Republicans are sticking with Iowa in 2024 as party officials commit to the caucus format and expect the contest to bat leadoff on the GOP’s presidential nominating calendar — the tradition for nearly a half-century.
Republicans support Iowa’s special status as the first state to cast votes for president in the quadrennial primary, content the roughly 90% white Midwestern battleground reflects the GOP electorate and bolsters the party’s strategic tilt toward the heartland. Republicans also are intent on preserving Iowa’s caucus, an election fraught with counting controversies in recent years and with lower turnout than conventionally run primaries but popular among grassroots conservatives loyal to former President Donald Trump.
“The state will definitely hold a caucus and not a primary,” Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann told the Washington Examiner Tuesday. “We are proceeding as if the carve-out process will continue.”
The Republican National Committee sets its presidential nominating calendar every four years and typically reserves the first four contests for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada in that order. The RNC has not yet weighed in on the 2024 schedule. A committee spokesman declined to comment for this story.
But even at this early stage of President Joe Biden’s term, Republican White House hopefuls are journeying to Iowa and to meet with voters and lay the foundation for a 2024 campaign. Gov. Kim Reynolds’s phone is ringing off the hook. The Republican is up for reelection in 2022, and would-be presidential contenders are inundating her with offers to help her raise money and swoop into the state to headline her events, GOP sources say.
This activity, and the lack of any pushback from the Trump wing of the GOP, has made Iowa Republicans supremely confident that their spot atop the party’s nominating calendar is secure. “I fully expect the Republican Party of Iowa to hold the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus in early 2024,” said Jimmy Centers, a GOP strategist in Des Moines. The state parties, not the state, are responsible for administering the caucuses.
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Democrats are mulling moving their first 2024 nominating contest to ethnically diverse Nevada and are considering replacing caucuses with normal ordinary primaries.
With Iowa backing Trump over Democratic nominees by wide margins in 2016 and 2020 — and with the Democratic electorate diversifying, some party activists have concluded the state is unfit to host the first votes in the quadrennial primary. Problems counting caucus votes, and a growing belief that the scheme is undemocratic, are discouraging Democrats from continuing with the format generally. The outcome of last year’s Democratic caucus was clouded by delays and confusion.
Having won the most convention delegates, now-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was eventually deemed to be the winner. But he finished second in the popular vote to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Democrats were dissatisfied with the experience all around, despite the fact that Nevada’s caucus, the third Democratic contest in 2020, went smoothly.
Republicans are not immune to caucus blunders.
In 2012, eventual Republican nominee Mitt Romney, now a Utah senator, was declared the winner of the Iowa caucus, only to have the state party correct itself days later and announce former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was the top vote-getter. But four years later, when Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas snagged the caucus crown and Trump finished second, there were no mishaps (although the future president claimed the contest was rigged).
Republicans have seemed pleased with the process, and Iowa, since then. In 2020, the Iowa GOP decided to go ahead with the caucuses even though Trump was running as the incumbent, in part as an insurance policy against losing the state’s first-in-the-nation status. In that race, the 45th president defeated minor Republican opposition to take the top spot with 94% of the vote.
