John Deeth has volunteered for the Johnson County Democrats and been involved in caucus planning since 2004. He was the lead organizer for the Johnson County caucuses in 2016 and 2020 and is doing the same work for 2024. Deeth has also worked in the Johnson County Auditor’s Office since 1997.

It’s been two and a half years now since the Democratic National Committee upended the traditional presidential nomination calendar and removed Iowa from its long time place as the first contest. As an advocate for an Iowa presidential primary, I was overjoyed when the sitting Democratic president of the United States wrote, “Our party should no longer allow caucuses as part of our nominating process.”

I had hoped that October 2023 would mark the acceptance stage of the grieving process. That month the Iowa Democratic Party announced a two-stage plan for 2024: an early caucus for party business only, to meet the letter of state law (which does not require a presidential vote at the caucus), and a later, mail-in party run primary to comply with the DNC’s delegate selection calendar. I may or may not have been the first to come up with that plan, but no matter. It was the only way to legally check both of those boxes.

Unfortunately, some of Iowa’s Democratic leaders just don’t know how to say goodbye.

The latest denial came from Iowa House Minority Leader Brian Meyer, during an appearance on “Iowa Press” in late June. Meyer has now joined a few other bitter-enders in arguing that Iowa Democrats should simply ignore the DNC’s official calendar in 2028 and schedule our caucuses first.

Meyer, and others who take the Defy The DNC stance, are not leading. They are giving party activists who are worried about the post-First future false hope that the glory days are coming back. Going rogue will not get us back the perks and privileges of First In The Nation, and it will not address the problems with the caucus process.

Most Iowans who say “we need the caucuses back” are not talking about caucuses at all. They are talking about First. They think First and The Caucuses are the same thing, because they’ve been taught that our early position was entirely dependent on having a caucus rather than a primary. 

The short version of the history is that, after a couple cycles of game playing, Iowa and New Hampshire reached a detente in the 1980s by both claiming to be first. Iowa would be the first caucus and New Hampshire the first primary.

New Hampshire spent the next 40 years threatening to move their primary ahead of us and policing Iowa’s caucus process to make sure it did not resemble an election, without giving us much guidance as to what that meant. As rooms got more crowded and voters begged for absentee ballots, Iowa Democratic leaders shrugged their shoulders and said that was impossible because “New Hampshire won’t like it.”

Then Iowa ran into a string of bad luck that exposed the well-intentioned but amateur nature of the caucuses. After a Republican near-tie in 2012, Democrats had a de facto tie in 2016. Then in 2020 the results process melted down entirely. It doesn’t matter Who Really Broke The App; Iowa got the blame.

So in late 2022, the DNC announced a new calendar that had New Hampshire as the third state and removed Iowa from the early state window.

Iowa Democrats had a measured but long-delayed response. They appeared to be cooperative, playing a long game for a shot to get an early state date again in a future cycle. (With incumbent Joe Biden facing no serious opposition for the nomination, the stakes were low in 2024.)

New Hampshire took the opposite approach, immediately and loudly screaming that no matter what the DNC said, New Hampshire would vote first. Which they did. (Sort of; see below.)

Which brings us back to Brian Meyer on Iowa Press, saying Iowa Democrats should take that defiant stance for 2028.

When people say “we need the caucuses back,” they mean they want the candidate visits to the smallest towns, the national press attention, the exciting multi-candidate events, the outside money and organizers and big names. I did that stuff. It was fun. It may have helped us organize the state. 

But that has nothing to do with the caucuses. Those things are about First. Those things are about the year before.

When I say “the caucuses” I am talking about the night of: the actual Monday night meetings and the months of arrangements, preparation and training it takes to pull them off—effort that is required of the county parties, not the state party. The work to get that done has grown much more difficult in recent cycles, and some of the problems are insurmountable. Unfortunately, too many Iowa Democrats ignore those problems because of the addiction to First, and they’re willing to ignore and sacrifice voters who can’t attend.

But going rogue will not get us back the privileges of First.

DNC rules require (page 20) that states that are non-compliant with the DNC calendar are automatically penalized 50 percent of their delegates, and that candidates cannot earn delegates in non-compliant states. The penalties on candidates who campaign in non-compliant states could get even more draconian.

Sure, a candidate might want a publicity bump from a rogue Iowa contest. But is that worth getting kicked out of DNC sanctioned debates? Are candidates willing to get locked out of the party’s online VAN database that is the lifeblood of organizing just to show up at an Iowa Democratic Party event?  

The Screw The DNC crowd scoffs at those penalties and loves to point out, as Meyer did, that “New Hampshire moved forward” in 2024. “They did what they needed to do and what they wanted to do. (The DNC) still seated those delegates. At the end of the day, we need to do what we need to do. And I propose that we just move forward with our caucuses as normal.”

It is true that New Hampshire Democrats did vote in an official state-run primary on January 23, 2024, ahead of any other state and ahead of their assigned slot. It’s also true that unlike Iowa, New Hampshire has two Democratic senators, two Democratic representatives, and is still legitimately a swing state. 

But there were consequences for New Hampshire. And they didn’t really vote on January 23.

Even leaving aside the questions about his health, it was unlikely that Biden would have run an extensive in-person primary campaign in New Hampshire or any state. Incumbents who face only fringe opposition never do. But the rules against candidates campaigning in states that are not in compliance with the DNC nomination calendar are strict and comprehensive:

“Campaigning” for purposes of this section includes, but is not limited to, placing a candidate’s name on the ballot or failing to take action to remove it from the ballot; purchasing print, internet, or electronic advertising that reaches a significant percentage of the voters in the aforementioned state; hiring campaign workers; opening an office; making public appearances; holding news conferences; coordinating volunteer activities; sending mail, other than fundraising requests that are also sent to potential donors in other states; using paid or volunteer phoners or automated calls to contact voters; sending emails or establishing a website specific to that state; holding events to which Democratic voters are invited; attending events sponsored by state or local Democratic organizations; or paying for campaign materials to be used in such a state.

