Iowa Was Meaningless

We spent a lot of time covering the candidates’ ups and downs in Iowa. Almost none of it mattered.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/us/politics/iowa-caucuses-meaning.html



All that time in Iowa turned out to be a waste.

For 14 months, all of us in the political-media-industrial complex focused our resources and attention on the first-in-the-nation caucus state. We went for all the cattle calls, chicken dinners and the state fair. We covered local polling as if it was breaking news. (It was!) The top 10 candidates spent a collective 621 days in Iowa, according to The Des Moines Register’s candidate tracker. I spent 40 nights in the state, according to my hotel receipts. (In Mason City, stay at the Historic Park Inn, the world’s last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel.) The New York Times and other outlets had reporters move to Des Moines for months.

We spent countless hours reporting about how Iowa’s Democratic electorate longed for a younger, fresh-face candidate who could usher in generational change. We found out which campaigns had the strongest ground game. We walked readers through the state’s byzantine caucus process. Our colleagues chronicled local supporters’ lament that there was “no excitement” around Joe Biden’s campaign. All of those things were important because of the belief that a winning performance in Iowa can catapult an underdog candidate to the White House. But that has happened only twice — for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008. Iowa’s power now lies in its nostalgia, while the Democratic electorate has become far more diverse than the caucusgoers candidates encounter in Iowa.

In the end, the race in Iowa this year was a contest to see who could become president of Iowa. Pete Buttigieg narrowly won, but we didn’t find out the results until after the epic fiasco that was the caucus counting process. The things that mattered in Iowa — excitement, organization, money spent on TV ads, crowd sizes for town hall meetings — had next to no bearing on who eventually won the Democratic presidential nomination.

Mr. Biden, with Bernie Sanders dropping out yesterday, will be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee against President Trump this fall. He never had the most money, never had the biggest crowds and never had much buzz. What he had, unlike any of the other 27 candidates who ran, was the strong loyalty and support from black voters in the South, who voted for him in overwhelming numbers. And just as in 2016 and 2008, that was the most important element to winning a Democratic presidential nomination.

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