Iowa caucuses: From intimate gatherings to big spectacles

DUBUQUE — Doug Burgum and his wife stood in front of a large stone fireplace surrounded by Native American decor at the home of Ron and Rebecca Herrig outside Dubuque.

Burgum, the governor of North Dakota and then a Republican candidate for president, was the featured guest at the mid-November reception, which was hosted by Republican Party of Iowa Chair Jeff Kaufmann.

Addressing a group of about 30 people as they munched on small deli sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres piled on paper plates, Burgum talked about his rural upbringing and small-town roots, and his business background as a former software firm chief and Microsoft executive. He talked about the economy, energy and national security, and warned of China being the nation’s No. 1 threat.

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It was the kind of intimate setting — an individual seeking the highest office in the country and one of the most powerful positions in the world, talking to just a few people in someone’s living room — that has come to define the Iowa caucuses over the last five decades.

But intimate caucus gatherings like this one are becoming increasingly scarce. As interest in the caucuses campaigns has grown both from within the state’s borders and beyond — and as the caucuses themselves have grown — small gatherings have given way to large town halls and rallies.

“Events like this are critically important, because this is this is how Iowa caucuses had been won and lost,” Burgum told The Gazette in Dubuque. “In which small groups of people that care deeply … can look you in the eye, shake your hand, make the measure of that person and say, ‘Is this person someone I want to hear more from? Is this someone that we should try to support to go forward?’

“And so they’re critically important, particularly for someone like us,” said Burgum, who entered the race late — launching his 2024 bid in June — and was the among the least well-known candidates in the field.

That personal pitch — meeting voters in cozy living rooms, backyards and restaurants while taking questions about immigration, ethanol and farm subsidies, which has made a difference in previous caucuses between well- and lesser-known candidates — has been upended in recent caucus cycles.

Burgum suspended his campaign three weeks later after he failed to meet polling and fundraising thresholds set by the national party to qualify for the fourth GOP primary debate. He also failed to make the debate stage the month before.

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Joe Van Ginkel, chair of the Madison County Republicans, remembers his first Republican caucus in 2002, which was a year without a presidential primary.

“We had eight people at a dining room table,” Van Ginkel said.

Just six years later, in 2008, all of Madison County’s precincts were moved to the same spot, Winterset High School. Those caucuses were “a bin-buster,” he said.

“It was above the fire code,” Van Ginkel said. “And I don’t know what it’s going to look like this year, but I expect it to be pretty good turnout.”

Democratic National Committee member Scott Brennan, a Des Moines lawyer and past chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, said he started to see the slide away from intimate gatherings with candidates in Iowans’ living rooms to larger town halls and rallies starting with that same 2008 caucus cycle, when then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama won the Iowa Democratic caucuses in a historic victory that ultimately set him on the road to the White House.

“And I don’t know how you ever go back to that pure retail nature,” he said. “You have to do big events because people expect it. And, frankly, the media expects the big events and so then it drives turnout, because the campaign’s terrified that they’re going to do an event and media show up and there’s only 15 people.”

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'A year of chaos’

Steffen Schmidt, an emeritus professor of political science at Iowa State University, has written about and watched the caucuses evolve since the Seventies.

"This year has been a year of chaos for both the Democrats and the Republicans,” Schmidt said, with “separate storms sweeping across those political parties.”

The first storm being former President Donald Trump, and the other the national Democrats booting Iowa from its early nominating spot in their effort to redesign the nominating calendar to better represent the party’s demographics.

Iowa Democrats will hold party-organizing precinct caucuses Jan. 15, the same day as Republicans. But they will express their presidential preference using a new mail-in process and won’t announce results until March 5.

Trump has built a dominating, and possibly insurmountable, 32-point lead in Iowa polling. Trump has achieved this despite spending, relative to other Republican candidates, a sliver of the time campaigning in the state.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Schmidt said of Trump’s dominating lead in Iowa, despite shunning the typical retail politics leading up to caucus night.

“Donald Trump is not a normal political candidate,” Schmidt said. “Donald Trump is a personality, a phenomenon. He’s more like a movement, and so you can’t assess the caucuses like you have in past years.”

Trump can command overwhelming support without having to campaign extensively given his universally known persona and brand and ability to command media attention, said Doug Gross, a prominent GOP lawyer in Des Moines who chaired Mitt Romney's 2008 presidential effort in Iowa.

Trump’s multiple criminal indictments, including over efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and lawsuits seeking to remove him from the primary ballot in other states have only emboldened his supporters, who see him as a victim of political persecution.

Caucus campaign organization critical

While Trump defies conventional logic — not holding town halls or taking questions from voters, the kind of retail campaigning that has been a hallmark for presidential campaigns in Iowa — the caucuses are still all about organization.

To dominate in the actual caucuses as he has in the polls requires turning out supporters to sit in schools, churches and community halls on what is often a blistery cold night, listen to others make brief speeches in support of their candidate and cast their vote for Trump.

“In 2016 he relied almost totally on his brand,” said Gross, who recently endorsed former South Carolina Gov. and GOP rival Nikki Haley. “This time Trump has a very strong ground game.”

Trump lost the Iowa GOP caucuses in 2016 to better-organized U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Trump’s 2024 campaign now has built an expansive network of hundreds of “caucus captains” recruiting their neighbors to participate for the first time, and serve as campaign precinct representatives on caucus night.

At recent events before Trump taking the stage, videos detailing how to caucus played as volunteers collected “commit to caucus” cards signed by attendees.

Trump has replaced what was a scattershot campaign in 2016 with a more organized effort focused on turning out first-time caucusgoers and gathering and using detailed data about the former president’s supporters in the state.

