Nevertheless, the fact of the matter remains that, for whatever reasons of tradition and/or inertia, Iowa votes first--and when I first moved here 3 years ago for grad school, I determined to take full advantage of the fact. All my adult voting life, I have either lived in Washington, Idaho, or Utah, which means that, when it comes to national elections, my vote was largely symbolic and meaningless--Washington almost always goes blue, Idaho and Utah always goes red. Moreover, their primaries are late, such that the nomination is largely locked up and a non-issue by the time it gets to them. What would it be like, I wondered, to live in a swing or early primary state, where my vote actually mattered?
First, I was reminded of what I first learned during my summer job in Colorado in 2008--if you live in such a state, you will be absolutely carpet bombed with ads. Like, totally. Just the other day, during a basketball game, I saw ads on TV for Hillary, Bernie, Ted Cruz, Jeb, Rubio, and even anti-Rubio attack ads (I suspect those were Jeb ads, too). I also saw ads for Scott Walker and Bobbie Jindal before they dropped out of the race. It's just been relentless. It appears that if you want your vote to matter, then you also gotta put up with being shouted at from all directions.
It all came to a head yesterday, on the night of the Caucus itself. I may never have this opportunity again, so out I ventured to my local precinct.
Note I said "Caucus", not Primary. There's a difference. In Washington we have both (despite everyone totally knowing how redundant that is), so most folks, as far as I'm aware, just opt for the Primary. You check a box on a ballot, mail it in, you're golden. Clean, efficient, painless, organized--my partial-German heritage approves ("Bender" is an Amish name).
Caucuses, by contrast, are much more of an organized chaos. You have to actually physically show up to your precinct location by 7pm (which is problematic for folks with disabilities or night-jobs). Each individual precinct is tiny, by the way; mine was the "Iowa City 13th precinct," to put that in perspective. One feels like this is a remnant, an artifact, of a much more archaic era, when Caucuses were held in Saloons or something, where drunken, eye-gouging brawls over candidates could break out at any moment, and roving gangs of mobs attempted to physically intimidate each others' votes--yet nevertheless everyone put up with the system because doing a live headcount was the only way to ensure that bandits didn't steal the ballot box en route to the state capitol by horse-back. One would think that such vestiges of the Wild West would have gone the way of the whale-oil lamp and the horse-drawn buggy in our 21st century, but Iowa had stubbornly clung to the old ways; in a way, watching folks check their smartphones at a Caucus felt as anachronistic as wearing ear-buds at a Renaissance Fair.
But if the Caucus still feels staggeringly outmoded, well, you also can't help but feel there that you are actually participating in Democracy! There was just this lo-fi charm about it, a low-key, low-budget, DIY approach towards determining the leaders of the most terrifyingly powerful country on earth. I mean, my goodness, the votes were collected on 3x5 cards! Also, it didn't matter if you were rich or poor, black or white, male or female--if you want to Caucus in Iowa, everyone has to do it the same humble way, stand in the same lines, against the same walls. It was almost more like organizing a Punk show. There's an infectious energy about the event, and a leveling of all social class and distinction--there are no VIP lounges in a Caucus.
That energy has spread, by the way--we are apparently not going to have a repeat of the record-low voter turn-out of 2014, because literally twice as many people as they were expecting showed up to my caucus (at least on the Democratic side). My friends in other Iowa City precincts reported similarly unprecedented turnout. It was in fact heart-warming, I admit, to behold participatory Democracy still alive and well in our cynical age--but that also means the organizers were unprepared for this many people, so I stood out in line for an hour in the cold, waiting to get inside, and I was not dressed appropriately. They also ran out of cookies by the time I got inside. So, if some of my Facebook posts seemed a little bitter last night, well, I was cold and hungry.
The way Caucus voting works in Iowa's archaic system is that in each precinct, a candidate gets 1 state delegate for every 50 votes. Hence, in my precinct, Sanders got 5 delegates with 263 votes, while Clinton got 2 delegates with 102 votes. The total number of delegates per candidate from these thousand+ precincts determines the winner. Considering the razor thin margins of victory state wide, then yes, every last vote actually mattered! For if I and only 2 other folks had not bothered to show up--or had wondered over to the Bernie wall instead--then Clinton would have gotten only 1 delegate from my precinct instead of 2, and she clearly needed every single delegate she could get last night! So if you're a Bernie fan, you could arguable blame me--or if you're a Clintonista, you could arguably thank me. I'll accept cookies. I'm not saying I'm the greatest American hero...but I am. (jk)
A friend congratulated me this morning, saying "Now that the results are in, it looks like your vote both counted and mattered." It's such a weird, exhilarating feeling! David Harris, I totally get now why you kept voting absentee for Florida. For now that I've had a taste for having my vote matter, I crave another sweet, sweet hit of the good stuff--and it's the first time I've ever regretted moving away from Iowa so soon.
Of course, this could all be rectified with a randomized computer program that gives all states a chance to have their votes matter in the primaries, which I argue could do wonders for strengthening participatory democracy everywhere in American--but that's a discussion for a different time.
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