The Des Moines Register launched Jason Noble’s ten-part podcast about the Iowa caucuses last week. You can listen to the “Three Tickets” at the Register’s website or download the episodes through iTunes or Stitcher. After telling his own Iowa caucus “origin story” (hearing Howard Dean sing part of an Outkast song on a campaign bus in 2003), Noble devoted most of the first episode (“Peak Caucus”) to the 2008 Democratic contest. Roughly 240,000 Iowans showed up for Democratic precinct caucuses on January 3, mostly to support Barack Obama, John Edwards, or Hillary Clinton. Their numbers more than doubled the roughly 119,000 Iowans who caucused for Republican candidates the same night and nearly doubled the previous record-high Democratic Iowa caucus turnout, set in 2004.
Bleeding Heartland covered the 2008 caucuses extensively. Even so, “Peak Caucus” recalled some moments I had mostly forgotten and got me thinking about other aspects of the campaign I remembered well. So Noble succeeded in motivating this political junkie to listen to the rest of the “Three Tickets” series.
A few reactions to the first episode are after the jump.
1. Noble recounted a mostly-forgotten chapter in the story of Obama’s 2008 campaign: the Illinois senator as a “bad candidate” for president.
Obama’s oratorical skills and convincing general election victories have cemented the president’s image as a phenomenal political talent. There was tremendous buzz around his candidacy from the beginning of 2007, and he drew large crowds from his very first Iowa visits.
But for about six months, Obama wasn’t performing well on the stump in Iowa. Noble tells that story through senior Obama campaign staffer David Axelrod and reporter Jeff Zeleny, who covered the 2008 campaign for the New York Times. Obama wasn’t a natural at retail politics. He didn’t seem to be connecting with Iowans. He made some big gaffes, such as telling an Ames audience in February that thousands of American lives had been “wasted” in Iraq.
Obama is fortunate that the media mostly covered him favorably, clearly preferring him to the other leading Democratic contenders. If a candidate who wasn’t popular with the press corps had made a statement as clumsy and offensive as lives “wasted,” reporters would have brought it up as often as they referenced Edwards’ $400 haircut.
Anyway, I had forgotten that in early 2007, Obama came across awkwardly in some of his Iowa appearances. His learning curve may have contributed to the sense of complacency strategists for Clinton and Edwards felt about Obama’s potential to do well in Iowa.
2. Like many commentaries on the 2008 caucuses, “Three Tickets” relied on experts who didn’t give enough credit to the Clinton and Edwards campaign organizations.
Noble rightly focused on Barack Obama’s “superior organizational effort,” which greatly expanded the Iowa caucus-goer universe. But turnout couldn’t have reached 240,000 without large numbers of first-timers showing up to support other candidates as well.
I had high hopes of hearing a more balanced account when Noble commented around the 12:00 mark, “The 2008 caucus campaign was an epic battle, a contest among three popular candidates, running three strong operations, who all three succeeded at growing the caucus electorate.”
As Bleeding Heartland has argued many times, in most detail here, the Obama campaign beat Clinton and Edwards with a superior organization. But that doesn’t mean Clinton or Edwards ran bad campaigns in Iowa or “didn’t have a strategy” here. Many people who had never caucused before showed up to be counted for Edwards or Clinton in my own precinct caucus. The same story was repeated all over Iowa.
Speaking to Noble, Clinton supporter Jerry Crawford estimated that between 80,000 and 90,000 Iowans turned out for Obama on January 3, 2008. My best guess puts the number close to 90,000. Although the Iowa Democratic Party releases only county delegate and “state delegate equivalent” totals for each candidate (not the raw number of supporters), we can estimate that Edwards and Clinton each had roughly 70,000 people stand in their corner, based on total turnout of 240,000 and the percentage of delegates assigned to Clinton and Edwards.
Remember, the previous record-high Iowa Democratic caucus turnout had been around 125,000 people in 2004.
Also worth noting: Mike Huckabee won a convincing victory in the 2008 Republican caucuses by turning out 40,841 supporters. His campaign’s GOTV could not compare to that of Clinton or Edwards, let alone Obama’s operation.
Noble described how Obama’s campaign opened field offices not only in major Democratic strongholds, but also in many small towns. He didn’t mention that the Clinton and Edwards campaigns invested substantial resources in similar outreach. In late December 2007, Bleeding Heartland listed all the Democratic field office locations. Obama had the most with at least 37, including two in Des Moines, but Clinton’s campaign was running 34 field offices, and Edwards had 25 scattered around the state.
Remarkably, 43 of Iowa’s 99 counties contained at least one field office for a Democratic presidential candidate before the 2008 caucuses.
To illustrate the Clinton campaign’s failure to match Obama in organization, Zeleny fell back into familiar cliches, such as deriding the purchase of green plastic shovels to distribute to Clinton precinct captains. Certainly that wasn’t the best use of campaign funds, but anyone who implies that Clinton’s staff were not reaching out to a large pool of potential supporters misunderstands events on the ground. To cite just one example from my own neighborhood, the Clinton campaign identified and turned out a woman I have known for most of my life, whom I failed to turn out for the 2004 caucuses or the 2006 gubernatorial primary, despite repeated personal contacts.
It would have been helpful for Noble to interview some former Clinton or Edwards staffers, specifically about the strengths and weaknesses of their GOTV in 2007.
UPDATE: I should also mention that Crawford was the only person associated with the Clinton campaign whom Noble interviewed in this segment. He blamed himself for the loss (citing his own failure to recognize the strength of change sentiment in the electorate), but I would rather have heard from people who were managing campaign operations, not just in Des Moines but in those field offices.
