The Iowa Caucus

The US Presidential Election is on 4th November, 2008. That’s exactly 11 months away. However, serious campaigning started almost a year back (some might say it actually started the day after George W. Bush got re-elected) and the first real votes were cast yesterday in a small, Midwestern state. To understand why, one needs to understand the process that goes into selecting the occupant of the White House. It’s a process full of idiosyncracies, complexities and archaic traditions. In a nutshell, its something like this - the two major parties, Republican and Democratic (for now, we’ll restrict ourselves to these two), elect their Presidential candidates through a system of staggered primaries and caucuses across the 50 states, these candidates are confirmed at the party conventions, they face off in a series of Presidential debates before voting takes place on ‘the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November’. That election is also not straightforward but is done through the Electoral College system but we’ll talk about that some other time.

So, the first real hurdle is getting the party’s nomination. That happens through a system of primaries and caucuses in the different states. A primary is a regular secret ballot election. A caucus, on the other hand, is much more interesting. It is basically a meeting of voters and some of the processes they use to select the candidate are quite fascinating.The primary and caucus schedule is generally spread out over a few months(quite compressed this time round though) and by tradition there are certain states which hold the initial contests and thus prove to be vital in the overall scheme of things. Hence, candidates tend to spend a lot of time and money campaigning in these states, pretty much neglecting the others. These initial states are not your Californias or New Yorks but rather smaller nondescript states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Their overall contribution is minor but a poor performance in these early states can doom a campaign while a strong start might propel you to the nomination. And voters in these states take their responsibility very seriously; they know that their votes will go a long, long way in deciding their party’s nominee.

And so, as tradition demanded, the 2008 Presidential race officially kicked off with the Iowa Caucuses. As I mentioned earlier, Caucuses tend to have different formats. The Iowa Republican Caucus is quite standard-people gather at the caucus venue, cast their secret ballots and at the end, the votes are read. The Democratic Caucus is something else totally. A group of 60-80 people gather at the Caucus venue which may be a school, church or even someone’s house. They gather in a large room in which each corner is earmarked for a particular candidate. In the first round, the voters stand in the corner which represents the candidate they support. So basically, you have this large room in which different clusters of people are standing. Sounds like one of those old party games! The number of votes for each candidate is now counted and those with less than 15% of the total votes are deemed to be ‘not viable’ which means their voters now have to shift to other, still viable candidates. Before they make the decision as to where they switch, each of the viable candidates’ corners send over an ‘ambassador’ to the defeated corner, trying to convince the voters to come to their side. After this last bout of campaigning, the voters make their final decision as to which corner they want to stand in. The vote tally after this second round is what gets reported. This same process is replicated in scores of caucus venues across the state. CNN actually showed the Caucus process going on in someone’s house last night. Of course, the system is archaic and full of flaws but given the recent events we’ve seen surrounding elections in Kenya and Pakistan, it’s strangely comforting to note that there still exist places like Persia, Iowa. Places where people welcome complete strangers into their homes and into their lives with the purpose of holding an election, where a community gets together and amid great civility, lets its voice be heard without obstructing that of another.