“If Trump comes out with a significant victory, which I suspect, it will reaffirm the special nature of the Iowa caucuses and the importance of organizing to win the caucuses, and not just flying in and doing tarmac campaigns. I don’t think that goes away,” Gross said.

Kaufmann, the Republican Party of Iowa chair, noted while Trump has not campaigned as extensively in Iowa as other candidates, he still has held more and smaller events in the state than in 2016 — and is blitzing the state in the final week leading up to the Jan. 15 caucuses.

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Kaufmann also noted the emphasis other Republican presidential candidates, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ohio biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have placed on visiting every county, as well as the frenzied activity of their campaigns here and Haley’s in the last stretch.

“One thing about Iowans, we really appreciate when people take the time to care and to think about us,” he said. “Yes, there are a few of these trends that in and of themselves might be looked at” as a shift away from retail politics, “but I'm actually still comfortable with the localized nature” of this year’s caucuses, Kaufmann said.

And should Trump pull off a landslide victory, “I would still argue that Iowa did its job if these other individuals had a chance to make their case,” Kaufmann said.

Schmidt, the ISU professor, and Gross predict the retail aspect of the Iowa caucuses will become more important in future cycles.

“Because you’re not going to have someone (like Trump) with that large of a national brand that can forgo it,” Gross said.

Traditional approach in race for silver

The other narrative will be who finishes second in the GOP caucuses, and if he or she can land within striking distance of Trump. Whether that’s DeSantis or Haley, the traditional message of the Iowa caucuses holds true, Gross said.

“Who finishes second in Iowa is extremely important, and the only way to do that is through a strong organizational and retail political effort,” he said. “So it still matters. It just doesn’t matter as much.”

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DeSantis bet his campaign on retail campaigning in Iowa. He visited all 99 counties in the state, fiercely courted its socially conservative voters and secured the backing of its popular Republican governor.

He played baseball at the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, ate Dutch letters in Pella and visited the world’s largest popcorn ball in Sac City.

The visits have been part of DeSantis’ all-in strategy in Iowa, as he hoped a caucus upset would catapult him to a dominant position in the national primary. But despite his aggressive efforts, he remains far behind Trump in recent polling.

Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, has a wider path to eventual victory for the nomination, holding a clear second place in her home state and in New Hampshire.

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Trailing even further behind Trump is Ramaswamy, who last Tuesday celebrated visiting each Iowa counties twice during his campaign. Texas pastor Ryan Binkley, the first among the 2024 candidates to visit every county in the state, is polling at literally 0 percent among like Iowa Republican caucusgoers.

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Debates stealing Iowa’s thunder

Burgum poured millions of his own dollars into his campaign but lacked the national name recognition of his primary rivals and failed to raise his profile following his appearances in the first two debates.

Burgum said the RNC’s “arbitrary criteria” undercut the long-standing role and value of the caucuses in a small state with cheap media markets and an emphasis on in-person organizing that gave lesser-known candidates and new ideas a voice and kept a party’s nomination competitive.

“The RNC’s clubhouse debate requirements are nationalizing the primary process and taking the power of democracy away from the engaged, thoughtful citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire,” Burgum said in a statement. “The RNC’s mission is to win elections. It is not their mission to reduce competition and restrict fresh ideas by ‘narrowing the field’ months before the Iowa caucuses or the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.”

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Roger Helmrichs, chair of the Delaware County Republicans, said he feels the candidates’ focus on qualifying for the debates came at the cost of campaigning in Iowa. However, Helmrichs said he also understands to a degree why the national party set debate qualifying requirements.

“I agree there should be some qualifications. But I think their qualifications are a bit stringent,” Helmrichs said.

History and Iowa’s role

The Iowa caucuses have a history of dramatic, late-breaking twists. Past winners such as former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum and Cruz didn’t rise in the polls until the final weeks.

This year’s race, however, has felt very different. Trump continues to hold an enduring and unshakable lead and a clear alternative has yet to emerge.

Iowa has a spotty record at picking the eventual nominee. George W. Bush was the last non-incumbent Republican president to win the Iowa caucuses and secure the party’s nomination in 2000.

“I think that’s good. I think it’s good because all of these candidates need to know here in Iowa, that they don’t have to win this state to make it worthwhile to put their investments in that state,“ Kaufmann said.

He continued: “Iowa doesn’t pick presidents. We were never supposed to do that.” Rather, Iowa’s role is to winnow a large field to a small group of contenders who have proved they are the most viable candidates.

“All we’re supposed to do is highlight these candidates, and I still believe that there are two or three tickets out of Iowa to get the boost your campaign needs” to continue on to compete for the GOP nomination, Kaufmann said.

Optimism for Democrats

As for what happens to the Iowa Democratic caucuses moving forward, Brennan believes the party will retain some vestige of its mail-in process for 2028.

“But all bets are off as to the timing and everything else,” he said. “We are doing the process we’re doing this time, because the DNC has demanded it and we think it is good for a lot of folks in Iowa to participate. And if they participate and the turnout is appropriate, I think, you know, we would do a component of that again. But I think we would mix that with some sort of in-person process. That would be my preference.”

Schmidt said he believes once the 2024 political “storm is over,” national Democrats “will suddenly realize that they destroyed something that was extremely valuable, very successful and pretty democratic, in the sense that people tried very hard to bring their neighbors to the neighborhood caucus.

“And I think” Iowa Democrats will regain their coveted first-in-the-nation presidential caucus status, he said. “I really do.”

Comments: (319) 398-8499; tom.barton@thegazette.com