Opinion
The Iowa Caucus is a waste of time
By Jonathan Kirshenbaum ’19
February 11, 2016
Tags opinion
Over a year after the start of Democalypse 2016—a term coined by the hilarious Jon Stewart—there is a celebrated event that is the proverbial starting gun of the American presidential elections: The Iowa Caucus. But amongst all the pomp and circumstance, one critical truth is often neglected: the Iowa caucuses are the antithesis of the representative and accessible democracy that Americans fiercely fought for and defended over the past two and a half centuries.
Even at its most basic level, the very procedures of caucusing seem backward. Proponents will laud the open, grassroots cosmopolitics where Iowa’s engaged citizens join together to carry out the mantra of a government of, by, and for the people. However, the simple fact of the Iowa caucuses is that they inherently guarantee low voter turnout. In 2008—the previous “open election” when neither party had an incumbent candidate—the caucus’s turnout of 350,000 was trumpeted as a record-breaking showing. But as Thomas Patterson of the Kennedy School of Government points out, this supposedly “earth-shattering” participation rate actually amounts to just 16.3 percent of the eligible electorate. In contrast, New Hampshire, the nation’s first primary state, saw a combined voter turnout of 51.9 percent.
There’s a reason for that. As a primary state, New Hampshire’s polls are open all day. Voters can punch their ballot on their morning commute, on their way to pick up the kids from school or even after dinner. From start to finish the whole process takes no more than 30 minutes. In Iowa, you have to be at the caucus location, in person—on a usually freezing February night—at 6:30 p.m. in order to participate. If you are a parent, ER nurse, custodian or anyone who doesn’t work a 9 to 5 job, you are effectively shut out of the process. Therefore, turnout is low because Iowans don’t drop everything and run to the caucus centers the way that some media correspondents and party-leaders would make you believe. For most Americans, getting their work done or spending a night with the family is a more appealing way to spend an evening than letting their ears freeze off.
So why then, every year on the first week of February, do some 320 million pairs of eyes snap to their televisions when the caucuses start? Simple. Because they’re first.
Regardless of its eventual consequences, the Iowa Caucus is the first official event in a long, drawn-out selection process that will last for the following nine months. After already a year of candidates’ speculation and beating around the bush, Americans are anxiously chomping at the bit like a racehorse that has been kept at the starting gate for too long.
Okay, but as starting states go, what’s so bad about Iowa? It is a state that enjoys a lofty literacy rate, exceptionally high voter turnout in general elections and is left relatively untouched by gerrymandered congressional districts.
But Iowa has a dirty little secret that champions of the caucus would like you to overlook: it’s not really a state representative of “The Great American Melting Pot.” According to census data, Iowa is 90.2 percent white, 3.2 percent black and 4.4 percent Hispanic (for comparison, that puts it in the top five whitest states in the republic). Democratic party official Joe Trippi notes that “After Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic primary race is an electorate that is 54 percent white and 46 percent minority,” making a victory in Iowa and New Hampshire—or the hairline split between Sen. Sanders and Sec. Clinton that the caucuses produced—about as unreflective a measure of Democratic inclination as imaginable.
The same problem exists for the Republicans. Nearly 57 percent of GOP Iowans consider themselves Christians, higher than any other non-southern or border state. This at least partially explains why Mike Huckabee, an ordained minister, beat out Mitt Romney in 2008, and why Rick Santorum narrowly did the same thing in 2012, despite neither candidate having an inkling of national appeal.
But it’s more than polarized demographics that prohibit caucuses from living under the banner of democracy. Every modern democracy has adopted “the secret ballot” in its popular voting processes, including the United States. After disastrously corrupt elections in the 1800s, the U.S. threw out the system that required voters to publicly display which candidate they supported. So how do the Democratic caucuses make sense when voters stand in groups depending on who they support?
If the questionable at best interpretation of democracy and ridiculous demographic representations aren’t enough to jade your opinions of the caucuses, how about this: They don’t make any sense. If you ask even the most senior Democratic official how many caucus votes Obama got in 2008, he won’t be able to tell you. In fact, no one will be able to tell you, because Iowa Democrats don’t count votes in their caucuses.
Hugh Winebrenner, a professor at Drake University, explains that the purpose of the Democratic caucus was never to conduct the sort of straw poll like the Republicans do. But when the caucuses became the measure for the first nominating event, they have to come up with some form of “results.” That’s why today, the Democrats deal in “state delegate equivalents” instead of actual votes.
Greenfield posits a situation where a hypothetical caucus is allocated eight delegates. Under current rules, the candidate with a threshold of 85 percent of that caucus’ participants would get all eight delegates. So if 100 people show up, and 87 of them support Bernie Sanders, he’d get all the delegates. Fair enough, right? But if 500 people show up, and 499 of them are supporting him, the final results wouldn’t change one bit; he still gets the same eight delegates. When you look at the most recent caucuses that were decided by some coin-flip brouhaha—that’s another piece for another time—you can see just how faulted this system actually is.
As for the Republicans, there is a secret destructive truth that every GOP caucus winner must quietly acknowledge: The Iowa caucuses have never had any serious impact on the ultimate outcome of determining their nominee.
Whatever the final consequence of this election is, one thing will not change: the Iowa Caucuses will persist in their role as the first, fundamentally flawed stop on the presidential nominating trail. As Joe Biden remarked in 2007 after not caucusing as well as hoped, “This isn’t a caucus—it’s an industry.”