What Did — And Didn’t — Go Down In The Iowa Caucuses

Buttigieg v. Bloomberg is interesting to me, as both are vying to be the non-Biden center-left candidate. Buttigieg likely did well in Iowa last night. He is decently positioned in New Hampshire. He may get a bounce in polls. That said, at least right now, Bloomberg has caught up to him in national polls, perhaps in part because of all the political ads he’s running. Bloomberg is also spending lots of time in Super Tuesday states, while Buttigieg is in the traditional early states. And over the last few weeks, Democratic elected officials have been endorsing Bloomberg, not Buttigieg. I have a cynical take on that — I think neither Bloomberg nor Buttigieg is likely to be president in 2021, but one of them will be a billionaire able to fund projects in your city and hire you for a big nonprofit job. There’s a case that you would rather be Bloomberg than Buttigieg right now, particularly if the early primaries are inconclusive. (And at least at 11:50 a.m. on Feb 4. the primary results are inconclusive!)

Sarah, Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status is an accident of history. It starting going first in 1972, before the order of the states really mattered. The power of going first became clear in 1976, once Jimmy Carter proved that a candidate could gain momentum and eventually win a nomination by performing well in Iowa. Since then, leaders of both parties in Iowa have fought to maintain the state’s status.

There are various ways this could change going forward, but it could require coordination and agreement between the national party, state parties and state legislatures. One obvious change might be for Iowa to just hold a primary instead of a caucus. But that would create tension with New Hampshire, which has written into state law that it should be the first state in the country to hold a primary.

The national party could try to change the order of states altogether, but the date of a primary or caucus is ultimately up to the state legislature or state party (depending on which entity runs it in a given state). The national party can create incentives or disincentives to try to get the states to change their dates, but that’s not guaranteed to work.

We have yet to find out the true scale of the current shitshow, but there’s a possibility that — especially if Democrats lose in the fall — Iowa could be shamed into changing its ways and working with the national party to do so. As with the results themselves, a lot is yet to be determined.

Galen, you’ve done some in-depth reporting around this for the The Primaries Project. Why does Iowa go first? And do you think that might change? For instance, we’ve already seen some caucuses fall by the wayside this year when it was discovered in 2016 that there was no way to hold a recount in the Iowa caucuses, as the DNC moved to change its rules to make nomination contests more inclusive. This is a bit speculative at this point, but do you think Iowa could be in trouble?