The FiveThirtyEight Team Goes To Iowa

DES MOINES — The hallway doors are closed, providing some level of separation, but otherwise the field offices for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton at 3839 Merle Hay Road, about 15 minutes outside of downtown, are mere feet apart. The competing Democratic candidates share the same hallway on the same floor of the same building, situated above a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop and Milroy’s Tuxedos. Aside from that, the two offices don’t have much in common. Inside the Clinton office, I was greeted by organizers but immediately directed to the sign-in table, where it became clear that I wasn’t the first reporter to drop in. Despite her leading opponent’s recent surge in Iowa — two recent polls show Sanders narrowly ahead of Clinton — the atmosphere inside the Clinton offices did not feel frantic; it mostly seemed like business as usual. Staffers were seated at individual desks and appeared organized and focused, hardly taking notice of my entrance. The regional organizing director, Kane Miller, gave me a quick tour and told me that this had been a field office for Obama in 2012. They’d painted over the sunrise logo on one wall, replacing it with Clinton’s logo inside an outline of the state of Iowa, but they’d left a few relics of the past, including this one:

I asked Miller if data-gathering still happens in this room. “Data happens in every room now,” he replied. Next door at the Bernie camp, things were a bit more ad hoc. The three organizing staff on hand shared one round table just inside the front door, while a few others roamed the adjoining rooms — one of which included a handwritten spreadsheet of sorts that spanned an entire wall, tracking precinct captains by name and location across Des Moines. There weren’t many precincts left blank, and I joked that I hoped they had this data saved on a computer somewhere, too. In a back storage room overflowing with boxes of Bernie T-shirts, four volunteers from nearby Hoover High School sat on the floor holding clipboards with call-sheet logs. “We write down if they picked up or not, if they are caucusing or not and who they’re caucusing for,” Isabel Sullivan, 14, explained.

I asked the students why they were volunteering for Sanders when they couldn’t vote for him. “Since we can’t vote we feel like we should be helping the campaign instead,” said Hannah Talcott, 14. They also said they get out of gym class if they choose to volunteer for a political campaign. All four friends said they’d learned a lot about Sanders “from the Internet” and liked him because of his consistency throughout his career. “He’s been in support of the issues he’s in support of now since before he wanted to run for president, since before they were valid issues in society,” Sullivan said. If Sanders doesn’t win this election, he might consider trying to hold onto these kids’ votes in 2020!

DES MOINES — Iowa isn’t exactly known for its diversity, and the fact that the Hawkeye State gets the first say in each presidential election despite its nationally unrepresentative demographics can be a sore spot. But Iowans do take the political power they hold seriously, whether or not they’re eligible to vote. Monica Reyes, 25, and Hector Salamanca Arroyo, 22, are two undocumented Iowans who’ve dedicated themselves to pushing politicians to take comprehensive immigration reform seriously and to pushing Latino Iowans to seriously engage with politics. Reyes founded DREAM Iowa with her sister in 2012 to help share information with other undocumented immigrants about their rights. The group became more active in electoral politics in 2014 after meeting with the leaders of DREAM Action Coalition, a national organization that advocates for immigration reform. “They were like, ‘Come on, you’re in Iowa. Do something about it,’ and so we did,” Reyes said. “We started confronting politicians. We started confronting presidential candidates.” Arroyo has high hopes for both the group and himself. DREAM Iowa is currently run completely by volunteers and is in the process of becoming a 501(c) organization. “We’ll be able to push more individuals to run [for office] and recognize what the Latino vote can do, as well as get more Latinos to actually hold elected office,” Arroyo said. “Who knows, maybe in the next couple years, maybe immigration reform happens and we’ll be able to run. I feel as if that’s my dream — to be able to run and be elected would be a full circle for me.”