesday.
This is not to say that it doesn’t matter that Iowa and New Hampshire go first. Quite the contrary; the existing process has consequences, and early contests have an arguably larger impact given the compressed, front-loaded nature of delegate allocation.
Aldrich argues for a “momentum” model in which “success in one primary spirals upward, through more positive media coverage, access to greater resources, and therefore more favorable reception by the public in the next primary or caucus.” Momentum is created by actual results in Iowa and New Hampshire, but more by performance against expectations – which is set by the media and the campaigns themselves.
The key, Aldrich claims about the current system, is the starting point from which candidates gain or lose momentum. “And it is here that the pre-primary campaign plays its role,” he writes. “It is what sets the opening position.” And that’s why money raised has, in recent history, been such a good predictor of each party’s eventual nominee. This is what’s called the invisible primary or money primary.
Money, of course, isn’t everything, and it doesn’t directly translate into votes, convention delegates, or presidential nominations. But it does translate into campaign organization and media perceptions of viability, and thus begins the cycle that finally mobilizes voters into the places we might have expected if money did buy votes.
Don’t take those words as cynical. Remember the admission about fundraising by the authors of Why Iowa?, and then look at their findings.
Feedback Loop
Those authors looked at the relationship between certain variables and outcomes from 1976 to 2008. “Money, poll standing, and time in Iowa appear to [separately] have substantial power predicting vote share in Iowa,” they write.
But there’s a better way to predict results, they added: “When press attention to candidates is used to estimate results, the effects of money and poll standing disappear (whether we model vote share or candidate place of finish), and any effect of time spent in Iowa is greatly truncated.”
So media coverage independent of fundraising, polling, and campaigning is a strong predictor. This suggests that the media plays a role that could, in theory, elevate a lesser-known candidate into the category of “viable.” (You might point to Bernie Sanders as such a candidate, and I’d point to the fact that Sanders has proved quite adept at fundraising.)
But media coverage is inextricably linked with the other factors – polling, campaigning, and money. And there was another finding by the Why Iowa? authors that obliterates the idea of an independent role played by the media. The predictive power was also seen when comparing performance to expectations of media coverage: “We see that press coverage of a candidate (predicted by the candidate’s fundraising, polling numbers, and campaigning) outperforms models that use polling, finance, and time spent to predict outcomes in Iowa.”
In other words, if you think of media coverage as a summary function of polls, money, and campaigning, and if you further acknowledge the correlation of coverage to results, you begin to see how the system largely negates the free choice of citizens.
Voters caucus and vote, but those actions are predictably moved by a feedback loop circling through that nomination elite. Money leads to poll numbers leads to media coverage leads to money leads to poll numbers, and on and on.
This might not be surprising to many people, but it’s depressing. Iowa holds this vaunted status as an ideal – this common-sense, largely rural place where big money doesn’t matter. We have this image of candidates meeting folks in living rooms and greasy spoons – the concept at the very heart of the supposed importance of retail politics.
The actual picture is much different.
Sidebar: The Case for Iowa
The arguments for ditching Iowa’s place at the front of the presidential-nomination calendar can be boiled down to four: The state is small, it’s unrepresentative, the caucus process is silly, and its results haven’t exactly been stellar in terms of propelling candidates to their party’s nominations.
All four make intuitive sense, but at least three of them are also flawed.
Iowa Is Small
Yep, and worth only six votes in the Electoral College.
But that’s kind of the point. Starting the presidential campaign in a sequence of four states that each have fewer than 10 electoral votes allows for person-to-person campaigning that wouldn’t be possible if we started with more-populous states, or if there were a national primary, or if there were regional primaries.
As the main article makes clear, I’m skeptical of how important that campaigning actually is compared to money, but I also think we’re well-served by a system that at least allows for the possibility that a qualified candidate with little money can get enough of a foothold though one-on-one contact to join the national conversation.
