The FiveThirtyEight Team Goes To Iowa

DES MOINES — The Des Moines Register reported earlier this week that Marco Rubio is planning on running 7,000 television ads during the month of January. That’s a staggering number, estimated to be about one-third of all the political ads that will run during the period. The inundation is certainly bearing out in the experience of Meredith Leigh, the Iowa caucus voter I spoke with Tuesday. When we spoke at 7 a.m., she had already seen ads for Hillary Clinton and Rubio. And Leigh reported back at the end of the day that the only other time she watched TV that day was to tune in to “Jeopardy,” a half-hour program with a couple of commercial breaks max. Throughout the course of Alex Trebek’s quiz show, she saw ads for Clinton, Rubio, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders; prime-time TV, Leigh told me, is pretty crazy this time of year. In her opinion, the ads vary from network to network; her viewing of “New Girl” on Fox, for instance, had fewer political ads than say, NBC. Leigh theorized that was because the Fox prime-time network skewed younger (caucus voters tend to be older). But voters seem to be getting hammered even harder on Facebook. Leigh logs on to find mostly Sanders and Clinton ads; she thinks it’s targeted and she’s almost certainly correct. (Facebook thinks that I’m interested in voice recorders and jumpsuits, which is … pretty much on the nose.) But there was at least one bit of old-fashioned electioneering that she ran into when she got home from work: A Jeb Bush flyer shoved underneath her door. It seems print ain’t dead just yet.

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!