Biden easily wins Iowa Democrats' mail-in caucus

DES MOINES — President Joe Biden easily won the first mail-in Iowa Democratic caucus Tuesday, earning a vote of confidence from the state’s Democrats after the national party booted the state from its coveted first-in-the-nation status.

Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart said Tuesday, as the last votes still were being tabulated at the party headquarters, that this year’s all-mail contest was the result of years of work by the state party.

"I've been the chair here at the Iowa Democratic Party for a little over a year now, but this process started before I did," she said. "And so this is the final culmination of seeing who the Democrats in Iowa are choosing to be their nominee for president."

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Biden won 91 percent of the votes, according to unofficial results announced by the party Tuesday night. Another 4 percent cast their vote as "uncommitted." U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota received 3 percent and Marianne Williamson, a self-help author who dropped out of the race but later said she was reentering, received 2 percent.

With neither long-shot challenger receiving the minimum threshold of 15 percent of the votes, Biden will be awarded all of the state’s 46 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

In total by Tuesday afternoon, 12,193 Iowa Democrats returned presidential preference cards in the state party’s first run at the new process.

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The results, timed to coincide with 15 other states and a territory holding Democratic contests Super Tuesday, came without the frenzy and media attention that usually accompanies the Iowa caucuses. Instead of voters scrambling into corners in crowded school gyms and complicated caucus math, the vote counting took place in a small room in a nondescript Des Moines office building.

The party contracted with a team led by Amber McReynolds, the founding chief executive officer of the National Vote at Home Institute, to oversee the voting and tabulation process.

The state party was forced to reinvent its nominating process after the Democratic National Committee removed Iowa from its decades-old position at the front of the presidential primary calendar. After a botched results process in the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses — in which Biden eventually was declared to come in fourth — the Democratic National Committee moved to reorder the nominating calendar in an effort to elevate the voices of people of color and encourage primaries over caucuses.

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The national party promoted South Carolina to the top spot, awarding the state that gave a kick-start to Biden’s 2020 successful campaign.

While Iowa Democrats held party-organizing caucuses in January, the same day as the Republicans' first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, the new calendar meant they could not tally votes until after the other early states had voted.

Chair: 2024 caucus ‘the most accessible’

Democrats long have had concerns about the accessibility of the Iowa caucuses, which required voters to go to a caucus site for hours on a winter evening. Critics say the caucuses are inaccessible for people who work nights, have disabilities or leave the state in the winter.

In contrast to those in-person caucuses, Hart said this year’s contest is the most accessible in the party’s history. All registered Democrats in the state had the option to request a presidential preference card.

“This is the first time that in Iowa, when you work third-shift, or when you have small children and you don’t have child care in the evenings … you still got to have your voice heard," Hart said. "People still participated in this process.”

The Iowa Democratic Party received 19,609 caucus card requests, and cards postmarked by Tuesday can be counted if they arrive to the party’s headquarters by Friday. The party will certify the official results tally March 16, Hart said.

The number of returned caucus cards, so far, falls short of the number of people who participated in the party’s 2012 caucus, the last time an incumbent Democrat was on the presidential ballot. And it is just a fraction of the more than 200,000 who participated in the competitive 2008 caucuses, which catapulted former President Barack Obama's campaign.

About 110,000 Republicans participated in the party's caucuses this year, where there was a competitive presidential contest won by former President Donald Trump.

In a statement Tuesday, Republican Party of Iowa Chair Jeff Kaufmann said Iowa Democrats' pivot to the mail-in system was an attempt to appease national party leaders over the interests of Iowans.

"The Iowa GOP Caucus held in January was a lively, grassroots-driven, transparent model of democracy," Kaufmann said. "Preserving Iowa's first-in-the-nation status ensures that literally anyone can be president. Now more than ever, it's important that those who want to run our country are not just crowned by the establishment, but rather that the grassroots of each party decide who their nominee should be."

Iowa Democrats work to rebuild

The caucuses long served as a tool for party organizing as candidates have flooded the state with money and media attention during competitive years, driving voter registration and turnout at the caucuses.

But without that draw, Iowa’s Democrats face an organizing challenge, compounding their waning competitiveness in state elections.

Hart said the party is examining how it can encourage voters, under the new process, to turn out for the in-person caucuses and engage them to show up on Election Day. Iowa Democrats have “a long ways to go,” Hart said.

“We've talked in the past about how we're reimagining these in-person caucuses now, and I think that is exactly the way to look at that,” she said. “It's different. It's a new process. So we've got to figure out how to create more interest around that, how to get better participation at the in-person caucus, just like we’re looking at the way to tweak the mail-in process.”