Live Free of Iowa or Die



The Caucus are the most important event shaping the 08 Election.

Why?

Because of their leveraging affect on the outcome of the other Primaries….

And the weight they lend to the candidate who picks up the Iowa vote.

So what are the mechanics of this Iowa vote.

From what I can gather, approximately 125,000 democrats are expected to caucus; maybe as many as 150,000 tops! About 85,000 people came out the last time the republicans caucused.

Because the Caucus happens at 7:00 PM, it kind of eliminates night workers i.e. those workers and service people who work at night.
And what about those GI’s who are on Foreign duty. They can’t caucus. There’s no caucusing by mail either for out of town residents.

What about young parents with children?

Or grandparents watching grandchildren?

They can’t caucus either….


As a result, the Iowa caucus embraces those who are most likely to go out at night in ice and snow for two or two and a half hours to support their candidate.

And unfortunately nobody knows who that group is because such information is not gathered or retained.

But one might make some intelligent guesses…

Guesses that tend to shatter the polling that we can safely assume will be all wrong…

Here’s why the pollers are usually wrong—way wrong!

Regular polls judge the voting position of the Iowa voter.

They do not weight the vote as to the likelihood of that individual making the long haul to the voting site or the fact that the person being polled may not be able to get down to the caucus site because of work or other commitments.

And that is the problem making all of the pre-Iowa polls unreliable at best.


What is the real criteria?


How serious one is about the act of voting and how old are they. These seem to be the two criteria that will decide how the caucuses shape up.

Would someone willingly leave the comfort of a warm home to go out in the darkened, ice covered streets of Iowa for the privilege of standing on a line to see whether one’s one candidate can accumulate 25% of the vote? That seems to be the big unknown when all of the other factors are considered.

What other influences play a part..


There are more than 1770 caucuses that will take place. The weight of the specific caucus is predicated on how well it conforms to what it did before. It seems that the pundits suggest that there is also a difference in how the rural votes measure up to the urban votes. Some respected pundits tell us that a rural vote of several hundred can count for more in the caucus than a city vote of thousands….

Nevertheless, what comes out of this which seems to favor the rural vote and those hearty enough to roll out at the call will influence what happens in places like New York and Miami and San Francisco that bear little or no relationship to the mind-set of most Iowans.


Therefore, it is quite likely that the National outcome of the Primary Election will be dictated by maybe between ten and fifteen percent of eligible voters skewed unfairly to the rural areas and the young set. Moreover, Iowa unlike the rest of the land reflect a very strong Evangelical influence—some forty percent of Iowa voters claim to be Evangelical.

But what’s even more frustrating is the fact that Iowa can start the ball rolling for a candidate turned winner who gets less than the majority of votes cast by ten to fifteen percent of eligible voters.

That could mean that fewer than 100,000 votes of caucus goers could decide an election of nearly 100 million voters, in effect, signaling that the vote could be hijacked by less than one out of one thousand voters totally.

If this were done in some foreign country, more than likely the votes would have been tossed out because it gives the lie to the one man, one vote idea that is fundamental to democracy as we know it.

Perhaps our great minds need to sit back and think this out rationality and come up with a better idea than starting the Primaries off with a non-objective method of voting your preference.

Les Aaron
The Committee for Positive Change

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Contact les aaron at hubmaster@aol.com