Iowa

The polls essentially are counts of votes by likely caucus attendees. If a poll is done properly, its measure of opinion about the candidates should be similar to the tabulation of votes on caucus night. But if a poll does manage to precisely forecast the results of the Jan. 3 caucuses, that is probably more coincidence than polling accuracy.
That's because Iowa Democrats shun public disclosure of voter preferences at their caucuses -- something not generally reported by the press or understood by the public.
An early order of business in each Democratic precinct caucus in Iowa is a count of the candidate preferences of the attendees. For all practical purposes, this is just what the polls try to measure. But Iowa Democrats keep the data hidden. The one-person, one-vote results from each caucus are snail-mailed to party headquarters and placed in a database, never disclosed to the press or made available for inspection.



The above is from Gilbert Cranberg, Herb Strentz and Glenn Roberts' "Iowa’s Undemocratic Caucuses" which ran on Tuesday's op-ed pages of The New York Times. The authors ("Gilbert Cranberg is a former editor of the editorial page of The Des Moines Register. Herb Strentz is a former executive secretary of Iowa’s Freedom of Information Council. Glenn Roberts is a former director of research for The Register") go on to explain that the popular results are not reported and that delegates from areas does not demonstrate the actual popular support in Iowa for any candidate (if that's lost on you, carry it over to the electoral college).



Last week, "Mailbag" responded to MSM believer Milton and noted this on a previous New York Times column:



That column ran on A25 of the paper's January 7, 2004 edition. It is entitled "How to Be an Iowan for a Day" and is written by Dan Savage. From Savage's column: "As a citizen and, um, a respectable journalist, I was appalled when I learned that you didn't need a valid voter registration card or proof of residency -- any identification at all -- to take part in Iowa's caucuses. . . . With huge numbers of volunteers and true believers flooding into the state, the potential for mischief seemed huge." Savage participated -- non-Iowan Savage -- in the January 2000 Iowa caucus and got away with it. He only got punished when he wrote about it. I have no idea why you couldn't find it but the article ran in 2004 and we're not going to hunt down a link to spoonfeed you.



Milton, we've spoonfed you this week, you get a link and don't have to go to the trouble of actually using a search engine.



If you're still not grasping how Iowa should not be allowed to kick off the primary season (it doesn't have a primary, it has a caucus), consider that two weeks ago, in a report on the candidates, The New York Times seemed amused that Hillary Clinton found it surprising that giving an entire hour over to one man for face time didn't result in his support. Only in Iowa. Any other state, she would have found a supporter, a foe or someone thrilled to have 30 minutes, let alone an hour, to share her or his thoughts on government and the president's role.



The popular lie is that Iowans go first because they care so much about politics. Proportionally, that's not true when looking at turnout for Iowa and, of course, it's impossible to measure it against the forty-nine other states because there is no rotation of who goes first. Cycle after cycle, we're left with Iowa which is not representative of the country.



Cycle after cycle, that state gets catered to and babied. This year Florida stood firm and said they weren't going to play this nonsense presidential election year after presidential election year. We applaud their stand and boo and hiss the national Democratic Party's response to it.



If you're one of the ones who thinks, "Well you just don't do that at the last minute," fine. But realize that something needs to be done and it needs to be done before 2012 presidential election season (which, if the pushing up continues, may start in 2010).



In the US, presidential elections are held every four years. Think: What else is held every four years?



Did the Olympics come to mind? Every four years, there is a summer and a winter Olympics. They are not held in the same area cycle after cycle. Instead, every nation participating gets a shot at hosting them. By the same token, every state should have a chance at being the first to hold a primary. The Democratic Party should have long ago grasped that.



Instead, they want to piss off Florida voters with threats. The ones who should be pissed off are those living in the 49 states other than Iowa.



Leaving aside the immense flaws in Iowa's system and the fact that is does not have a primary, there is the issue of basic fairness. How many years is Iowa going to be allowed to have all the candidates cater to them? Speaking with Krys Boyd on Think, Wesley Clark noted that California and Texas don't even see candidates after the primaries because the states are considered 'sewn' up. (Dallas says that in 2004, Howard Dean came to the city of Dallas and John Kerry went to Austin, others may have shown up elsewhere as well during the primary.) That's appalling but even more appalling is the fact that one state gets months of opportunities to interact with all candidates during the primaries and most of the other states are not so fortunate.



Iowas don't care "more" but they do get bombarded more with local media because the candidates are in-state, making speeches, meeting with people, attending events. We think candidates would get similar attention in any state they had to campaign in the way they do Iowa.



It's past time for the Democratic Party to start showing fairness and stop catering to one state (even New Hampshire doesn't get the kind of face time Iowa does).



We applaud the move Florida made and we applaud even more the fact that they refused to back down. If the DNC wants to attempt to strip the state of their delegates to the national convention, there should be a huge outcry from across the nation. This wasn't just about Florida, it was about those living in Florida and the rest of the states, the bulk of the states, where a candidate rarely shows up, let alone spends week meeting with citizens.