The reports are trickling in from the Iowa caucuses, the first time we have actual numbers that mean anything in the long, long road to the 2008 elections. With between 65% (Republican) and 85% (Democratic) of the precincts reporting, it looks like Huckabee has won on the Dark Side and Obama has won on ours. Edwards and Clinton are in a virtual statistical tie for second place, with Bill Richardson (in whose direction I'm inclining at the moment) coming in a far-distant fourth with just more than two percent of the votes. Romney came in second to Huckabee by about 10 points. Fred Thompson and John McCain are roughly tied for third about 10 points behind Romney. R-n P--l came in fifth with 10 percent, and Giuliani the cross-dresser went down in flames with just 4 percent of the votes.
On the surface, it would appear that these results challenge a number of points of what has come to be accepted as "conventional wisdom" about the 2008 race. I've heard a number of people, for example, surprisingly even in Left Blogistan, expressing the opinion that the United States is not yet ready to have a black man as president. Most of the pundits have suggested that among the Republicans it's Romney's or McCain's or Giuliani's turn this year, and Clinton's turn for the Democrats. Fred Thompson was supposed to wow the Republicans and re-energize the process on their side when it looked like the most likely winner on their ticket was "None of the above."
I'm not so sure we should be so quick to throw out those conventional ideas, however. The Iowa caucuses, statistically speaking, are a lousy sample to use if your goal is accurately to predict how the American voting public is going to behave on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The state is small, overwhelmingly rural, overwhelmingly agricultural, and overwhelmingly white. The United States as a whole is incredibly none of those things. The Iowa caucuses, at least on the Democratic side, are cursed with an arcane set of rules, do not allow for secret ballots, and come with a significant sampling bias (effectively, they only count the votes of people who are willing to show up at a specific time and place to spend possibly hours disputing politics with their neighbors, and who have the leisure and the ability to do those things).
Sure, Obama can claim to have won the first actual race that means anything. I don't think I'd start ordering his wife's pattern for the White House china just yet, however. Yes, he managed to win in Iowa, an overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly rural state--which could be taken to mean that "the heartland" (whatever that's supposed to mean) isn't as bitterly opposed to the idea of having a black man as president as many were assuming it was. But Obama is from Illinois, just across the river from Iowa. In other words, he's reasonably familiar and seen as "one of us." That dynamic may not play out quite as strongly in, say, Kansas or Oklahoma or Montana. Plus, at least as reported at the Great Orange SatanTM, the youth turnout in Iowa was staggeringly high--and a lot of that vote went for Obama. His numbers among older voters (who are far more likely to turn out for primary elections in my experience) may not be quite as stellar.
Edwards and Clinton? Well, they're still too close to call. Doesn't look like "the heartland" has a problem with either a trial lawyer or a woman candidate (even if she is Satan Incarnate, according to the Orcosphere), either, given that they're both bagging around 30% of the Iowa delegates. I don't think we're going to see anybody in the top three conceding this one tomorrow morning. And I'm quite sure, regrettably, that that ambiguity means we're going to see a whole lot more attempts by all parties to spin and position and focus-group themselves into a more advantageous position by the time the New Hampshire primaries roll around in a few days--and we're also likely to see the partisan infighting continue, even if it runs the risk of poisoning the well when the time comes for us to rally around the eventual winner.
I do think we can reasonably expect to see the Republican field narrow at least slightly before Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Mardi Gras Tuesday, however. Rumors abounded even this morning that Not-So-Fast Freddie would likely drop out if he didn't do well in Iowa--and it's hard to spin a 20-point loss to Huckabee and an 11-point loss to Romney as anything remotely decent. I doubt Giuliani is going to do us any favors and retire his "Noun. Verb. 9/11" campaign any time soon--but if he's got any brains at all (a proposition concerning which I beg leave to remain agnostic), he'll fire his entire campaign staff or at least those that urged him to ignore the early states and concentrate on Florida. He may hang on to a lead in the national polls for a while--but it will evaporate more quickly than most of the 26 inches of snow we've had--and lost--here this winter if he keeps turning in polling numbers in the single digits in all those early states he's blowing off to keep his powder dry for later contests.
