Every four years, Democratic presidential candidates set up field offices, recruit armies of volunteers, and crisscross the state for months, courting voters at fish fries, corn roasts, vet halls, anywhere they can shake hands and make a pitch.
In a more representative democracy, candidates would spend the time leading up to primary season traveling around the whole country, introducing their policy ideas to all voters, but in the current primary schedule Democratic candidates are stuck in Iowa for six months to a year. The vast majority of states—including California, which has ten times’ Iowa’s population—get shortchanged, receiving drive-by campaign stops and limited exposure to the candidates.
Thanks to the inertia of the Democratic National Committee’s primary commission, which sets the schedule, the Iowa caucus has far more importance than the primaries that come after. Since 2000, the winner of the Iowa caucus has gone on to become the Democratic nominee in every open election cycle.
The flaws in this model are many. On the most basic level, caucuses are at odds with the Democratic Party’s core belief in voting rights and the power of the franchise. Turnout at the caucuses is very low; 2008 was a record year, yet only 16% of eligible voters participated in the process. Delegates in Iowa aren’t awarded based on a one-person, one-vote standard, but on a candidate’s ability to pack as many supporters as possible into each of Iowa’s 1,681 precincts on election night. The candidate who best manipulates this system gets the most delegates, regardless of their level of support among Democratic voters statewide, and wins loads of positive media coverage (and momentum) for the primaries that follow.
The fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Iowa caucuses aside, why would a party which has embraced urban America, inclusion, and diversity for several decades give its most important primary slot to one of the whitest, most rural states in the country?
Democrats have long dominated vote totals in cities and among people of color. In a 2018 Pew survey, African-Americans supported Democrats over Republicans 84-8%, Asians supported Democrats over Republicans 65-27%, and Latinos supported Democrats over Republicans 63-28%. Nationwide, 39% of Democrats are people of color, a number which will increase as the U.S. continues on its path to becoming a minority-majority country.
By contrast, Iowa has no real cities and homogeneous demographics. The largest town in Iowa is Des Moines, which tops out at a population of 217,000, the 101st biggest in America. Iowa’s demographics are what one would expect in a typical red state: 90% white, 3% black, 2% Asian.
Not surprisingly, considering its demographics, Iowa is a red state. From 1988-2012 Iowa voted Democratic in six out of seven presidential elections, but the good people of the Hawkeye state warmed to Donald Trump’s red-white-and-blue racist fury in 2016, giving Trump a lopsided ten-point victory. In 2018, Democrats beat Republicans by nine million votes in House races, and nearby swing states Wisconsin and Michigan elected Democrats at the statewide level, but Iowa voters kept Republicans in control of both houses of the legislature and gave incumbent Republican governor Kim Reynolds four more years. Iowa also has a Republican-controlled state supreme court, leaving Democrats with no levers of power in the state.
If Iowa were still a swing state, one could argue that the national Democratic Party should try to correct this power imbalance, but election results and polling indicate that Iowa’s lurch to the right has settled in. Despite Trump’s low approval ratings, current polls show him beating all Democratic candidates in Iowa, including front-runner Joe Biden, without having run a single negative ad. Theoretically the Democratic nominee might win Iowa in the general election if they invested heavily in TV ads and made several pit stops in the fall of 2020, but time and money are finite and Iowa has just six electoral college votes; it would make little sense to rob bigger, more competitive states of the resources.
In sum, a rural, overwhelmingly white Republican stronghold with an undemocratic caucus system and six electoral college votes has a better-than-even chance at choosing the next Democratic presidential nominee. The upshot is that Democratic candidates are forced to spend the bulk of their time before February 3rd in Iowa, though they have no incentive to return to Iowa for the rest of the campaign.
2024 is a long way off. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has plenty of time to fix this systems error. The solution is simple: move Iowa to the back of the 2024 schedule and pick for the opening primary a state that will be contested in the general election. Possibilities include Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, states with urban centers and more electoral college votes than Iowa that Democrats have to win (which is why the DNC chose Milwaukee for this summer’s convention).
At one time, there may have been a sound strategic reason to lead the Democratic primary season with the populist politics of swing state Iowa, but history has moved on and much of the rest of America has evolved. If the Democratic Party is true to its progressive principles in 2024, it will seize the future, rather than cling to the past.
Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter
More political writing by Dan Benbow:
Lingering Myths of the 2016 presidential election:
Bernie was robbed by the DNC!
The Iraq War turns 16; America sleeps
The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens
are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
(a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism
of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust
More political writing by Dan Benbow:
Lingering Myths of the 2016 presidential election:
Bernie was robbed by the DNC!
The Iraq War turns 16; America sleeps
The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens
are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
(a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism
of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
