The Iowa caucuses should be irrelevant
I’d be remiss to open this post without mentioning that I’m a University of Iowa alum and that I spent some of my most formative years living there. I have many fond memories of my time in Iowa City and the people I met and became close friends with during that chapter of my life.
Unfortunately, the state has changed drastically in the time since, and not at all for the better. From a political and ideological standpoint, it’s mostly unrecognizable now compared to when I lived there.
And the Iowa caucuses? They simply shouldn’t matter—or at least they shouldn’t be nearly as important as they still are. Frankly, that was true long before the state began its sharp, aggressive lurch to the extreme right in the mid 2010s.
There are the obvious, oft-cited reasons why: The state is overwhelmingly white and rural; it has no large metropolitan areas and its population is markedly older than most states. Much like New Hampshire, with its first-in-the-nation primary, Iowa doesn’t come close to representing the breadth and depth of America’s diversity.
Meanwhile, the caucuses themselves are a woefully antiquated affair that shuts out anyone (read: voter suppression) who can’t be present and spend considerable time in person on a weeknight when the temperatures are well below zero.
Take a look at what will be transpiring across Iowa this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, an irony that should be lost on no one. An infinitesimally tiny segment of demographically homogenous voters who will be even less representative of America at large than the state itself—who hold deeply regressive views that are wildly out of step with the broader electorate—are going to gather to declare their preferred candidate for president.
In so doing, they will be absolutely showered with media attention that they don’t deserve, just as they already have been in the weeks and months leading up to this overhyped occasion. (I am so sick of reading stories about some self-proclaimed “pro-life” voter who is interviewed at some diner or church in West Des Moines or Mason City or wherever, as though their demonstrably unpopular opinion should matter in the slightest.)
And the worst part about it is that whoever comes out on top—and sadly, we all know who it’s going to be—will be crowned the candidate with “momentum” leading up to the contests that come next. With its coveted but unearned spot on the calendar, Iowa sets the tone—all because a minuscule group of mostly rural, older white people, the vast majority of whom ostensibly preferred America as it was in 1950, had the time and resources to spend a frigid January night partaking in an archaic tradition that fit in much better during the era they love to romanticize.
Given that the entire identity of the Republican Party is now vested in the nihilistic notion of forcing a return to a bygone chapter of American history, by any means necessary and to the exclusion of so many, it’s no surprise that they still put stock in this quadrennial relic. But Democrats were right to ditch Iowa’s first-place spot on their side. The people who are most influential and receive the most attention in picking our presidential candidates should be the people who look most like the whole of America—and like it or not, that’s not Iowa.
The people who are most influential and receive the most attention in picking our presidential candidates should be the people who look most like the whole of America — and like it or not, that’s not Iowa.
As I said, I owe much of who I am now to my time in the Hawkeye State. Be that as it may, Iowa is unfortunately a case study on how America’s electoral system is rigged to give grotesquely oversized weight to small, rural, homogenous, sparsely populated conservative states at the expense of the majority—not just in general elections, but in the nomination process for the nation’s single most powerful office.
To the extent that the Iowa caucuses are relevant at all, they should be a mere footnote—not the inaugural event that can easily make or break candidacies and set the stage for everything to follow, whether we’re talking Democrats or Republicans.