So New Hampshire got away with voting first… but they didn’t really get First. New Hampshire saw no surrogate speakers or organizers. They didn’t even have Biden on the ballot. There was an awkward dance of New Hampshire pols trying to get people to write Biden in without breaking any of the rules, and while still trying to send a message that they resented that Biden had taken First away. They did good enough and got him 64 percent. It was a stubborn and empty victory.

But it wasn’t good enough for the DNC Rules And Bylaws Committee, which refused to allocate delegates based on the January 23 result. 

Here’s the part you almost certainly don’t know: New Hampshire caved. They kept as quiet about it as possible because it would have undercut their posture of defiant bluster. But in order to get their delegates seated, the New Hampshire Democratic Party had to conduct a party-run primary (exactly what the Iowa Democrats did!) on April 27. The event was scarcely publicized and only a handful of party activists participated.

If Iowa Democrats defy the DNC to go first in 2028, there will be none of the historic perks of First as we knew it. There will be none of the excitement, none of the big events, none of the money, none of the press. We can build it, but they won’t come. 

That’s the biggest punishment, but we could still be penalized at the convention. If the DNC wants to make an example of any state for breaking the calendar, Iowa is a sitting duck. Tom Harkin helped protect First for decades, but we no longer have him or any federal elected Democrats. The DNC doesn’t like that Iowa is red and getting redder, they don’t like our lack of diversity, they don’t like caucuses as a process, they don’t like our arrogant sense of entitlement that First is our natural right, and they don’t think we’ve really been punished yet for the 2020 results meltdown. I can very easily see the DNC tossing Iowa’s entire delegation to send a message. 

So Meyer’s proposal definitely gets us no candidates visiting the state and very possibly gets us no seats at the national convention. And it does nothing to fix the outdated caucus process.

The biggest problem with the caucuses was not the botched 2020 results. It’s not even that the caucuses are not accessible to people who can’t or won’t attend at the scheduled time. Those are big problems, but they can potentially be fixed.

The biggest problem is that in the best Democratic precincts, attendance has overgrown the capacity of the largest available public buildings. It’s not a question of getting a bigger room—bigger rooms do not exist. I can recruit volunteers better, I can train people better—but I can’t build buildings.

Usually events deal with limited capacity by setting an attendance cap—they sell tickets. But the caucuses aren’t the Taylor Swift tour: you have a legal right to attend. And you can’t add more tour dates to an election (despite the old timers who say “the caucuses aren’t an election,” the public has decided otherwise). So either you cram tighter, or you come up with a way to get some people out of the room while still letting them participate.

Meyer acknowledged the problem of people not being able to attend, and alluded to some sort of absentee process. Which is great—except now you’re back to the “New Hampshire won’t like it” issue. And my sense is that the people who want to defy the DNC on the caucus date and go back to the old system will also be willing to go back to the old system of excluding people who can’t attend. It’s too bad, but it’s worth it for First, right?

The biggest change Meyer suggests is getting rid of the least popular feature of the caucuses, the long realignment period where supporters of weaker candidates can switch to a second choice (and where, historically, other delegate math games got played). IDP was already moving in that direction with minor reforms in 2020. Meyer wants to have the type of caucus Iowa Republicans have always had: a simple straw poll at the beginning. After that, people not interested in party business can leave.

Fair enough. Literally everyone I have ever talked to who has attended both a Democratic and a Republican caucus prefers the Republican system. 

But while that might speed the caucus along, it does nothing to reduce overcrowding. You still have to park everybody, often many blocks away. You still have to sign everyone in and update a lot of voter registrations. You still have to get everyone into one room to get started. So in a mega-precinct, you still need that 800 person room. You just need it for, say, 90 minutes rather than three hours. 

There needs to be a lot more reform to make the rooms less crowded. What if you start letting people sign in, vote, and leave before the meeting starts? That’ll spread out the sign-in crunch and rotate more people through the parking spaces, and allow for somewhat smaller rooms. 

So do you start that at 6 PM? 5 PM? What if some sites let you have an early check in all day long but others, especially schools, don’t? And how many hours of early sign in and voting can you have before the New Hampshire Secretary of State decides that’s not a caucus, it’s an election?

Look, if we’re going to defy the DNC and have a fight with New Hampshire anyway, why not just go all the way and have a primary?

This year, State Representative Dave Jacoby of Coralville introduced the first ever bill for an Iowa presidential primary. It went nowhere, and we are a long way from seeing a primary bill pass. Iowa Republicans are still First on their party’s calendar, don’t really care much about the people who are unable to attend, and are united in opposition to any changes. If anything, they want to force Democrats back into the old stand in the corner to vote system. And they love seeing us squirm as we try to comply with both state law and DNC rules. 

Realistically, the compromise of 2024, with an early caucus for party business and a later party run primary, is the best Iowa Democrats can do for now. But more Democratic leaders should join Jacoby in supporting a primary, to send the message to activists that it’s time to accept reality, and to let the national party know that Iowa Democrats are ready to live the values of voting rights that we’re supposed to stand for. If we do that, and if we win some elections in 2026, then maybe we can start talking seriously about an official spot in the early states again. 

Despite my long-windedness, the caucuses and First are far from the biggest problems Iowa Democrats face. They’re just my piece of the big picture. Any time spent on fighting for First now is just a distraction from the more important work of rebuilding our party and winning elections. It’s long past time to move on.

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Top photo of a 2020 precinct caucus was originally published on the Polk County Democrats Facebook page.