This is the last Jim-written Morning Jolt until Monday, June 26. On the menu today: The Iowa Democratic Party wants to ignore the punishment of the Democratic National Committee and continue to vote first, holding a rogue caucus that sounds an awful lot like a primary — which may well run afoul of the law in not just one state but two. Meanwhile, President Biden may well concede both Iowa and New Hampshire, allowing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to begin the process with two easy wins. Finally, the entire image of Iowa as the place where a man can become president by charming small audiences and shaking enough hands in enough diners is built on a myth that started back in the 1970s. Iowans probably won’t like what’s in today’s newsletter, but they need to hear it all the same.
Iowa Democrats’ Rogue Caucus
The current plan of the Iowa Democratic Party is to hold its presidential caucus on the same night as the Republicans in January or February 2024. But the state’s Democrats won’t be voting at their caucus meetings; under the party’s proposed plan, Iowans will express their presidential preference through mail-in cards. On caucus night, Iowa Democrats will gather for their traditional meetings and conduct party business; the Iowa Democratic Party will announce the results of the caucus at some later date.
This is another early state rebellion, akin to what’s happening in New Hampshire. You may recall that, earlier this year, the Democratic National Committee overwhelmingly voted to adopt a schedule suggested by President Biden, making South Carolina the first contest and moving New Hampshire to second, sharing its primary date with Nevada. Biden and the DNC kicked Iowa out of the time period of the first few primaries entirely.
This was because the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses were a spectacularly mismanaged disaster. It took three days for the state party to tabulate the results, which used to be available the night of the caucus, live, on television, late in the evening, in the era before the Internet. The caucuses were held Monday evening; by Wednesday afternoon, not only could the state party not provide the full results or say when it would be able provide full results, it also could not explain why it could not provide full results. Because both the Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders campaigns requested a partial recanvass, the state party didn’t offer a final delegate count until a month later; on February 27, the Associated Press announced, “Following the initial delay in reporting results, and after observing irregularities in those results, the Associated Press has decided it will not declare a winner in Iowa.”
It is safe to say that this was the biggest embarrassment in the presidential-nomination process for any state in modern history, and it looked like the Iowa caucuses were going to be the biggest disaster of 2020 until everything else in the world said, “Hold my beer.”
You won’t find a lot of “attaboys” for the DNC in this newsletter, but in these circumstances, the party committee had every right in the world to kick Iowa to the back of the line. As the meme goes, “You had one job.”
And now, the Iowa Democratic Party’s response to its punishment is, “To heck with you. We’re going to go first again anyway.” Yes, it completely fumbled on its biggest, most consequential duty, but in the minds of its members, that’s no reason to deny the party the right to choose a presidential nominee before every other citizen in every other state gets to cast a ballot.
There are several complications to the Iowa Democrats’ plan. For starters, the Republican-dominated Iowa state government just passed a law requiring political parties that are selecting delegates as part of the presidential-nominating process to do so at precinct caucuses that “shall take place in person among the participants physically present at the location of each precinct caucus.”
Right now, in some eyes, the Iowa Democrats’ plan violates state law. Iowa Democratic Party chair Rita Hart argued that the state government didn’t have the authority to set that limit: “It is my solid belief that one political party cannot tell another political party what to do or how to conduct its business.” Other Democrats argue that because the state’s delegates to the national convention will be selected in person at county conventions, the Iowa state party is already complying with the legislation.
Then there’s a New Hampshire state law which says:
The presidential primary election shall be held on the second Tuesday in March or on a date selected by the secretary of state which is 7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election, whichever is earlier, of each year when a president of the United States is to be elected or the year previous.
If Iowans are casting their ballots for the Democratic presidential nominee by mail instead of at a traditional caucus meeting . . . are Iowa Democrats holding a caucus, or a primary?
The Cedar Rapids Gazette editorialized, “The goal is to make the caucus process more accessible to elderly and disabled Iowans, as well as shift workers and others who can’t attend a long caucus gathering on a cold night in February.” I’m glad to see Iowans recognizing that a caucus, because of its strict schedule and long time commitment, does not enable as much participation as a primary; people have only been making these arguments for decades.
But there’s a strong argument that because everyone is now voting by mail, Iowa now has a primary, not a caucus, meaning that whatever date Iowa requires for those cards to be returned, New Hampshire must hold its primary seven days earlier; otherwise, New Hampshire state election officials are violating their state law. (“Officer! Arrest that man! He didn’t schedule our state’s primary early enough!”)
As Axios noted, at least for now, the message from Biden and his aides is that he will not compete, or even appear on the ballot, in any state that holds a rogue primary before the DNC deadlines. This is spectacular news for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who could well win both Iowa and New Hampshire by default because the incumbent president doesn’t want his name on the ballot. In fact, prepare yourself for a world where Marianne Williamson finishes second in the first two contests. Take that, dark psychic forces!
