About
the caucuses: Wholesome and hyped
By
Amy Jennings
Iowa Presidential Politics.com
Wholesome, small-town quirkiness paired with national
media hype have caused the meaning and significance of the Iowa
presidential
caucuses to undergo many transformations over the years.
Although participants in one of the nation’s
first presidential events do not select a single candidate
as a winner, the media have nevertheless portrayed Iowa as the
early
success indicator for presidential hopefuls.
In recent years,
experts have examined the caucuses to ascertain the actual
value and accuracy
of the outcome of the Iowa caucuses. In his book The
Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event,
Hugh Winebrenner concludes that although the results
mean
little, the hype
surrounding the
political process is perpetuated because it benefits the
state political parties, the media and the individual
candidates.
The Iowa caucuses are unlike the direct primary
voting practices in other states and are usually misunderstood by
people who are not active in the Iowa political
process. To begin with, the local caucuses are party-sponsored
events that select delegates to attend county conventions, which
in turn elect delegates
to district and state conventions, where the delegates to the national convention
are chosen. This process is different from state primary elections that count
votes for a specific candidate.
The caucuses are also used to determine platform
issues for the parties.
Republican
and Democratic caucuses are run differently. In order for a
candidate to be considered viable at a Democratic
caucus, the candidate's supporters must make up at least 15 percent of
the participants. The members of preference groups that do not
meet that minimum
have the opportunity
to realign with other, more popular candidates.
Delegate selection takes
place from these final groups, and the chair reports the number
of delegates who
are committed and uncommitted to each candidate. In a system of proportional
representation,
the Democratic party calculates the “delegate equivalents” of
each candidate from each precinct.
While Republicans have the option of using
proportional representation, they usually elect delegates to a county
convention on an at-large basis. Winebrenner
gives the example that if a precinct were electing six candidates at large,
then a caucus participant could vote for up to six candidates and
the individuals
who received the most votes would be elected regardless of their presidential
preference.
In the 1970s, the Republicans
initially did not report the preferences of the delegates elected,
but the party
now reports to Des
Moines the results of
a poll that it conducts prior to delegate selection.
The political process described above does
not occur in a vacuum. Since the 1970s, the media attention focused
on the Iowa caucuses
has caused the importance
of
the so-called “results” to be magnified. Political candidates
and campaigns now spend large quantities
of time in money in a state that, as Winebrenner points out, represented
only 1.3 percent of delegate totals for both Democrat and Republican conventions
in 1996.
By surveying
important
caucuses in the history of presidential races, Winebrenner asserts that
construction of greater importance for the Iowa caucuses is the result
of the interaction
of the media, the state political parties and the candidates themselves.
Winebrenner begins his argument for the inflated importance of the
Iowa caucuses with an examination of the 1972 Democratic caucus,
which
was
the first event to gain substantial attention following changes in party
rules. Sen. George McGovern was the first candidate to concentrate
support in
the caucuses,
and
he seemed
to correctly predict that Iowa would become an important first
success indicator
for presidential
hopefuls.
That year, the Democratic Party made adjustments to deliver
tangible results to the members of the national media that showed
up by calculating “national
delegate equivalents” and “state delegate equivalents” from
sample precincts. Winebrenner argues that projections made in this manner
are invalid and unreliable because no actual votes are counted. In addition,
participants
whose first choice candidates that don’t reach the 15 percent threshold
can realign with other candidates, which skews the supporter totals.
Winebrenner points to the 1976 Democratic presidential
caucuses as the first evidence of the media creating a set of
expectations
for candidates
based
on the caucuses. That year, presidential nominee hopeful Jimmy Carter
launched an early campaign in Iowa. After Carter won a straw poll at
the Jefferson-Jackson
Dinner, The New York Times reported him to be a front-runner in the
campaign.
After the media made this designation on the basis of
a single straw
poll in
Iowa, Winebrenner says that the media “framed” Carter with
the expectation that he would win the caucus and his performance would
be judged within that
frame. According the media sources cited in Winebrenner’s book,
such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal,
Carter fulfilled his
expectation to win, making his an “impressive” victory
rather than a “surprising” one,
which could have been the case if Carter had been framed earlier as
an underdog.
Winebrenner asserts that events in the 1980s
heightened and solidified media attention to the political process
in Iowa. Coverage by 300 reporters as well as TV crews marked recognition
of the caucuses as an important political event. Winebrenner asserts
that the 1980 caucuses are the first to have
a substantial effect on the presidential election, when the media
interpreted the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Ted Kennedy
to be in trouble
after a loss in Iowa. He says the validity of
the reporting mechanisms used by the state parties to produce tangible
results for reporters
also was called into question during the 1980 caucus.
Just as the media and political candidates
made Iowa an important event, they also wielded the same power to
diminish that importance
in some ways. The author
says that the front-loading of primaries and the reliance of candidates
on paid TV ads caused the caucuses to become less important after
1984. He cites George Bush and Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bob
Dole in 1996 as examples of candidates who had enough money to
recover from early losses in Iowa.
Although
Iowa may not be as crucial a venue as it was in the 1970s
and early 1980s, Winebrenner points out that the field of candidates
also was substantially narrower in
some later years.
Winebrenner examines the caucuses in depth
from 1972 to 1996 to determine that although the Iowa caucuses do
not produce viable results, the
media often overlook this fact in a quest for reportable results.
As a consequence, early media interpretations based on the Iowa caucuses
become the reality of
the campaign and a frame in which candidates must solicit support.
Winebrenner challenges the media to find a better way to serve the
political needs of the
American public than creating frames from insignificant events like
the Iowa caucuses.
E-mail
Amy Jennings at amy.jennings@gazettecommunicationscom
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