What a hot and juicy time to be an Iowan! Every four years Iowa finds itself in the national spotlight as the host of the nation’s first Presidential Caucuses. For the last year, Democratic presidential candidates have been all over Iowa drumming up support, shaking hands and kissing babies. Iowa is utterly spoiled with attention; we’re basically old pals with all the candidates.
“Bernie’s in town again tonight.”
“Pete is up at Loras later, might go visit with him if I have time.”
“Warren just texted me, we’re gonna Netflix and chill.”
Ok, maybe not that last one. I don’t think my dog would have gotten along with hers, so I didn’t even try to arrange it.
Getting right to it, then: I have opinions about the caucus system, about Iowa going first and being entirely unrepresentative of the nation’s population, and about the lack of hand sanitizer in a tightly packed room in the middle of flu season, but these opinions will not be fleshed out in great detail here. This is simply a recap on the caucus experience, because Americans deserve to know the truth! (I was trying to sound presidential there, did it work?)
Caucuses begin promptly at 7:00 PM. If you’re not in the door by that time, you are sent away to wallow in your unpunctual shame for the next four years. Torn between my disdain for breathing recycled air in a crowded room with people I don’t know and my concern for the scarcity of parking at my caucus location, my goal was to arrive at exactly 6:48 PM.
Approaching the school, a lone Biden sign stuck in the frozen ground like a careless stalk of corn grows in the middle of a bean field. But as I approached the doors the action picked up. Volunteers for each candidate were eager to buy my love with stickers and buttons. Denying stickers from no less than three Pete Buttigieg volunteers, I finally pushed through the doors. Two women at a small, square card table asked if I would like to take a survey “for the media”. Sure, why not? The media seems like a legit operation. I will give the media the best data. I checked boxes about my age, gender, issues, candidates, and “when I decided who I was caucusing for” and gave it back along with the pen they had lent me, which I would later regret.
Yet another Pete Buttigieg volunteer directed me to the sign-in table where I found my name, address, phone number, and e-mail address on display for all to see and scribbled my signature. I was given a neon pink index card and pointed towards the masses to go forth and plant myself in my candidate’s section.
My index card and I settled in against the cinder block wall under my candidate’s sign, as chairs and tables were minimal in the narrow space. The “captain” on my candidate’s team walked past me a few times, eyeing me awkwardly, but did not speak to me. He did not know that I can outlast anyone in the Battle of Who Will Speak First, especially if my opponent is bound by duty to initiate conversation. We played this game for minutes that felt like hours for both of us. In the last few minutes before 7 PM, the room filled quickly. Then the magic started.
The first order of business was finding out whose birthday in the room of over 200 people was closest to today. A woman in the Buttigieg camp (of course) raised her hand and exclaimed that her birthday was, in fact, this very day. No joke, the entire room erupted into the Happy Birthday song and when the name part came around, the majority sang “Happy birthday dear lady, happy birthday to you”. Come to find out, her name is Betty. Betty’s birthday gift was a manila envelope with a survey for her to complete for the University of Iowa and the promise of candy someday from someone.
Next up, the Pledge of Allegiance. An observation from the many times I’ve pledged allegiance to the flag in a room full of adults: everyone claps at the end. It’s only slightly less embarrassing than clapping at the end of a movie. But I still don’t understand why. We didn’t clap after saying it in our classrooms growing up, so when was this behavior learned? That’s here nor there, we said it, clapped, and moved on.
We elected the Caucus Chair and Secretary, who ran uncontested, by way of “aye” and “nay”. There were a couple real funny guys in the crowd who took tremendous joy in shouting “nay” on both accounts. The newly elected Chair let us know that they were collecting sign-in numbers and calculating viability thresholds and that if everything went well, we should be out of here by 9:00 PM. The collective groan was audible and oddly satisfying.
The numbers were in: 220 people in attendance. Each candidate needs 33 people to be considered viable. The final message Mr. Chairman left us with before getting into the action was this: “No matter what happens, when we leave here tonight, we must all unite as Democrats to take back the State legislature and the courts, turn Iowa blue again, and take back the White House!” The only thing missing was a classic Howard Dean “HYAAAAAAAH!”
