These Were the Iowa Caucuses We Always Needed
February 4, 2020
Many thanks to the election gods—or should we be thanking the software gods?—for soaking the Iowa caucuses in rocket-grade kerosene and setting a spark to them. As the caucuses burn all lemony yellow and happy ginger and finally turn to ash on the prairie, let’s cherish this debacle for the multi-course lesson it has taught us: We’ve learned that the Iowa Democratic Party can’t be trusted to count past 10 without taking off its shoes and socks; that the party’s wise men bought a crap-app to tabulate votes; and most of all, as we aim our view on New Hampshire, that the Iowa caucuses never really mattered. Thanks to this monumental whiff, we need never spend a moment’s attention on the Iowa caucuses again.
The idea that the Iowa caucuses don’t matter is not a novel idea. As they approached this cycle, the press and politicians reminded us that 90-percent white Iowa is in no way representative of the country, so it provides little intelligence into what the majority of voters think. We were reminded that the caucuses send an insignificant number of total delegates to the nominating convention (41 versus California’s 494) and that Iowa has no right to position itself at the head of the candidates’ pageant. Meanwhile, the press reminded us that the presidential candidates don’t much care for it, either. A New York Times piece from November titled “Why Almost Nobody Will Defend the Iowa Caucuses” told that story. The caucuses take place on an icy winter night when sensible people stay home near the fireplace or take their Florida vacations. As more than one observer has commented, it’s an unwieldy affair, more complicated than Calvinball and impossible to understand with or without a Ph.D. in political science. Candidates hate it, sensible reporters hate it, and I hate it. Only Iowans seem to like it, but that’s because it bathes them in flattering attention.
If Iowa really mattered, Mike Bloomberg—the richest and arguably the smartest guy running for president—would have arranged his schedule to run in the caucuses. Q.E.D.
Yet this correct and conventional wisdom—that the Iowa caucuses suck and should be drowned in a hog-manure lagoon—was instantly contested once the caucus app failed to deliver a prompt count. Instead of correctly viewing the caucuses as a nuisance that should be terminated, the press and the pols began hollering that the Iowa chaos was “incredibly damaging to democracy” (CNN) and were already feeding election conspiracy theories (Associated Press). “Democrats Did the Russians’ Work for Them,” read an opinion piece by Amanda Carpenter on the Bulwark. Mischievous Republicans like Brad Parscale and Donald Trump Jr. have seized on the conspiracy theme to claim that the election was stolen from Bernie Sanders. Even POLITICO’s Tim Alberta detected in the Iowa crack-up a diminution of confidence “in the institution of the ballot box.”
But both can’t be true. The Iowa caucuses can’t be a pernicious nuisance that should be ignored if we were to think soberly about politics and then a catastrophe for democracy when the people who run it fail to tabulate immediate results.
Why then do we pretend that the Iowa caucuses matter—whether they deliver a prompt count or not? The easy answer is that we’re easy marks for the pounding propaganda dispensed by both the Democratic and Republican parties and their candidates, that Iowa is consequential. The candidates create this illusion by spending untold sums erecting stages across the state on which the candidates dance. According to the Wesleyan Media Project, 2020 candidates and outside groups spent more than $44 million on TV ads alone in Iowa. Even though they know better, the press has been complicit in the Iowa propaganda campaign, crowding the state with cameras, journalists and breathless, clichéd reports.
The best justification for the press corps’ deep investment in Iowa coverage is that, as long as it has budgeted to cover the major-league contests, it doesn’t cost that much to cover the Little League games, too. Also, the campaign has to start somewhere, and the land of pigs and corn is a harmless place to beta-test its correspondents for the real show that will follow in the larger primary states. If you blinked and missed the Iowa coverage, trust me, you didn’t miss much.
Now that we’ve seen the Iowa caucuses in all their naked wretchedness, maybe we will finally summon the courage to avert our eyes in February 2024 when the carnival returns and the news stream clogs once more with its irrelevance. Just because a state goes first doesn’t mean we have to pay attention to it.
Iowa: Just say no.
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Don’t get me wrong, I like Iowa the state just fine. And I love its pig meat. My animus is limited only to the caucuses. Send your favorite Iowa itineraries via email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts favor pig BBQ. My Twitter feed, beef. My RSS feed is still on a starvation diet.
Source: https://www.politico.com/
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