The Iowa caucuses, the first-in-the-nation presidential nomination contest, died this week after a brief and sudden illness in Des Moines. The cause of death was sheer ridiculousness. They were 48 years old.
One of the most peculiar public rituals in U.S. politics, the Iowa caucuses had developed a sterling reputation for picking candidates who would not go on to become president (Barack Obama’s 2008 victory and George W. Bush’s in 2000 serving as exceptions). Past Iowa winners on the Republican side include Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Bob Dole (in 1988), and George H.W. Bush (in 1980). On the Democratic side, the winning losers include Tom Harkin, Richard Gephardt, and “Uncommitted,” the plucky noncandidate who won back-to-back victories over George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Despite the caucuses’ poor predictive ability, candidates from both sides of the aisle have poured millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours into campaigning across the state — in pursuit of just a handful of votes. Turnout in the caucuses was always just a fraction of the statewide electorate, which perhaps explained why they were such a poor predictor of nationwide results. The caucuses disproportionately sampled from the staunchly ideological voters, especially the liberal Left around Iowa State University and the University of Iowa, and the religious Right. The former helped propel Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, to a near victory in 2016 and a victory (maybe?) in 2020, and the latter enabled televangelist Pat Robertson to finish ahead of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988.
The caucuses’ tangible accomplishment was ensuring presidential fidelity to the nation’s outdated, bloated, inefficient, and corrupt agricultural policies. Despite the fact that farmers are now on average wealthier than nonfarmers, the federal government still distributes billions of dollars in subsidies to an industry that has increasingly become dominated by giant agribusinesses. In an age of runaway budget deficits, cutting back on pork for pig farmers has seemed to many like a no-brainer, especially since farmers are just a fraction of the nation’s overall workforce. But most presidential candidates, in their desperate attempts to win the Iowa caucuses, have dutifully pledged allegiance to the status quo.
The caucuses were also very good for the state Republican and Democratic parties, which had been so lavished with attention and money that they had resisted any entreaties to reschedule the caucuses to let other states come first. In that way, the caucuses were representative of the fact that the modern nominating process was not very good at picking presidential candidates in a time- and cost-efficient way.
And yet, despite these obvious advantages to the state, the caucuses had nevertheless been in poor health for some time. The 2016 Iowa caucus results separated Sanders from Hillary Clinton by just two-tenths of 1%, a contest that was so narrow as to prompt scrutiny of caucus practices — including inaccurate results, late reporting, bizarre tiebreaking methods such as coin tosses, poorly trained volunteers, crowded precincts, overly long meetings, and above all, a lack of transparency by the Iowa Democratic Party.
This year, the caucuses quickly took a turn for the worse. Employing third-party contractors to build a mobile app to count votes, Iowa Democrats thought they had strengthened their system. They thought wrong. The app failed, and results were delayed for several days. Additionally, several miscounts occurred as results trickled in over the subsequent week — leading to widespread derision and scorn from the political class and voters at large. Elections on the frontier in the 1870s were run better than this.
This mishap finally ended the Iowa caucuses’ long and unspectacular tenure as the first presidential preference contest.* The Iowa caucuses are survived by their sister, the Nevada caucuses, and their cousin, the New Hampshire primary.
*Or, at least, we can hope. Surely, no presidential candidate will be foolish enough to indulge the Iowa parties with so much time and money in future cycles. Surely, the two parties will use this year’s spectacle as a spur to initiate a serious investigation into systematic reforms. Surely, the greatest nation in the history of the world will refuse to subject itself to this quadrennial humiliation ever again.
Jay Cost is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
