It's Almost Time for the Iowa Caucus!

Who gives a shit?

Well, it’s just about Iowa caucus time and if there’s one thing I’ve learned after decades of watching the Iowa caucuses it’s that the Iowa caucuses don’t matter. If you’re unfamiliar with the way they work, once every four years, a bunch of weirdos go to high school gyms across Iowa’s 99 counties and stand in circles for a few hours. You’re allowed to change circles as many times as you like and everybody keeps moving in different circles until a winner is selected. For some reason, playing their fucked-up Duck Duck Goose game is how Iowa determines their state delegates for the presidential nomination. I don’t understand it. You don’t understand it. Nobody understands it and there’s no point in trying to understand it. Because it doesn’t matter.

The Iowa caucus is the political equivalent of National Hamburger Day. It’s an industry event created to bring money and attention to Iowa the same way National Hamburger Day is an industry event created to bring money and attention to hamburgers. The reason Iowans were so upset when the Democrats decided to move back their own Iowa caucus is because they also understand that their caucus is only significant because of where it falls on the election calendar. The fact that it’s the first contest (as opposed to the most meaningful in terms of importance, vote totals, representation, etc.) is the only relevant thing about it.

Ron DeSantis being totally normal at the Iowa State Fair.

For months, their state is flooded with candidates and all the attendant candidate (and media) spending. With the possible exception of New Hampshire, no other individual state gets nearly as much primary attention.

This year, the Iowa caucus is already a foregone conclusion. The Republicans will choose Donald Trump and the Democrats (when they eventually have their own Iowa caucus) will select Joe Biden. But the media still has to act like it’s a big deal so you get quotes like this from today’s New York Times:

“Trump has been polling around 50 percent plus or minus,” said Dennis J. Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Des Moines. “If he were to come in at 40, that’s a flashing yellow light. That suggests weaknesses and uncertainty.”

In other words, he’s going to win but we need to pay attention to how much he wins by in order to divine, I guess, how “strong” or “weak” he is. He hasn’t even been campaigning! The dude has just been hanging around various courtrooms waiting to get convicted for various crimes. Will those crimes eventually be his undoing on the way to snatching the Republican nomination for a third time? I don’t know and you don’t know. All we know is that, this time next week, nobody will give a shit about Iowa anymore, which is the right and natural way of the world.

I’ve certainly spent time in Iowa and, while it’s a perfectly nice place, there’s nothing about it that screams political acuity. Far from it. In fact, according to Roll Call, “In [the last] seven Iowa caucuses, two of the caucus winners have gone on to win the Republican presidential nomination.” Two! I mean, Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucus. Rick fucking Santorum won the Iowa caucus! Remember President Santorum? I don’t either. Not only do Iowans have a penchant for picking the eventual Republican loser, they also somehow manage to consistently pick the worst candidate in the field. (Tough to pick a winner in a “who’s worse” contest between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump but Iowa made a pretty showing of it.)

The truth is, no state is a good choice for the first primary. Our country is too big, too diverse, to have any one place serve as an appropriate proxy for the nation. Nor, I guess, should that be the goal. Primaries are meant to expose voters to candidates, and it makes sense that voters in different parts of the country will have different concerns. What doesn’t make a whole lot of sense is the years-long process we use to figure out our next leader.

Do we really need the primary season at all? Especially considering the “season” lasts a minimum of two years? Better, I think, would be a Battle of the Network Stars-type scenario in which, once every four years, presidential aspirants have to compete in a series of physical and mental challenges. You wouldn’t want to see Ron DeSantis compete in the potato sack race? Of course you would. Vivek Ramaswamy against Nikki Haley in the pie-eating contest? C’mon. That’s good fun, and about as illuminating as anything we’re seeing on the debate stage. Maybe we throw some American Gladiators in there to keep people on their toes. If the nation is rushing down the bread and circus route anyway, we might as well go all the way.

Anyhow, the Iowa caucuses are stupid. The people who show up to them are way too into politics, which skews the results, which inevitably creates a false narrative about the state of the country, which affects the way the media covers the race - which is largely a media-creation anyway - so we’re left with a situation in which candidates are forced to raise millions from anybody who will write them a check to throw at a non-representative contest that does a bad job of predicting the eventual nominee but does a very good job of creating content as meaningless as the caucus itself. In this way, the Iowa Caucus is actually the perfect American institution and I take back everything negative I said about it. Now shut up and let me eat my pork chop on a stick.