It wouldn't surprise me to see McCain throwing in the towel, either. Tracking polls had him making something of a late comeback, after having to reinvent himself and his campaign several times this summer. But coming in a distant fourth, and behind a guy even more soporifically somnolescent than McCain himself, is not exactly what I'd call an inspiring achievement. The racist, homophobic, misogynist, anti-choice, anti-immigrant, anti-everything this country has or should stand for R-n P--l is probably not going to go anywhere--either higher in the polls or doing us a favor and folding his campaign. Romney will most likely try to move even further to the right, and clap his hands all the harder in the hopes of being able to dissociate himself from his (to the Republican base, anyway) "liberal" past identity. I'm not sure what that's likely to do for his numbers nationally.
If I were Mike Huckabee, though, I don't think I'd be getting many grandiose ideas about my political future from this result. As with Obama, I'm skeptical that these results are likely to hold up well once the candidate gets out of the white-bread environment of rural Iowa and has to confront people of color more than once a week--to say nothing of people who aren't terribly enthused by the idea of turning America into a Talibanesque theocracy.
And all of the foregoing is exactly why I think Iowa and New Hampshire need to lose their choke hold on the honor of going first in the electoral process. Why on earth should two small, rural, agricultural, overwhelmingly white states get to be our nation's political filters? If you look at the demographic reports and the census projections, the U.S. population seems to be moving to the cities, to the south, and to the west. Wouldn't it make far more sense to start our presidential nominating process in some state that fits at least a few of those criteria? At the very least, it seems to me, we ought to rotate the honor of going first in the process so that no one state or group of states always gets to take the lead.
I've seen a few arguments that starting in places like Iowa and New Hampshire forces candidates to confront "actual people" and their concerns. Maybe so, but how representative are the "actual people" in Iowa and New Hampshire? Most of us are not white pig farmers or corn growers or what have you. Most voters, to mention just one obvious example, are not nearly as enamored of crop subsidies or the ethanol tax credit as is the average resident of Iowa, for whom those things are far more real than they are to the rest of us elsewhere in the country. By the same token, however, the average Iowan knows next to nothing about water rights, immigration problems, or foreign trade in comparison to someone from California or Nevada or Arizona or New York.
I still see no reason why we should continue to allow Iowa and New Hampshire to maintain a stranglehold on the early political process. The candidates are indeed making the rounds of the coffee shops, the county fairs, the VFW halls, and the PTA meetings. That will no doubt continue wherever we eventually decide to hold the first-in-the-nation contests next time out. To be sure, if a larger and more diverse state is chosen for that honor, the candidates will have a harder time covering the territory--but it's hardly the case that they're blanketing even Iowa and New Hampshire. For every voter who gets to go on NPR or the nightly news and gush about having met Candidate X or Candidate Y or Candidate Z, I'll wager there are five or ten or even a few dozen voters who never got that chance and never will, even if they live to be a hundred. So what does it ultimately matter that it will be harder for the candidates to meet everybody when they aren't even trying to do that now?
We should do what we can to make the start of our electoral process far more representative of the voting population overall than it is now. That's only fair and just. As an added benefit, it will make it far more likely that we can draw meaningful conclusions from the results, without having to wait around for a few more data points to iron out the arbitrary peaks and valleys in the data points.
The primary system really needs to be repaired. With the majority of the population living within 50 miles of a coast, Iowa is not exactly representative of anything.
I would think that the statistics gurus could come up with the most representative state, and start with that one, instead of conservative outliers at the beginning of the process.
I would also like it to be a closed primary state, so that those who have actually made the effort to register as a member of a party are the only ones voting, and it's a secret ballot, like the general election.
Posted by: Bryan | Friday, 04 January 2008 at 11:33