Today is the first chance to cast votes in the 2016 presidential election. Once again, Iowans will choose between presidential nominees with an ego they don’t deserve.
The Iowa caucuses, set to begin tonight at 7:00 p.m. across the state’s 99 counties, act as predictors for how each party’s nomination will turn out, as well as a way of vetting candidates for the nation’s highest office. But on both counts, Iowa has always been a poor predictor of who ends up winning the party nominations and general election.
The Iowa caucuses are skewed and undemocratic. They take away almost all the impact that primary voters in bigger states, such as Pennsylvania, could possibly have on the nominating process.
Historically speaking, the Iowa contest has very little tradition backing up its notoriety.
It wasn’t until the ’70s that the state’s caucus received any kind of media scrutiny. In 1972, Sen. George McGovern, D-South Dakota, used Iowa as part of his run challenging the traditional nominating procedure in the Democratic Party. In the aftermath of the messy Democratic Convention four years prior, which included protesters violently clashing with police, McGovern helped push the McGovern-Fraser Commission through the Democratic National Committee.
The commission essentially modified the traditional nominating process, which had mostly been the affair of elite party leaders, to today’s primary-centric model. But while these reforms might seem to make the process more democratic, they really haven’t. And a number of problems in today’s nominating process stem from the expansion of Iowa’s power.
First, it’s important to note that McGovern didn’t even grab a plurality of votes in Iowa’s 1972 caucuses — he came in third. But media portrayal of McGovern as doing better than expected gave him enough momentum to win a large majority of delegates at the Democratic Convention.
Another effect of the shift to focus on Iowa appeared in McGovern’s enormous loss that November to incumbent President Richard Nixon. Pegged by Republicans as the candidate of “acid, amnesty and abortion,” he was woefully too liberal for many Democrats. Texas’ then-governor, Democrat John Connally, even led an extensive movement of “Democrats for Nixon,” denouncing McGovern as unrepresentative of the party.
Iowan voters pushing extreme candidates without nationwide support forces strong candidates to repackage themselves. Just four years ago, the state notably picked former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania, over the eventual GOP nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Fortunately, we don’t have to contemplate how disasterous a Santorum campaign in the general election would be, but the “conviction candidate” still managed to harm Republican prospects in the general race against President Obama in 2012.
After losing in Iowa and a host of other early states, Romney was forced to shift campaign messaging to portray himself as more conservative than his record as governor of Massachusetts suggested. Not only did Romney’s loss in Iowa push him to the right, but some, including the Washington Post, branded him as having a serious “flip-flop problem” because of it.
Iowa does not have a representative demographic. Part of the reason the state has such a poor record of choosing eventual nominees has to do with the fact that issues they supported, or even just considered important, in Iowa are not necessarily so in the rest of the nation.
Those looking for the influence of Iowa-specific standards this election cycle need only look at Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign.
The conservative senator relies heavily on votes from the evangelical population, which made up more than half of the 2012 Republican caucuses in Iowa. But on the national level, evangelical Christians make up just 25.4 percent of all Americans, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center study.
Cruz’s campaign has also taken hits recently for his stance against continuing federal subsidies for Iowa’s large ethanol industry. At the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit on Jan. 19, the state’s longtime Republican governor, Terry Branstad, went so far as to advise Republicans in the state to vote against the Texas senator.
While these concerns are significant to Iowans, they should not drive national political leadership. They do not matter as much in New Hampshire or South Carolina, but they will still have a hand in driving the entire conversation up to those contests.
We don’t know what tonight’s outcome will mean for primary voters in Pennsylvania and the 2016 presidential race. But it’s a safe bet that we won’t have much of a say in who gets to run as the Republican and Democratic nominees.
Despite having a substantial 188 delegates to send to the Democratic Convention and 74 to the GOP, our April 26 primary date puts us months behind the first votes in Iowa and likely gives us very little choice of candidates. Iowa has a population equal to about one-fourth that of Pennsylvania’s, but it will, unfairly, help decide our voters’ options.
This oversized influence on national politics needs to go.
Although it may have sprung from a movement to make the primaries more democratic, the state’s small, unrepresentative population and poor track record of candidate selection outweigh any positive influence the caucuses have on the nominating process.
A better method for selecting the Republican and Democratic nominees for president could involve a popular vote among registered members of each party nationwide. Even the original method of selection via the leadership-only, smoke-filled room could probably yield better candidates.
If you’re planning on having a real say this election cycle, you better start learning how to grow corn now.
Henry primarily writes on government and domestic policy for the Pitt News.
Write Henry at [email protected].