Joe Trippi was the only Edwards campaign person Noble interviewed for this podcast. He lamented the decision to go with “the wrong speech” for the Jefferson-Jackson dinner. Although that may have been a mistake, from my perspective as a former precinct captain for Edwards (I know, don’t get me started), it was far from the most important poor strategic decision. Again, I wish Noble had interviewed former staffers who were more involved on the ground in Iowa.
3. Noble revealed that the Iowa Democratic Party was itself unprepared for the crush of 2008 caucus-goers.
Underestimating the eventual caucus turnout was probably the greatest strategic error of the Clinton and Edwards campaigns. But they were hardly alone in miscalculating.
Norm Sterzenbach, who was the Iowa Democratic Party’s caucus director during the 2008 cycle, told Noble they were anticipating record-high turnout, but in the range of 175,000 to 190,000 people. Party leaders planned accordingly when booking venues and printing materials, such as voter registration cards for Republicans and no-party voters who were changing their party affiliation in order to caucus with Democrats.
Notably, beginning around the 33:00 mark of “Peak Caucus,” Sterzenbach credited all three of the leading candidates with producing the record numbers. My partial transcript:
The conventional wisdom was that Barack Obama brought all these people out, and he did, but so did Hillary, and so did Edwards. They all deserve a lot of credit for that high turnout. It was a year of rock stars. And so, the candidates themselves were much larger than we had seen in previous caucuses. And then on top of it, they all ran really solid, innovative campaigns in Iowa. They had a lot of staff, they spent a lot of time in the state, they went all across the state, and they kicked over every rock to find every potential caucus-goer you could.
Please share any comments about the 2008 caucuses or the “Three Tickets” podcast in this thread.
P.S.- Axelrod delivered quite the cheap shot when discussing the 2007 Jefferson-Jackson dinner, a “turning point” in the race. After explaining how Clinton’s partisan message about “turning up the heat” on Republicans played right into Obama’s hands (since he was talking about uniting the country and standing above partisan politics), Axelrod characterized the call and response portion of Clinton’s speech (“Turn up the heat”) as “North Korean” style. As if candidates don’t use that technique to fire up crowds all the time.
Granted, Obama’s stump speeches didn’t typically employ call-and-response rhetoric, but crowds sometimes produced the same effect by chanting the candidate’s words back to him. I’m sure Axelrod wouldn’t find anything “North Korean” about the way the crowd repeatedly burst out with “Yes we can! Yes we can!” during Obama’s famous speech from the evening of the 2008 New Hampshire primary.
UPDATE: Thinking further about Noble’s podcast, I hope future episodes will include more voices who haven’t been heard before. Zeleny and Axelrod were among the leading contributors to the dominant narrative about the 2008 Iowa caucuses and the battle for the Democratic nomination. The Des Moines Register should seize the opportunity to showcase people who haven’t already shaped much of what we know about the caucuses.
SECOND UPDATE: On October 10, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Andy McGuire and Republican Party of Iowa Chair Jeff Kaufmann published a joint op-ed in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on why the caucuses “continue to earn their ‘first-in-the-nation’ status.” These passages speak to what I value most highly about the caucuses.
The caucuses represent grass-roots politics at its finest. Iowans don’t put a premium on name ID or fundraising numbers – we put a premium on ideas. We meet with presidential candidates all over Iowa – multiple times even – at coffee shops, football games, backyards and more to talk about the future of our nation. We take the time to learn about each candidate’s background, study their policy proposals and ask spirited questions in order to vet each candidate thoroughly. In an age of elections too often dominated by big money and flashy TV ads, the Iowa caucuses serve as a unique antidote.
2. We take this job seriously. The hard work that Iowans put in during the caucus process is recognized across the aisle. Iowa prides itself on taking a candidate’s full measure on policy. Candidates tell us every day how much they enjoy coming to Iowa and appreciate the thoughtful questions asked of them.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the average Iowa caucus-goer who attends a candidate event is much more likely to ask a substantive policy question than are the journalists who tag along with presidential hopefuls. Noble opened the podcast with an anecdote about a memorable moment on Howard Dean’s campaign bus in the fall of 2003. He and a fellow student journalist for Iowa State Daily had a chance to ask the Democratic front-runner one question each. Noble asked “the smartest question I could think of,” about something then New York Times columnist William Safire had written about Dean, which the candidate brushed off. The other student journalist asked an “great” (in Noble’s view) question: did Dean believe Outkast was breaking up.
Wherever Dean was headed that day, I would guess he got more questions about real issues from ordinary Democrats than from any journalists riding the campaign bus.
The column by McGuire and Kaufmann also touted a joint project to improve the reporting of Iowa caucus results.
The Iowa Democratic Party and the Republican Party of Iowa teamed up with Microsoft on a new reporting app for the Iowa caucuses that will enable results to be delivered quickly, securely and accurately. The new app, powered by Microsoft technology, is a major upgrade over previous reporting systems. In 2016, Iowa will be on the forefront of election technology, leading the nation in how election results are collected and tabulated.
Another fiasco like what happened with the Iowa GOP’s caucus results in 2012 would do irreparable harm to the reputation of the caucuses. Democrats don’t report raw numbers of supporters for each candidate, but even so, it can’t hurt to have faster, reliable reporting of delegate numbers.
For the opposing view, listen to the self-styled “Dr. Politics” (Iowa State University Professor Steffen Schmidt) make a fool of himself on Dave Price’s WHO show “The Insiders” last weekend. Schmidt characterized the caucuses as a “beauty contest” and argued that the parties should stand by whatever initial results are reported on caucus night–after that, “goodbye.” He thinks it was a “horrible mistake” for the Iowa GOP to recount the 2012 results. Crazy talk.