The FiveThirtyEight Team Goes To Iowa

“Après moi, le deluge.” That’s what Baby New Year says to Iowa every campaign year. When January rolls around, the campaigns ramp up their inundation of the state — TV ads multiply, door-knockers proliferate and phone calls increase (Bugaboo style, if you know what I mean). But how many drops are in a deluge? We like to quantify things around here, so we got Meredith Leigh, one of those famous Iowa voters, to keep track of her interactions with the campaigns for a day. Leigh, 33, is a contract negotiator at Wells Fargo and a registered Democrat, at least for this election — she caucused for Ron Paul in 2012. “It was funny, I took the ‘What side are you on?’ [quiz] because I was trying to figure out who I was going to caucus for” this year, she told me. “I came up 79 percent Jeb Bush and 76 percent Bernie Sanders.”

I popped over to Leigh’s house in a quiet residential neighborhood of Des Moines this morning to chat with her at the start of her day chronicling the media blitz. I got there when it was still dark out and was greeted by Cici, a 10-year-old basset hound who warmed my lap a little (and yes, my heart) while I grilled her owner about what it’s like to be a registered Iowa voter right about now. Leigh had seen two campaign ads on TV before my 7 a.m. arrival, one from Marco Rubio and one from Hillary Clinton. She said that members of both the Clinton and Sanders teams had come knocking on her door in the last month. She’s still undecided, so they’re hitting the right kind of house, but Leigh said that she has a polite technique to help her quickly disengage from the campaigners (this is a pattern with people I’ve been talking to, by the way — polite denials). “I’m always like, ‘Oh, OK, I’ll think about that,’” she said. “I don’t want to be like, ‘No,’ because then they’ll be like, ‘Well I think this person is great, blah, blah, blah,’ and I don’t really want to engage.” We’ll check back in with Leigh at the end of the day to see how much interaction she’s had with campaign ads on TV, radio and online. Who knows, she might even run into a candidate! Des Moines is lousy with them this time of year.

There may be no sign of a Jeb Bush comeback but there are, well, “Jeb!” signs.