You can sympathize with New Hampshire Democrats; they have run their primaries smoothly every time, and the DNC still kicked them back a few places, suggesting that the new schedule prioritizing South Carolina might be driven by which states voted for Biden in the previous primary and which ones didn’t.
But it’s also more than fair for those of us in the other 48 states to grumble that these two states have such wildly disproportionate influence in the nomination process and get so much attention from candidates compared to everyone else. (No, my objection does not extend to South Carolina. Yes, I’m spending next week there, why do you ask?) You could argue that the entire system of federal ethanol subsidies exists because of the importance of Iowa in the presidential-nominating process.
Late last year, the AP’s Thomas Beaumont laid out how the image of Iowa and its special role in selecting America’s presidents in the last quarter of the 20th century was largely mythical and romanticized — a misleading narrative that did a lot for professional political operators in the Hawkeye State, but didn’t necessarily serve anyone else all that well:
To much of the nation, the caucuses were a quadrennial curiosity, seen in TV shots framed by snowy cornfields, with a reminder piece the summer before featuring candidates awkwardly sampling the Iowa State Fair’s menu of fried food or gazing at a life-sized cow carved from butter.
The seeds of the myth were etched into the national narrative in the 1970s by a cadre of political writers, mostly from Washington, who tracked Indiana’s Birch Bayh, Arizona’s Mo Udall, Idaho’s Frank Church and an obscure governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, to cafes, VFW halls and living rooms.
Their stories offered a sheen of quaint civic responsibility, citizens meeting candidates, often several times, and a willingness to brave a bone-chilling winter night for them.
Despite the lore, Carter did not actually win Iowa. He received more votes than his rivals, but more participants chose “uncommitted.” The early votes weren’t even binding and were actually just the first step in a national delegate selection process ultimately determined at the state convention months later.
Having a contest where rules allowed for no winner was an early sign the arcane process would one day become a key point in the argument against keeping Iowa first.
But in 1976, the legend was born. An outsider could generate momentum heading into the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary election.
As I am fond of pointing out, if you could ever catapult yourself to the presidency by shaking enough hands in enough diners, those days are long gone. As I noted about two weeks ago when I was allegedly a pro-DeSantis shill — as opposed to a week later, when I was allegedly an anti-DeSantis shill — somebody’s always running the 1976 playbook and hoping for similar results:
Every cycle, there’s at least one candidate who bets their campaign on the idea of retail campaigning, and naively believes that they can shake enough hands in enough diners to win the Iowa caucus or New Hampshire primary. It never works out. (Back in 2007, then-Connecticut senator and presidential candidate Chris Dodd moved to Iowa, and it didn’t do a darn bit of good.)
Back in 1976, the total participation in the Iowa Democratic caucus was 39,039 people. Presuming we can trust the numbers of the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucus, 176,352 people participated. Turnout has steadily increased on the GOP side as well; 186,932 people voted in the 2016 GOP Iowa caucus. A candidate cannot personally charm tens of thousands of Iowans, in-person and one-on-one, no matter how early they start.
I can hear it now; those with a vested interest in keeping Iowa at the center of the political universe will insist that there’s something special about Iowans, that they take their duties seriously by showing up and listening carefully to the candidates — as if the residents of every other state in the union weren’t capable of doing that, too. No one magically becomes more attentive, thoughtful, or a better judge of candidates’ characters and abilities by moving to a new home over the state line.
Why do so many Californians seem to tune out of politics? Maybe it’s because most national political figures use the state as an ATM, flying in to attend glitzy, high-dollar fundraisers and then flying out. If California went first in the presidential-nominating process, Californians would pay a heck of a lot more attention to the presidential race!
Right now, the last states on the primary calendar, according to FrontloadingHQ, are Kentucky, Oregon, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota. There’s nothing wrong with any of those states. (Insert New Jersey joke here.) The residents of those states haven’t committed any political sin or done anything to deserve to vote last in the process, when they will have the least impact on whom the party nominates.
The country would probably be better off if the presidential-nomination process rotated which states voted early and which ones voted last. But we’re a long, long ways away from that kind of sweeping reform becoming reality. As we’re seeing, the DNC can’t even push Iowa back a few spots for screwing up the election results.
ADDENDUM: Over at Commentary, Abe Greenwald lays out the evidence that the United States is shifting from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, which will have all kinds of deleterious effects:
Trust is the key ingredient in what’s known as “social capital,” which we can define as the benefits accrued by people in social networks. And these benefits are plentiful. High-trust societies are characterized by increased wealth, less crime and corruption, and greater transparency. Low-trust societies are associated with impaired economies, higher crime and corruption, and ill-defined norms.
And there’s this: A free country without trust cannot long survive as a free country. Trust undergirds our social contract and thwarts the authoritarian tendencies of government. Decreases in public trust, on the other hand, create opportunities for state intervention. It’s when we can no longer enter into profitable relationships in good faith that the regulators, rule-makers, and enforcers come calling.