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The Iowa Caucuses are a messy way to start the presidential selection process. NPR's political director describes the caucus experience: Caucuses are like a neighborhood party that last for hours. In Iowa, they begin at 7 p.m. sharp. They take place in a church or a gymnasium or a school or in someone's living room. You're there with your neighbors. You discuss issues, such as Iraq or ethanol or Social Security. And you also discuss candidates. Unlike a primary -- where your vote is private -- in a caucus, you declare your support for a candidate in plain view of everyone around you. Candidate Smith's supporters go to this corner of the room, candidate Jones' that corner, and so on. If no candidate at a particular caucus site receives the support of 15 percent of the attendees, his or her supporters need to form a coalition with another candidate's supporters to reach the vaunted 15 percent threshold. Otherwise, the candidate ends up with no support at all. The candidates spend so much time there, some would be eligible to vote in the state. The Democratic caucus takes place in public over several hours, in 1,784 precincts. Republicans choose the winner by popular vote. They scribble their candidate's name on a piece of paper and drop it in a box. More on the difference between the Republican and Democratic caucuses below.
First, the rules. The caucus rules are 72 pages long. As mentioned above, if you support a candidate who has less than 15 percent support at your caucus location, you either have to join another candidate's group or leave. Your vote for your first choice doesn't amount to squat and is not recorded.
The caucus process is so complicated the candidates have created instructional videos and put them on YouTube. Here is a Huckabee video. The Edwards campaign has a particularly clever instructional video. The Obama campaign has a citizen's guide to the caucuses. The Obama YouTube video includes a simulated caucus meeting. (Notice how diverse the actors are in the video.)
The State Historical Society has an interesting film about the caucuses on YouTube. How's this for an open election? The popular vote is not released, just the delegate count. The New York Times explains in a guest op-ed: The one-person, one-vote results from each caucus are snail-mailed to party headquarters and placed in a database, never disclosed to the press or made available for inspection. Instead, the Democratic Party releases the percentage of "delegate equivalents" won by each candidate. The percentage broadcast on the networks and reported in the newspapers is the candidate's share of the 2,500 delegates the party apportions across Iowa's 99 counties, based on Democratic voter turnout in each of the 1,784 precincts in the two most recent general elections. So, the turnout for a candidate in a precinct caucus could be huge, yet the candidate's share of the delegate pie could be quite small -- if that precinct had low voter turnout in 2004 and 2006. Under the formulas used to apportion delegates, it is possible that the candidate with the highest percentage of delegate equivalents -- that is, the headline "winner" -- did not really lead in the "popular vote" at the caucuses. Further, it is possible that a second or third-tier candidate could garner a surprising 10 percent or 12 percent of the popular vote statewide and get zero delegates. (That's because to be in the running for a delegate a candidate must have support from at least 15 percent of the people at a precinct caucus.) He or she may have done two or three times as well as expected among Iowa's Democratic voters and get no recognition for it. Republicans keep it simple in Iowa: Iowa Republicans do not go through this rigamarole. Early in their caucuses they take a straightforward count of how many people support each candidate. The tabulations are reported promptly to the news media. The caucuses then go on to choose delegates to county conventions. Little or no attention is paid to the Republican delegate count, which the press does not even bother to report. The caucuses are held in the dead of winter and at night, when lots of people simply cannot get out. But there is no early voting or absentee voting. The Secretary of State's office told me that even members of the military risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot vote. You have to be present to vote. Now, you know the voting age in the United States is 18. But, in Iowa you don't have to be 18 to vote in the caucuses. You just have to turn 18 by Election Day in November.
For more information about Rock the Caucus, the Iowa effort to involve young voters, visit www.rockthevote.com/rockthecaucus and http://www.iowapirgstudents.org/. A caucus vote is not really for a candidate, it is for a representative to another meeting, who goes to another meeting, who goes to another meeting.
Oh, and by the way, in four of the last nine presidential elections, the Democrat who won the Iowa Caucuses did not win the nomination. (See the list below.) And yet out of this morass, the media crowns a winner and political fortunes rise and fall. The leadership of the most powerful country in the world hangs in the balance. And, just so voters don't get confused, Iowa holds a primary election for congressional races in June.
The DesMoines Register provides exhaustive coverage. The New York Times also has a deep multimedia site.
Iowa does not look like the rest of the country. It's a small, mostly rural, mostly white state. And still, there are some who argue that holding the first vote in a small state like Iowa forces grassroots activism and discussions that tend to center on issues. Iowa jealously defends its "First in the Nation" position, partly because it pumps tons of money into the state and into the state's media and is a giant commercial for the state. It is not an election, it is an industry.
Iowa economist Harvey Siegelman estimated that the economic impact of the 2004 Iowa Caucus was approximately $50 to $60 million. The 2008 Iowa Caucuses will be tens of millions greater than that. It is the one time every four years when the state gets free advertising for its economic development recruiting.
