Let me be honest here. Obama won Iowa by 9 percentage points because of the caucus system. I'm not saying he wouldn't have won Iowa in a straight vote, the numbers show that he almost certainly would have. But he definitely wouldn't have had the same margin of victory, nor would he have had quite the ensuing surge in the media that followed that news. Let's look at the numbers in New Hampshire vs Iowa: (from CNN.com's election center coverage - http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries)
Iowa:
Obama - 38%
Edwards - 30%
Clinton - 29%
Richardson - 2%
Biden - 1%
Kucinich - 0%
New Hampshire:
Clinton - 39%
Obama - 37%
Edwards - 17%
Richardson - 5%
Kucinich - 1%
For those of you that don't know how that caucus system works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucus
The low numbers of second tier candidates in Iowa vs the slightly higher numbers seen in New Hampshire indicate that several voters probably decided to switch candidates after their original choice turned out not to be viable. With the unlikelihood that a Richardson or Kucinich supporter would ever consider Hillary Clinton, it's a safe bet to assume that both Obama and Edwards got a boost, which may have been what led to Clinton's third place finish.
Now what these numbers ALSO show, is that if New Hampshire had a caucus system, Obama definitely could have won New Hampshire as well! Still, I won't get into the relative merits of a caucus system right now. What I want to focus on is how much attention these early races are getting in the media. You won't find a single news broadcast for a month that doesn't devote almost half it's time to primary coverage, and the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries have been hugely hyped.
This is why the media is goofy. They hype these races not necessarily out of their importance but because of their need to improve ratings and get people to watch their broadcasts. To get people to watch their networks they need to hype the importance of these races so that people will care about them, and feel that they are important enough to pay close attention to them. Then, since people are so convinced by the media that these races are so important, their voting patterns are influenced by the results of the early races, which are otherwise nearly statistically insignificant. Now part of the problem is that the primary system is incredibly ineffective. It cripples the chances of candidates that don't have big money backing by weeding them out early based not on their ideas or experience but based on how much money they can afford to spend campaigning in the early states. This has always been a problem with the current system, but the new problem turns out to be the 24 hour news cycle.
in 1992, Bill Clinton was heralded as the comeback kid because of his 2nd place victory in New Hampshire. An afterthought in the Iowa caucuses, he managed to crawl back into the primary race due to his brilliant politiking and the fact that he hadn't yet been written off by the public or the media. Yet now, in 2008, Hillary's campaign was deemed almost dead after barely placing third in ONE STATE, and Edward's campaign is now deemed lifeless after a second and a third place finish. In under two decades the importance of the state of Iowa, which was already incredibly important in deciding the primary races, has skyrocketed.
One of the things that I told people when I was campaigning in Iowa (for a whole one day, what a champion of democracy I am), was that they had the unique opportunity of being an Iowa caucus voter, and therefore had an incredibly disproportionate ability to influence the course of the nation. The truth was, and still is, that the next president will almost certainly be a democrat, and they had the ability to choose who that democrat would be. That message certainly rang true with many Iowa voters, seeing as how the number of people participating in the Iowa democratic caucuses nearly doubled from about 120,000 in 2004 to almost 230,000 in 2008. Still, the system doesn't make a lot of sense, not just because it focuses on the horse-race personality contest, because all elections in America do now-days. But because such a huge influence on the future of our nation is placed on less than 1% of our nation's population.
The motivation seems evident to move all the primaries to the same date, or at least move them closer together. And that is the move that many states have made this year. However they have to do so with the blessing of the DNC or RNC since the respective parties are the ones that, in the end, choose the presidential nominees. Of course, to the surprise of no-one raised in a free-market economy, the motivation for states to move their primaries forward wasn't so much about democratic equity, but about money. In one case the strategy even backfired. One state you'll hear almost nothing about during the democratic primary race is Michigan. That's not because of the unimportance of the state when it comes to the general election, or because it's number of delegates is inconsequential to the outcome of the democratic primary. It's because Michigan moved it's primary date further up the calendar than the DNC was comfortable with, and as a result it's delegates are barred from voting in the democratic primary nomination. Seriously, if you're having trouble following what I'm talking about here, I encourage you to do a little research on our primary system, at least read the wikipedia articles about it, it's pretty fucked up.
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7 comments:
I just wanna add one thing. If I'm recalling the Iowa entrance polls I read about correctly, Obama was at 35%, Clinton 27%, Edwards 23% (my numbers might be slightly off and I can't recall if this was one company's entrance polls or some sort of average). So, if those numbers are to be believed, Obama would have mostly rocked Iowa either way, Edwards just massively benefited over Clinton due to the caucus system.