Those four states – in the middle of the country, the northeast, the southwest, and the southeast – also allow candidates of different stripes to play to their natural audiences.
Iowa Is Not Representative
Well, it depends on how you look at it.
In 2006, CNN used 12 measures (“four that measure race and ethnicity, four that look at income and education, and four that describe the typical neighborhood in each state”) to determine which state is “a microcosm of the whole country.” Wisconsin topped the list, followed by four other Midwestern states: Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, and Ohio.
Iowa was 26th, New Hampshire 36th, Nevada 44th, and South Carolina 39th. Underlying the evaluation was the idea that the states playing key early roles in shaping the presidential-nomination races aren’t necessarily “representative” of the country as a whole.
But a 2009 paper titled “Iowa: The Most Representative State?” looked at “51 current (2000–2007) indicators of social, cultural, economic, political, and policy activities” and ranked Iowa 12th, leading the authors to conclude that Iowa is “reasonably representative.” And it’s more representative than the other early states: South Carolina (19th), New Hampshire (27th), and Nevada (35th). Wisconsin was 15th in this evaluation, underscoring that it all depends on how you look at the data – and what data you look at.
The authors note that, in this formulation, “diversity” drags Iowa’s representative-ness down: “In a nutshell, the population of Iowa is too old and too white to represent the nation.” But the most important measures, they argue, are economic factors, and in that area “Iowa clearly is the most representative [among all 50 states]. This finding takes on a double importance, when the pivotal role of economic voting in U.S. presidential elections is considered.”
And Rutgers Political Science Professor David Redlawsk (one of the authors of the Why Iowa? book referenced in the main article) makes the argument that Iowa should not be considered in a vacuum: “What I think we should look at more is that the set of early states are, as a group, fairly representative. The GOP has social conservatives in Iowa, economic conservatives in New Hampshire, and southern conservatives in South Carolina, and if you put them together, you pretty much have the Republican Party.”
The Iowa Caucus Process Is Silly
As Charles P. Pierce wrote about the 2012 GOP caucuses in Esquire, they’re “a jerry-rigged, easily gamed, and otherwise hopeless system that couldn’t even produce a final result for six months the last time around.”
There’s the argument in Why Iowa? that the caucus process produces sincere rather than strategic voting – a tendency particularly pronounced on the Democratic side. And that’s a good thing, the book’s authors argue.
But that could also be encouraged through other means, such as a preferential ballot (versus a vote-for-one ballot) in a primary. And even the Republicans in Iowa, using a secret ballot in their caucuses, have shown evidence of sincere voting, which probably speaks to the seriousness with which Iowans treat their first-in-the-nation status.
And there’s no denying that the caucus process depresses participation.
So critics of the caucuses will get little argument from me on this front.
The Results Haven’t Been Predictive
As David Macaray wrote in 2011 for HuffingtonPost.com: “What do Dick Gephardt, Tom Harkin and Mike Huckabee have in common? They all won the Iowa caucus. What do Steve Forbes, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and Gary Hart have in common? They all finished second.”
It’s true that there was no Democratic Presidential Nominee Gephardt (in 1988) or Harkin (in 1992), and no Republican Nominee George H.W. Bush (at least in 1980), Bob Dole (at least in 1988), Mike Huckabee (in 2008), or Rick Santorum (in 2012).
But if Iowa results consistently translated into each party’s nominee, it would undermine Iowa’s importance as a unique proving ground, or it would underscore that Iowa has too much power in the process, or it would provide evidence that Iowa is indeed representative of the whole country.
More importantly, Iowa is the opening bell of the nomination contests, and we should expect (and to some degree hope) that the race will change over time. That’s especially true because we know that Iowa favors religious conservatives more than the country at large does.
Ultimately, this criticism is a natural function of the first two: Iowa’s results aren’t strongly predictive precisely because Iowa is small and not representative of the country’s diversity.
– Jeff Ignatius
