Democrats take aim at Iowa as they seek to change their nominating system
The goal is not wholesale reform. Instead, the question is what to do about the opening weeks of the nominating process: which states get to go first, and which voters’ voices will be elevated through the earliest contests to express the party’s values. The real issue, however, is Iowa, the Midwestern state that many Democrats have come to loathe. Iowa’s future was on the table when the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) met n Friday.
Iowa is a target for a variety of reasons. Its population is largely White and therefore does not reflect the party’s diversity. It is seen as largely rural in makeup, at a time when the party’s voters are housed increasingly in cities and populous suburbs. Its contest is a set of caucuses, an arcane system whose rules few understand and that disenfranchises voters.
Iowa has long been a subject of criticism, along with New Hampshire, which holds the nation’s first presidential primary. Other states are jealous for the attention showered on those states in particular — the time spent there by candidates, the focus given to their voters by reporters seeking to take the pulse, and, not incidentally, the economic benefit of all the money flowing in for television commercials, hotel rooms, restaurants and other businesses.
Iowa’s fate, however, may have been decided in 2020 when its caucuses ended in chaos and eventually backbiting between the state and national party committees. The counting broke down so badly on the night of the caucuses that it was not immediately clear whether the winner was Pete Buttigieg — the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and now U.S. secretary of transportation — or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Buttigieg eventually was declared the winner, but long after the circus had moved on. Joe Biden, meanwhile, finished a weak fourth.
A history of change
Democrats have constantly tinkered with their nominating process, often for good reason. After the 1968 convention in Chicago, remembered primarily for the clashes between antiwar demonstrators and police, the party moved to change fundamentally its system. The goal was to take power from the party bosses and put it more in the hands of the people, the voters. More primaries, fewer state conventions.
Subsequent reforms sought to rebalance the influence of the Democratic elected officials and state party leaders whose role was diminished by those post-1968 reforms. The issue became how to give party leaders a way to temper the power of the people. That lasted until after the 2016 round of primaries and caucuses, when the DNC again trimmed back the power of these automatic, “superdelegates.”
But the longest-running tension has been the debate over which state should go first. Party rules require that states hold their contests within a window that generally begins in March and ends in June. But a few states are given the privilege of holding their events before that window opens. For many years, in part by accident and in part by design, two states — Iowa and New Hampshire — enjoyed that privilege exclusively.
Iowa’s caucuses, held on a Monday night and requiring participants to spend several hours together, started the process. The caucuses were seen as a test of organizing for the candidates and as party-building mechanisms that brought more activists into the work of mobilizing and turning out voters in November.
New Hampshire has generally followed eight days later with the first primary, in contests that brought independent voters into the decision-making and that were seen as more open and expansive than caucuses. New Hampshire state law requires that no state with a similar contest can go earlier. New Hampshire officials of both parties have been zealous in protecting their status. Meanwhile, Iowa and New Hampshire often have worked together in a mutual protection society.
Those two states traditionally winnowed the field of candidates and could help give a winning candidate momentum that carries through to the nomination. They also could elevate little-known and underfunded candidates. That’s how Jimmy Carter became the nominee in 1976, after leading the field in Iowa and winning in New Hampshire.
Ahead of the 2008 election, festering complaints about the lack of diversity in Iowa and New Hampshire led to a change that produced the current early calendar by adding two states to the mix, South Carolina and Nevada.
South Carolina was included to give Black voters more influence in selecting the party’s nominee. In 2020, Black voters made up more than half the electorate in South Carolina’s Democratic primary, and their strong support for Biden turned his fortunes around and put him on a path to victory. Without his victory in South Carolina, Biden probably would not be president.
Nevada’s place in the early group is testament to the power of Harry M. Reid, the late former Senate majority leader, who lobbied fiercely and successfully to include the state among the first four. There were two rationales: The first was to give prominence to the voices of Latino voters. The second was that it would give union workers a voice in a party with strong ties to organized labor if not always to rank-and-file union members.
Mo Elleithee, as a member of the rules committee, outlined the case against Iowa on Friday. The early states, he said, should reflect diversity in their populations, inclusion (by which he meant primaries vs. caucuses), potential status as general election battlegrounds, and voting systems that inspire confidence. Every state except Iowa, he said, could claim at least a couple of those.
“Now is not a time for us as a party to stand on tradition,” he said. “Now is not a time for us as a party to stand on status quo.”
Iowa brought some of this on itself, beyond its lack of diversity and its caucus system. Not only did it get to hold the first event every four years, but it also put increasing demands on the candidates, staging county party dinners, an annual must-attend steak fry and various issue forums designed to force the candidates to spend time in the state.
But over the years, Iowa has demonstrated some virtues. Barack Obama would not have become president in 2008 without Iowa. His victory in the 2008 caucuses not only elevated his candidacy, but it also persuaded skeptical Black voters in South Carolina that he could become president, thereby changing the dynamic of his epic clash with Hillary Clinton. Obama also skillfully used caucuses — in Iowa and elsewhere — to win the nomination; without them, Clinton might have prevailed. This is one reason that she and former president Bill Clinton have had no use for caucuses ever since.
Giving up the rural vote?
There were few defenders of Iowa around the big table Friday, other than the state’s representative on the committee, Scott Brennan. But if there is a gathering consensus to eliminate Iowa from the early states, the harder question will be which state or states should now be part of that grouping and what unintended consequences might ensue.
It was only four months ago, after Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race, that Democrats were lamenting their terrible showing among rural White voters, a phenomenon that worsened after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Many Democrats were asking then: How can the party win back those voters?
Iowa is representative of this trend, and, as such, it has moved in just a few years from being a general election battleground to an increasingly GOP-dominated state. But what signal will be sent to those nonurban voters if Democrats jettison it now? And as was noted Friday, will the Midwest, whose role in general election remains central, be left without a voice in the opening round of the nominating process?
Party leaders will spend the next several months sorting through their choices. Many states will seek to become one of the privileged early few. Scratching Iowa off the early list might seem easy and obvious after the 2020 debacle. The questions and answers that follow are less so.
