Iowa Republican chair sees more than three tickets out of Iowa caucuses

CEDAR RAPIDS - 'Three tickets out of Iowa” is one of the long-held beliefs about the state's first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses.

However, with at least 12 GOP presidential hopefuls competing here, Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Jeff Kaufmann believes there may be more tickets available in 2016.

'I believe that old adage does not fit this year,” Kaufmann said recently on C-SPAN. 'We have a very wide field of very, very credible candidates. So I don't know what the magic number is, in terms of tickets out of Iowa. In my opinion, there are more than three.”

Kaufmann and Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Andy McGuire defended the state's leadoff role in the nomination process, which McGuire described as the 'heart of democracy.”

McGuire admitted caucuses, especially the Democratic version with preference groups and viability, seem to operate by 'sometime quirky rules.”

'But what I will tell you is great about the caucuses,” McGuire said, 'it is a little like being the heart of democracy. You get together with your neighbors and you talk about what you think is important right now to you, what's important to them, what vision you want for the country. Then you decide which candidate fulfills that.”

McGuire discounted polls that show former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton increasing her lead over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in Iowa.

'It's certainly anybody's game right now,” McGuire said. 'In the next two months ... we will have more of those ups and downs. That's sort of the nature of Iowa and the nature of the caucuses.

More than once, she added, she's seen people change their mind on caucus night.

'So it is really a fluid time,” McGuire said, 'but it is democracy in action. There's just nothing like it.”

Kaufmann agreed that 'at this point, the polls are very transient, very fluid.”

'I'm not going to be putting any money down on a bet in terms of who wins or who ends up in the final group until we get well into December” or later, Kaufmann said. 'My opinion is that the vast majority of Iowans have not made up their minds yet, which makes this entire situation that we're in all the most exciting albeit all the more difficult to predict.”

See the whole interview at http://cs.pn/1Ikh5y3.