Kill the caucuses
The best thing about the 2020 Iowa caucuses is that it may be the end of the Iowa caucuses. In fact, if we take the long view, we should be celebrating the debacle that occurred Monday night. As a longtime venomous critic of the Iowa caucuses, I couldn’t be happier.
To catch you up: Someone thought it was a good idea to have workers at each caucus report in their results on a brand-new app that hadn’t been tested, with the predictable result that the whole thing melted down.
Even the idea of winning was made more complex this year as the state party decided to report three sets of results: the initial vote totals, the final vote totals (after supporters of candidates who failed to reach 15 percent in each caucus were reallocated) and the winners of delegates to the state convention, which is the real result.
About that 15 percent rule: If you tuned in to cable news and watched correspondents running around middle school gyms explaining that one candidate’s supporters didn’t reach the threshold of viability and so had to find another candidate, you probably asked: What’s the point of that?
Good question. Why on Earth should a candidate who gets 14 percent of the vote in a given precinct get zero votes when the results are tabulated? How is that supposed to be democratic?
If we’re really lucky, this might be the occasion for significant reform. The absolute minimum that should be done is for Iowa to switch from a caucus to a primary, in which—see if you can follow along here—voters cast ballots, either at a polling place or mailing them in from home, and then the person with the most votes wins. Imagine that!
What would be even better is if we finally took the opportunity to end Iowa’s first-in-thenation status. Yes, it’s literally written into state law (the same is true in New Hampshire), but as Michael Tomasky suggested, you could solve that problem with a little hardball, such as punishing candidates if they campaign more than a small number of days there. The goal would be to turn Iowa, whenever it happens, into just another contest and not the be-all end-all that it is now.
Fortunately, lots of people seem to be realizing that the Iowa caucuses are irredeemable. This item from Politico in particular stood out:
“If one thing was certain from Monday’s debacle, Iowa had just signed its death warrant as the first-in-the-nation caucus state,” legendary Des Moines Register political reporter David Yepsen said.
“This fiasco means the end of the caucuses as a significant American political event. The rest of the country was already losing patience with Iowa anyway and this cooks Iowa’s goose. Frankly, it should,” Yepsen said.
It is hard to overstate how shocking it is to hear that coming from David Yepsen, who for a couple of decades was the most influential political reporter in Iowa. For him to announce the death of the Iowa caucuses is like hearing John Madden announce the death of football.
But three years from now, the Republican and Democratic parties in Iowa will tell us that they’ve worked out all the kinks, everything is fine, and we can proceed with the caucuses just like usual, with those supposedly civic-minded and well-informed Iowa voters ready to tell the rest of us who our president ought to be.
Don’t let them get away with it. No one state deserves the status Iowa took for itself, and it has shown it can’t manage it. The country needs to take control of the election out of Iowa’s hands.