By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 31, 2007
There are few better places to witness the messiness of democracy than at the Iowa caucuses. After months of campaign stops and ad wars, after millions of dollars spent, Thursday night will come down to the tiniest of details:
A plate of cookies.
The state of the sky.
A guy named Terrence.
This is democracy by inches. It's not easy, like pulling a lever or pressing a button; it's messy, because it's public and because it varies from precinct to precinct and because every little thing matters.
The weather can make a difference. A single person can make a difference -- and not in that corny way politicians talk about, but for real, because of how the caucuses work. They have complicated rules and complicated math and a period of haggling during which folks try to persuade other folks to support their candidate. It's fluid. It's a process.
It can seem less like presidential selection and more like "The Price Is Right." At the caucuses four years ago, John Edwards supporter Terrence Neuzil told a neighbor who was undecided: "If you vote for Senator Edwards, you can borrow anything out of my garage."
And so it was.
"And I will tell you this," Neuzil says. "He moved and took my grass spreader with him."
Iowa: where the rootiest of grass-roots politics takes place, where men are men and presidential candidates are easy, where a candidate (Barack Obama) is actually pleased to earn the endorsement of a woman whose life mission is to sculpt life-size cows out of butter. Should any one state get all the candidate love that Iowa gets?
If Iowa deserves it -- and really, who is equipped to answer such an existential question? -- it's because its citizens care about presidential politics. More precisely, a small number of Iowans really, really care, enough to show up at a prescribed time and stay put for an hour or more. Enough to publicly declare during the caucus which candidate they support and maybe even try to sway their neighbors. Caucusing is not easy. Iowans earn it.
Iowa has used a caucus system since it became a state in 1846. There have been some changes in the way the caucuses are run, says Hugh Winebrenner, professor emeritus at Drake University and an expert on the caucuses, but the emphasis has always been on a discussion of the issues and the candidates.
With so few people and so much passion, and with the strange way caucusing works, so many factors can influence the outcome. So many moving parts.
Like the weather.
"Now you're going to jinx it," says Brian Flaherty, chairman of the Johnson County Democrats.
Political observers and activists talk about the weather on caucus night with an Old Testament mixture of reverence and fear. Bad weather can lessen the night's turnout and affect the results, though precisely how is tough to predict. Is the candidate popular with elderly women who also happen to be fearful of slipping on ice? Or popular with caucus newbies who are looking for weather-related excuses to stay inside and watch the Orange Bowl?
It has been speculated, for example, that bad weather could really hurt Mike Huckabee.
It has been speculated, also, that bad weather could really help Mike Huckabee.
Caucus night is a night for spontaneity. Who will show up? Who knows!
"You learn over time," says Ned Chiodo, a lobbyist and former state representative in Des Moines who's been organizing for Hillary Clinton. He's broken Iowans into three groups based on how they caucus.
"There's the sure-sies," he says. They're a sure thing -- they say they're going to show up to caucus for a candidate and they will. There are the maybes, who might show up if you "really put some heat on 'em and remind 'em and make sure you check on 'em and maybe even take 'em."
And then there are the "double agents," Chiodo says. They're the ones who "tell you they're going to go for your candidate and they're not." Waste of time, those double agents.
There are also the folks who show up undecided. "Lotta people, I think, come to the caucus not committed because they know they're going to get more attention," says Neuzil, the Edwards supporter, who is also a Johnson County supervisor.
Perhaps this is politics as it should be -- filled with discussions, fraught with negotiations. Messy with the politics of personality and last-minute decisions.
"A loudmouth can have his or her day at the caucuses, particularly in the smaller ones," says Winebrenner, the caucuses expert.
* * *
As the campaigns well know, those who've been to a caucus in the past are more likely to caucus this time around. The old-timers know the drill. They know they have to be in line at their precinct by 7 p.m. or they won't be able to get in. They know they have to stay at the caucus for however long it takes. One time, Chiodo says, this woman showed up at a precinct and said, "Where do I vote?"
The folks in charge told her it wasn't like voting, that she had to stick around for awhile. Caucusing is a process.
She said, " 'I got a cab outside, I gotta get home!' " And she turned around and left, Chiodo says.
The decision of a single person -- to leave, to alter her support -- has the potential to matter more within the Democratic caucuses. The Republicans simply hold a straw poll; people show up and write a name on a piece of paper, and the statewide results are counted and reported. End of story.
But the Democrats operate in a less intuitive fashion, divvying up a precinct's delegates proportionately based on the total number of people who show up at that location. The other strange part about the way the Democrats work is that each candidate must have at least 15 percent support among the people in the room to be considered "viable." If the candidates are not viable, they don't get counted. That's when the "realignment" phase comes in, in which people try to persuade supporters of nonviable candidates (as well as those who are uncommitted) to throw their support to one of the remaining candidates.
The mood of the caucuses is as varied as the neighborhoods in which they're situated. There are rural ones where only 30 people show up and things run quietly.
"If you've been on the same farm for 50 years, you know all the neighbors," says 76-year-old Barbara Kauzlarich, who usually runs her local caucus in southern Iowa's Appanoose County. Kauzlarich puts two people in charge of the details at her caucuses: "Bruce and his mother." Bruce does the math and his mom keeps track of paperwork. Afterward, folks visit.
At other locations 500 people show up, and the persuasion period can verge on chaotic. One caucusgoer likens it to a trading floor on Wall Street. People are moving around in a crowded room and competing for attention, and it may get noisy, and it may get heated. If you're out there trying to persuade others to come to your group, says Flaherty, you may also have to "guard your own," since others may come along and try to "pick off somebody from a viable group."
The persuaders may tout their candidate's environmental record, if they think that will close the deal, or some other issue. Or they may offer to make a caucusgoer into a delegate at the county convention. Or they may say they need only one more person to gain a delegate for their candidate and point out that your group has so many supporters that it won't matter if you lose one.
Or they may say, " 'We've been next-door neighbors forever and you can trust me and you have to go somewhere -- so go with us,' " says Clinton County Democratic Chairwoman Jean Pardee.
Or they may fall back on cookies.
This last tactic is debatable. Sometimes, supporters bring what one caucusgoer refers to as "political chum" -- cookies and cocoa and stickers and brochures. But the folks in attendance are sophisticated. They've been following the race and they know the candidates and the policies. Could political chum really work on them?
"I don't think that really persuades people to move one way or another, but you know, it's always nice to have cookies," says Flaherty. "You're trying everything you can. It might work on one person."
Might work is worth a shot in this game of inches. And the allure of the cookies might not be about the cookies themselves, but about the show of organization evidenced by the cookies.
After all, the caucuses sometimes come down to subtleties: Who is making the argument. Or how enthusiastic the supporters of a candidate seem. Or how much pressure they apply. This is the messiness of a grass-roots system in which anything can change in the course of an hour and a half.
Neuzil, 37, remembers the first time he caucused in 1988, fresh out of high school. He showed up supporting Al Gore, but out of a hundred or so people, only one other person in the room was supporting Gore. So his candidate wasn't viable.
"I was very young and was courted," Neuzil says. "The group that was the nicest to me, I remember, was the Paul Simon campaign."
What really impressed him, he says, was that many of the supporters of the Illinois congressman were wearing Simon's signature bow tie. They seemed so unified, Neuzil says, so enthusiastic. And also . . .
"I thought that was the funniest one to go to, so that's the one I went to," he says.
And so it was.
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