The Iowa Caucuses

I don’t have time to make this blog sound as pretty as I’d like to, but for those who are interested, here’s an e-mail I sent to some friends about the Iowa Caucuses. This only applies to the Democratic caucus; from what I understand, the Republican caucus is a secret ballot much more similar to a typical primary.

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The process is essentially like this:

 

1) Go to the section of the room corresponding to the candidate that
you support (there was also an undecided section).

2) After 30 minutes, tally the number of supporters for each
candidate. Candidates must have the support of 15% of the caucus
goers to be viable.

3) Supporters of non-viable candidates then need to support one of
the viable candidates, or join supporters of another non-viable
candidate to make a candidate viable, or they can always leave.

4) After about 20 minutes, a new and final count for each candidate is done.

5) Each precinct has a certain number of delegates (we had 11), and
the number of delegates a candidate recieves is proportional to the
number of supporters they have. 

The process took about 2 hours overall, which included some orders of business in the beginning not related to the caucus.

Overall, it wasn’t the best of experiences (at least compared to the last time I did it) because the room was much too small to handle the 270+ caucusers plus media plus volunteers that were there. (I think the legal capacity of the room was actually 140). It was pretty hot and uncomfortable, and nowhere to sit, which I’m sure turned a lot of people off. Also, in order to count the number of supporters (and the total # of people there), you literally raise your hand and count off, which is pretty difficult when people are scattered around, it’s hard to hear, and other groups are shouting.

Last time I was in a huge room and the process was much smoother. But I guess that’s what happens when you get record turnouts, and I’m not really complaining.

Out of Obama, Edwards, and Clinton, it looked as though supporters of Obama and Edwards were by far much younger than those caucusing for Clinton. It was hard to tell where supporters of the non-viable candidates redistributed themselves. I know Kucinich told his supporters to support Obama if he wasn’t viable, and I believe that Richardson may have as well.