Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Campaign troops are swarming the frosty countryside and attack ads fill the air. With the Iowa caucus just hours away, it's life-and-death time for Democrats.
Jan 17, 2004 | Forget everything the media has said about who's going to finish where in Iowa, and what you've seen in the many, many polls of "likely caucus-goers" that have caused the story to change -- overnight -- from a struggle for second place behind a dominant Howard Dean and steady Dick Gephardt to a four-way, anything-can-happen race.
Yes, the race has tightened and yes, the campaign has intensified. The candidates and their troops seem to be in every town and on every channel. John Kerry and John Edwards have finally begun to turn in the strong performances expected of them months ago. A new Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby poll actually shows Kerry with a 5-point lead. At least partly in response, Dean and Gephardt have blitzed the airwaves with negative ads.
But no amount of political science can predict what's going to happen when Iowa's Democrats gather at a series of caucuses on Monday to select a nominee. Which means that, with the race too close to call, the candidates will be relying heavily in the next two days on armies of volunteers who will be engaged in a grueling process of trying to win one vote at a time.
Consider the "orange hats" -- some 3,500 out-of-state volunteers who have come here over the last few days to help motivate locals to attend the caucuses on Dean's behalf.
On Des Moines' Searle Street, California natives Chris Finnie and Robin Johnston wander up the sidewalk, looking cold despite their heavy winter coats and bright orange ski-hats, clutching a stack of Dean campaign newsletters and blue sheets printed with the names of registered Democrats.
From the first house on their list, a man asks who they are; when they identify themselves, he tells them to keep moving. Another woman who opens the door tells the volunteer on her step that it's not her house -- she's only babysitting -- but that her sister who lives there hates Dean. Finally, a little farther down the street, someone opens the door and says that she not only plans to go to a caucus on Monday, but that she would "definitely" support Howard Dean, who she thought was "a very nice man."
And so it goes.
With the stakes potentially enormous, the campaigns of Dean, Kerry, Edwards and Dick Gephardt have all invested enormous resources here to build the organizations that will help them identify their supporters and get them to the caucuses, a hugely labor-intensive effort that could provide the margin of victory. And with four candidates fighting for a relatively limited group of regular caucus-goers, each campaign is trying to figure out a way to maximize turnout from new constituencies likely to provide them with support.
There is a particular stress on getting bodies to the caucuses -- as opposed to "getting out the vote" for more traditional primaries -- because of the particular rules that make these gatherings more like old-fashioned town hall or Grange Hall meetings than most modern elections. Democrats will gather starting at 6:30 p.m. at some 1,993 public places, sometimes exclusively with friends and neighbors, and after a half-hour will announce their candidate preferences. Each Iowa precinct gets a certain number of delegates, and after a process that would seem baffling to many outsiders, the caucuses determine which candidate gets the delegates allotted to each precinct, which eventually determines the delegates who are sent to the Democratic National Convention in Boston this July.
Because of the highly involved nature of the process, there is a premium on anyone committed enough to show up in the first place. In 2000, only 10 percent of Iowa Democrats caucused, although that figure is expected to be twice as high this year. And because the caucuses are relatively small groups, one person can tip the balance of an entire meeting, potentially influencing the process far more than any single voter in an ordinary primary state.
Hence, the exhaustive efforts to turn out caucus-goers. Kerry hopes to receive a boost from his fellow veterans, and they're likely to constitute a sizable chunk of Monday's caucus-goers.
At 10:30 last Thursday night at Kerry campaign headquarters on Locust Street, as a few dozen staff and volunteers were clearing out space amid the scattered papers and half-empty pizza boxes for another meeting, state communications director Laura Capps described the final push. She said that through phone banks, the Kerry campaign had built up enough core supporters -- "definite caucus-goers" -- among Iowa's veterans to surpass anything seen in past Democratic caucuses. "We're going to have 10,000 veterans caucusing for us," she said.
In a four-way race in which the highest estimates for turnout hover around 150,000, that would be a significant achievement. And the campaign is hoping to get more mileage out of Kerry's military credentials starting tonight, when former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, begins a statewide tour of Kerry's "Veteran's Brigade."
In addition, Kerry has the endorsement of 27 Iowa state representatives, more than any other candidate. While the local legislators don't exactly have the star power of some of the other political endorsements in the race, they could have an outsized impact in a caucus system by spreading out to different sites on caucus night to work the room for Kerry.
Gephardt's strength, in turn, is his labor support, the same force that carried him to a win in the Iowa caucuses in 1988. The campaign will be able to deploy a burly corps of union members from the Teamsters and a number of manufacturing unions to bring their fellow members to the caucuses. Of all the strategies, it is the only one proven to have worked in the past.
The Edwards campaign has focused heavily on rural areas of Iowa, where the rural born-and-bred senator is judged to have a greater cultural affinity with the residents. Through a series of house parties organized by supporters identified early on, the campaign has attempted to build "concentric circles" of supporters that will be able to dominate some of the rural caucuses. It is an efficient tactic: Because of the caucus rules, the smaller, rural gatherings can yield more delegates than larger caucuses, even if fewer people attend.
The strategy that is most dependent on "new" caucus-goers is the Dean campaign's. While polls have shown him going in the wrong direction, his Iowa campaign is confident that its organization will provide the ultimate edge. But his organization is unprecedented, and the campaign's target is, in large part, Iowans who have never participated in presidential primaries -- which means that almost anything could happen.
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