Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
It’s time to end Iowa’s outsized role in picking candidates, Florida Democratic leader Debbie Wasserman Schultz says.
Time to end Iowa’s outsized role in picking presidential candidates, they say
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said Tuesday it is long past the time to end Iowa’s early outsized role in picking presidential candidates.
The mess in collecting and releasing accurate results from Monday night’s Democratic presidential caucuses would probably hasten the demise, something she said is a good outcome.
“Iowa’s probably on its last breath of remaining as the first state using the caucus system,” Wasserman Schultz said on a conference call with reporters.
Caucuses aren’t a fair way to run elections, she said. Making it worse, she said, Iowa is a poor choice for culling presidential candidates because it so unrepresentative of what America looks like.
Wasserman Schultz, who represents Broward and Miami-Dade counties in Congress and was national party chairwoman for five years until the summer of 2016, said her view isn’t a result of the mess emanating from Monday night’s caucuses. The difficulties coming up with results from Monday’s caucuses are “almost beside the point.”
The national party’s rules allow four states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — to have early caucuses and primaries. Candidates who perform poorly in the first two, Iowa and New Hampshire, are generally so wounded that they don’t continue in the contest.
The theory is that voters in smaller states get a chance to get up and close to the candidates and can do a good job vetting them. Wasserman Schultz — who as national party chairwoman trekked several times to the Iowa State Fair — said Tuesday she had “tremendous respect” for Iowans and “the pride that they take in going first and their role in being a proving ground for presidential candidates.”
But that doesn’t overcome problems with the caucus system, which she called an “un-democratic” way of running an election. She said the party has been inching away from caucuses, and they should be completely eliminated.
Participation in caucuses requires people to go to a caucus location for a lengthy gathering, and publicly move to an area in which their choice is open to everyone to see. Then there’s movement in which supporters of the worstperforming candidates can join up with the better-performing candidates.
In primary states, traditional voting allows people a secret ballot and many more options to pick their favorite presidential candidate. In Florida, for example, voters can go to neighborhood polling stations on primary day, go to centralized early-voting locations in advance, or vote by mail.
“Caucuses are not a fair way to run elections. We need to make sure that we retain the principle of one person one vote, which is the commitment that we make in this country and you can see the complexity that has played out over the course of the last day or so that makes it clear as mud at the end of the day about who is going to come out of Iowa in the top couple or three slots,” she said.
Iowa has many more white residents and far fewer black and Hispanic residents than the rest of the country.
Wasserman Schultz said it would be better to rotate states that get to go early so there is a more diverse electorate providing the early vetting of candidates. “Honestly,
it would be a more significant test of the staying power of candidates if they had an opportunity to begin a presidential contest with more diverse states and a variety.”
Wasserman Schultz was picked by then-President Barack Obama to lead the national party. She resigned in the summer of 2016 after stolen internal Democratic
Party emails published by WikiLeaks showed party staffers favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in that year’s nominating contest.
A prominent Florida Republican, state Sen. Joe Joe Gruters of Sarasota, chairman of the state Republican Party, said Tuesday thinks Florida would be a better state than Iowa to have an early role in nominating presidential candidates because of its diversity.
“Florida is such a diverse state. If you win Florida, you are most likely going to win the White House. Why shouldn’t we be first, second or third? I think what we have to do is a better job as party leaders making that case with the Republican National Committee and the Ds have to make the case with the DNC and we have to do everything we can to move up that ladder. Now’s the perfect time to bring it up because Iowa fumbled the ball and hopefully Florida can pick it up,” he said.
Mitch Ceasar, a former chairman of the Broward Democratic Party, said he’d argue caucuses are a form of voter suppression because it’s hard for people with difficult family or work schedules to get the time to participate. Ceasar is one of several candidates running for county supervisor of elections this year.
Melissa Shiff, of Pompano Beach, flew to Des Moines on Thursday and spent several days canvassing for presidential candidate Joe Biden.
She observed a caucus Monday night and returned home Tuesday — convinced that the process must change.
“It’s an archaic system,” Shiff said. “It’s just not set up for today’s society.”
Going door to door, she spoke with people — parents who would have to pay for a sitter, seniors who said it was too cold and who couldn’t easily get around — who said it was too difficult to participate in such a lengthy event. “It isn’t walking in there and then voting and leaving,” she said.
Shiff’s ride-hailing driver, a young parent, was driving to make money Monday night on his second job and couldn’t take time off to caucus.
“Other people told me they don’t want their vote out in public. That’s a very private, democratic moment,” Shiff said.
The precinct she was at, in the Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, had 358 people. About 15 minutes into counting people supporting different candidates, organizers realized they had made a mistake and had to start over.
“At that point, I thought student council elections are run better than this,” said Shiff, a former educator. “What are we doing here? Why are we wasting people’s time?”
Christine Hunschofsky, the mayor of Parkland, spent the weekend canvassing for presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and was an observer at a caucus at Southview Middle School in Ankeny, Iowa.
The voting was “extremely well run, extremely transparent” for the 459 caucus-goers, Hunschofsky said. “There were no issues. There were no complaints.” She was surprised when she started reading on social media and hearing the news about the confusion in reporting results.
Hunschofsky said she had mixed feelings about the process. She said she liked that people stood openly for their candidates and was “very impressed to see how seriously the people of Iowa take this responsibility.”
But, she said, she’s concerned that the process may make it too hard for some people to participate.
“I’m thrilled I went,” Hunschofsky said, especially since there may never be another Iowa caucus.
Shiff said she’s glad she went, and that the Iowans she encountered were interesting and welcoming. But, she added, “I hope this is the last Iowa caucus that I will ever see. It is not a representation of America, the diverse population of America.”
“At that point, I thought student council elections are run better than this.”
Melissa Shiff,
of Pompano Beach