HowStuffWorks.com explains how all of this nonsense started: Federal law doesn't dictate how states choose their delegates, so individual states decide what system to use. Most states use the primary system -- where voters statewide simply cast a vote for the candidate they support -- but some use the older caucus system. The term caucus apparently comes from an Algonquin word meaning "gathering of tribal chiefs," and the main crux of the caucus system today is indeed a series of meetings. To see how this works, let's look at the Iowa caucuses -- the first "voting event" of the presidential election year. In Iowa, the caucuses themselves are local party precinct meetings where registered Republicans and Democrats gather, discuss the candidates and vote for their candidate of choice for their party's nomination (Iowa caucuses actually occur every two years -- in non-presidential-election years, participants generally discuss party platform issues). In both parties, the purpose of the caucus vote is to select delegates to attend a county convention -- each caucus sends a certain number of delegates, based on the population it represents. The delegates at the county convention in turn select delegates to go to the congressional district state convention, and those delegates choose the delegates that go to the national convention. The Republican caucus voting system in Iowa is relatively straightforward: You come in, you vote, typically through secret ballot, and the percentages of the group supporting each candidate decides what delegates will go on to the county convention. The Democrats have a more complex system -- in fact, it's one of the most complex pieces of the entire presidential election. In a typical caucus, registered democrats gather at the precinct meeting places, ... supporters for each candidate have a chance to make their case, and then the participants gather into groups supporting particular candidates (undecided voters also cluster into a group). In order for a particular group to be viable, they must have a certain percentage of all the caucus participants. If they don't have enough people, the group disbands, and its members go to another group. The percentage cut-off is determined by the number of delegates assigned to the precinct. It breaks down like this: · If the precinct has only one delegate, the group with the most people wins the delegate vote, and that's it. · If the precinct has only two delegates, each group needs 25 percent to be viable. · If the precinct has only three delegates, each group needs one-sixth of the caucus participants. · If the precinct has four or more delegates, each group needs at least 15 percent of the caucus participants. Once the groups are settled, the next order of business is to figure out how many of that precinct's delegates each group (and by extension, each candidate) should win. Here's the formula: (Number of people in the group * number of delegates)/ number of caucus participants For example, say a precinct has four delegates, 200 caucus participants, and 100 people support John Doe. To figure out how many delegates you assign to John Doe, you would multiply 100 by four, to get 400. You divide 400 by 200 and get 2. So John Doe gets two of the four delegates. The media reports the "winner," based on the percentage of delegates going to each candidate. This isn't exactly accurate, since it's actually the state convention that decides what delegates go to the national convention, but more often than not, there's a clear statewide winner after the caucuses. The convoluted caucus system dates back to 1796, when American political parties emerged, and it hasn't changed a whole lot since then. Most states eventually replaced this system, because as political parties became more centralized and sophisticated in the early twentieth century, party leaders or "bosses" were perceived as exerting too much control over choosing a nominee. To give individual voters more influence over the nomination process, party leaders created the presidential primary system. Florida held the first primary in 1901 marking the beginning of the presidential primary we know today. Dramatic caucus reforms and rules that the Democratic Party instituted at the state level in the 1970s changed the system significantly. Designed to improve and open up caucuses to all party members, the requirements actually made caucuses more difficult to manage and inadvertently led to the rise of primaries. To help states coordinate the election days of both parties, the Republicans also changed their system. Here's a history of who won the caucuses from Answers.com: Bolded candidates eventually won their party's nomination. Candidates with an asterisk (*) subsequently won the presidency. Democrats · 2004 - John Kerry (38%) defeated John Edwards (32%), Howard Dean (18%), Richard Gephardt (11%) and Dennis Kucinich (1%) · 2000 - Al Gore (63%) defeated Bill Bradley (37%) · 1996 - Bill Clinton* (unopposed) · 1992 - Tom Harkin (76%) defeated Paul Tsongas (4%), Bill Clinton* (3%), Bob Kerrey (2%) and Jerry Brown (2%) · 1988 - Richard Gephardt (31%) defeated Paul Simon (27%), Michael Dukakis (22%) and Bruce Babbitt (6%) · 1984 - Walter Mondale (49%) defeated Gary Hart (17%), George McGovern (10%), Alan Cranston (7%), John Glenn (4%), Rueben Askew (3%) and Jesse Jackson (2%) · 1980 - Jimmy Carter (59%) defeated Ted Kennedy (31%) · 1976 - "Uncommitted" (37%) defeated Jimmy Carter* (28%) Birch Bayh (13%), Fred R. Harris (10%), Morris Udall (6%), Sargent Shriver (3%) and Henry M. Jackson (1%) · 1972 - Edmund Muskie (36%) defeated George McGovern (23%), Hubert Humphrey (2%), Eugene McCarthy (1%), Shirley Chisholm (1%) and Henry M. Jackson (1%) Republicans · 2004 - George W. Bush* (unopposed) · 2000 - George W. Bush* (41%) defeated Steve Forbes (30%), Alan Keyes (14%), Gary Bauer (9%), John McCain (5%) and Orrin Hatch (1%) · 1996 - Bob Dole (26%) defeated Pat Buchanan (23%), Lamar Alexander (18%), Steve Forbes (10%), Phil Gramm (9%), Alan Keyes (7%), Richard Lugar (4%) and Morry Taylor (1%) · 1992 - George H. W. Bush (unopposed) · 1988 - Bob Dole (37%) defeated Pat Robertson (25%), George H. W. Bush* (19%), Jack Kemp (11%) and Pete DuPont (7%) · 1984 - Ronald Reagan* (unopposed) · 1980 - George H. W. Bush (32%) defeated Ronald Reagan* (30%), Howard Baker (15%), John Connally (9%), Phil Crane (7%), John B. Anderson (4%) and Bob Dole (2%) · 1976 - Gerald Ford defeated Ronald Reagan How will exit polling work? Click here for a Q & A. Here are some interesting links: The Des Moines Register is urging Iowans to make and send in their own videos of the caucus experience. TV crews needing help finding standup locations should check here. Click here to compare the candidates on issues.
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