Also, I have to disagree that Iowa getting so much attention makes money a huge factor. Look at what happened to Huckabee, could he have been a contender in a national primary system? I doubt it. He was able to do well in Iowa, and possibly leverage that into national support, with hardly any money precisely because money wasn't quite as big a factor in Iowa. To a lesser extent, the same could be said about Edwards, who wouldn't have had quite enough money to compete nationally.
One last thing... the NH results are somewhat bizarre, and don't seem to match the polling that was done. Obviously this can happen, but the scary thing is no one knows if there was fraud or computer glitches in NH. Something like 80% of the ballots were counted by optical scan machines, with the tallying of votes carried out by a computer that is subject to hacking or simply glitches in the program. Without a hand-count of the ballots, there is literally no way to be certain the results of the election are accurate. That scares the crap out of me.
There is no excuse to not count every ballot by hand. Anyone who says otherwise undermines the most important aspect of our democracy; free and fair elections. As of right now, even without any actual evidence of fraud, I cannot say with what I would consider a reasonable degree of certainty that Clinton won NH. That is just wrong.
I agree with Kevin's disagreement. Yes, the Iowa Caucas and New Hampshire primaries are ridiculously overhyped, and account for such a tiny amount of the country's population that these events intrinsically are insignificant. However, it could be argued that this overhype is a GOOD thing in the Primaries process, because it DOES allow for someone such as Huckabee or Obama to catapult themselves to the front of the pack early on....to make themselves a household name and help them establish a more equal footing with those who have bottomless pockets like Clinton or Romney. Romney spent...what...20 times more in Iowa than Huckabee? And Huckabee smoked him. Also, Obama himself (while much, much more widely known that Huckabee)was not nearly the sensation before Iowa that he was afterwards. Both of these campaigns benefitted enormously from the hyper-exposure of Iowa. Now both names are forces to be reckoned with in their respective parties going forward.
At the same time, however, you see some candidates that don't give a crap about Iowa or New Hampshire and focus their attention on the larger early primaries, like Giuliani with Florida. If you think back to the night of the Iowa Caucuses, Giuliani's name was hardly brought up at all by any of the stations because everyone was so jazzed about the success of Huckabee and the failure of Romney. Do you think that Giuliani would have blown off Iowa and New Hampshire like he did if he thought that it was going to damage the success of his campaign in the slightest? Nah.
To me, these first two primaries function like a "free ticket onboard" for the lesser-hyped campaigns, such as what happened with Dean in 2004 (though he only placed third in Iowa, his momentum really got rolling during the Iowa Caucus anticipation.) Kerry and Edwards eventually took all the steam out of his campaign, but in my opinion not because of the money differences, but because of the more radical philosophies that Dean presented relative to Edwards or Kerry.
There is a film I currently have out called "Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?" It's a sobering question that we all pretty much know the answer to, but the role Iowa and New Hampshire take in at least helping out the proverbial "Mr. Smith" from the get-go is some silver lining.
-Ty
Ok I went and wrote a whole post in response to your guys comments, but I also wanted to address the voting "issues". I personally don't believe that any fraud occurred, though I of course recognize that it sure could have, and it scares the crap out of me too. I'm just saying that entrance polls aren't more reliable than ballot results, and shouldn't be held up as proof of wrongdoing. In a caucus system especially people's minds are liable to change before the actual vote is cast, but even in a secret ballot people often are undecided even when they walk into the booth. We have a president that makes foreign policy decisions based on his gut, its it at all surprising that someone would vote based on theirs? Still when these people get asked by a pollster they are impelled to give an answer, and some of them just say the first name that pops into their head, some of them say who they're leaning to, and some of them flat out lie. I heard an interesting theory that some people are embarrassed about voting for Hillary Clinton and that she suffers in polls since people don't like to admit they'll vote for her. I don't think it's true on any level that would have a large influence on the polls, but I'm sure that there are people out there who it's true for.
Also, about Giuliani. I would argue that not being in Iowa hurt his campaign quite a bit. He's hurting in Florida right now where he had decided to focus most of his energy, and I think it has some to do with the fact that he never gets talked about in the news.
Well I agree, I don't think fraud or any major outcome-changing glitches occurred either. I mean, if I had to place a bet on it, I'd put 100:1 odds against either.
But those odds would be placed without evidence one way or the other, simply as a blind-faith estimate. That's just not acceptable in a democracy, and to me that's not a "reasonable" degree of certainty.
What happens with Giuliani will be interesting to watch and actually might be a litmus test to help us to solve this discussion about the true importance or unimportance of Iowa. If you remember, early on, before any of the Iowa hype started, Giuliani was considered a big-time player in the Republican race. But then he fell by the wayside in a hurry. Although my time of being of political awareness is limited due to my age, I can't say I have seen anyone take the strategy of thumbing his nose at the first few primaries the way Giuliani did. As a pundit mentioned on television, this will be either the most ingenious or dumbest campaign strategy that anyone has attempted.
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