Next up: stump speeches! Representatives from each camp were invited to speak about why their candidate is the best and why you should join their sardine can. Each representative got exactly one minute to speak before the mic was cut. We heard from Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Yang, Sanders, and Warren’s camps. The captain from my chosen camp was not a particularly compelling orator, so it came as a surprise to no one that absolutely zero of the Undecideds in the room made a beeline for our group.
With the speeches over, it was finally time to align and count. The Chairman announced that anyone with a red “Observer” sticker would need to go to the far-left side of the room and stay out of the way. Camp Captain approaches me in this moment and breaks his silence. He directs me to go stand in the far-left side of the room now, with the Observers. I flashed my pink index card and politely told him to go kick rocks. He stated to me that I was wearing an “Observer” sticker. I opened my arms, pulled back my vest, showing him that I was clearly not donning any such sticker. I pointed out that my sweatshirt had a reddish circular sun on it, and suggested that he could have mistook for a bright red sticker with words on it. He walked away expressionless and I was allowed to stay. Crisis averted.
I have never given much consideration to how many ways there are to count people until this moment. The Klobuchar people got in line and walk past a symbolic threshold counting themselves as they crossed. They had exactly 33. The Buttigieg people had everyone put their hands up and the spunky young captain ran around giving everyone a high-five and counting them off aloud. 84 over there. Pete was SUPER viable. Everyone in our camp looked around nervously, waiting to hear from our Captain what kind of numbers we were putting up—we were clearly less than half of Pete’s camp. He counted silently. Then he counted silently again. Once more for good measure. What Captain lacked in personality, he made up for in creating suspense. Finally, one of the Type A’s in the group suggested that we count off aloud. With the counting complete, all 35 of us breathed a collective sigh of relief. We made it; we were viable!
The final numbers after the first alignment were: Buttigieg – 84, Biden – 35, Sanders – 35, Klobuchar – 33, Warren – 24, Yang – 7, and Undecided – 2.
We traded in our index cards for “Presidential Preference” cards, given to us by the Caucus Chair. I wondered to myself what they were going to do with the 220 neon index cards upon which no one was allowed to scribble anything. I had already decided that if we could write on them, I would have made a “Mad Dog 2020” sign and taped it on the wall and stood under that. Because I, too, am a real funny guy. Er, whatever.
Each person was instructed to write in their own first and last name, write the name of their candidate, then sign the Presidential Preference card on the side of the card with a big “1” on it. That is, if you remembered to bring a pen. I cursed my integrity for returning the media lady’s pen before borrowing one from one of my camp buddies. Because my candidate reached the viability threshold, I was required to turn my card in to my Camp Captain.
After this first round, the reps from each camp were again invited to the front of the room and given one minute to try to convince others to come align with their sides. We heard from the same folks again and our Camp Captain was even less captivating than the first round, a seemingly impossible feat. After the second round of stump speeches were made, the Caucus Chair got back on the mic and announced that you did not have to stay if you had already turned in your Preference card. It was 8:20 PM, and my “vote” was counted.
So ended my caucus experience. Others who were aligned on the first round with non-viable candidates were allowed to re-align with a viable candidate, then fill out side “2” of the Preference card. I didn’t stick around to find out the final numbers, and I was home by 8:40 PM.
The Iowa Democratic Party spent some sixty thousand dollars to develop an app for reporting numbers from each precinct. Anyone following the news knows that it was an investment that did not pay off. The app was glitchy and changed the counts that were entered. Everything had to be counted manually, delaying the results of the caucus until the following day. Even now, 2 days later, precincts are only 92% reporting.
National media outlets have identified several ways in which the Iowa Caucus failed to live up to the expectations of a watchful (and critical) nation. Controversial, embarrassing, chaotic, messy, meltdown… these are some of the words I’ve read describing the event over the last few days. Several of my fellow Iowans and I have discussed the possibility that we just participated in the last Iowa Caucus, or at least the last first Iowa Caucus. To that, I say: Fantastic! There’s no perfect way to do democracy. What privilege we’ve had for over 40 years, but it’s best case scenario if the process evolves to be more inclusive and accessible to everyone. Just like hand sanitizer should be during flu season.