But I'll toss in a good point that Ed Kilgore made:
You really need to dig into the details to understand Iowa, and that’s the real hold the state has over political junkies and candidates alike: the time you have to invest in the place tends to reinforce its importance.To put it in a more positive way...
The point of primaries and caucuses isn't so much to contest the nomination; it's to generate information for party actors. Well, it also technically does determine the nomination, but because large electorates generally follow opinion leaders, as long as party actors collectively come to a decision, the chances of regular voters overturning that decision are very small. If party actors collectively -- and remember, activists or insurgents or whatever you want to call them are included in my definition there -- cannot come to a collective decision, then the primaries and caucuses to wind up determining the winner. But whether that's as an independent force or whether it's ratifying the winner of internal party decisions...well, it's harder to say.
But getting back to the question of generating information: one reason that party actors nationally are satisfied with Iowa and New Hampshire first, as opposed to perhaps rotating lots of states, is that they know a lot about Iowa and New Hampshire and therefore have relatively little difficulty understanding in context the results from those states.
At any rate, Iowa isn't going anywhere, as I said over there. And those who are constantly writing Iowa's obituary...well, they make me cranky.
Democrats concerned with cities aren't so happy with Iowa and New Hampshire, or shouldn't be: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9226.html
ReplyDeletelarge electorates generally follow opinion leaders
ReplyDeleteWell, yes. They're generally only called opinion leaders if they have a following. If the electorate didn't follow them, they wouldn't be opinion leaders, would they?
Or "opinion leaders" could mean people who lead opinions, in the media for instance, or in a particular party or in Washington.
ReplyDeleteAnd if opinion leaders are folks who get interviewed on the Sunday shows, the 2008 and 2012 elections suggest they're often talking to each other, and being well paid for it.
The only point you are wrong about is about skipping Iowa and New Hampshire.
ReplyDeleteA powerful candidate does not have to contest Iowa or New Hampshire. At all. Barring health scares, for instance, Hillary is a prohibitive favorite to win the 2016 Democratic nomination if she runs, and she could win that nomination without even stepping foot in Iowa or New Hampshire and even running on a platform of getting rid of the two states' primacy.
They aren't actually that powerful. And the party actors' main control of the primaries is what it always has been-- through control of money. That's how candidates are forced out of the race-- not by bad results in Iowa, but because their fundraising dries up.
It actually suits the parties very much to maintain the illusion of importance of early contests, because they create a lot of free media coverage for favored candidates. But they aren't actually the mechanism of control, and if a big favorite candidate really cared about destroying the Iowa caucuses, he or she could do so VERY easily.
"A powerful candidate does not have to contest Iowa or New Hampshire." Tell that to Rudy Giuliani. You may say that he wasn't a "powerful candidate" but that's only in retrospect; as late as December 2007 he was eleven points ahead of his nearest competitor (Huckabee) in the GOP race according to Gallup. http://www.gallup.com/poll/103348/giuliani-leads-gop-race-huckabee-others-tie-second.aspx
ReplyDeletePersonally, I never thought Giuliani was a plausible candidate, and when his candidacy collapsed, I was entirely unsurprised. While ignoring Iowa and NH was stupid, I think the core of the problem was that he didn't stand a chance in them to begin with. That I believe was the reason for his strategy--he realized he'd be clobbered in those states no matter what, and so he wanted to draw attention away from them by focusing on Florida. It didn't work, and it couldn't have worked--but I doubt he'd have been successful even if he had contested the early states. The real lesson of his candidacy should be: Contesting Iowa and NH is necessary in order to win the Republican nomination, but far from sufficient.
DeleteGiuliani didn't exactly ignore IA and NH. He made lots of visits to each state, until he realized he wasn't making any headway in either. At that point he tried to retcon his campaign and say his strategy had always been to focus on (IIRC) FL rather than any of the prior states.
DeleteBy ignoring Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton would be ceding weeks of free publicity to her competitors. If one of them managed a win in one of those states because of this, that would lead to weeks of speculation that she was not really "a prohibitive favorite" and that the voters were rejecting her. She would probably still get the nomination anyway, but she would be buying herself a lot of aggravation just to prove a point for you.
ReplyDeleteYup.
DeleteIt's possible that Clinton will have it so wrapped up that it just won't matter. But had Al Gore skipped Iowa and NH in 2000, there's a very good chance that Bill Bradley would have won both...and if that happens, well, you never know. Probably Gore still wins, and there's a good chance he still wins easily, but a lot of people who were lukewarm for him but just assumed he had it won might well have jumped off the bandwagon at that point.
There was also a lot of pro-Bradley sentiment among the DC press and chattering classes, both because of dislike of Gore and a general desire to see if Bradley could beat a sitting VP. I expect that whichever Dem emerges as the main alternative to Clinton in 2016 will enjoy some favorable news coverage for the same reasons.
DeleteDon't forget: the press has a major interest in having a competitive nomination fight.
DeleteDon't forget, asserting there is a competitive nomination fight (as the press does EVERY time) does not mean there actually is one.
DeleteHere's a real simple question. If George H. W. Bush had skipped Iowa and New Hampshire in 1992, would he have lost the nomination to Pat Buchanan?
ReplyDeleteHere's a real simple question. In what way does a contest between a sitting President and a TV pundit/newspaper columnist who had never held elected office resemble any possible scenario for the 2016 election?
DeleteBush could have easily skipped the first two contests and still won the nomination -- because he probably would have won both those contests even while "skipping" them.
DeleteI don't think that's the case in a Clinton vs. Bradley-equivalent -- that is, someone who is a viable nominee, just not a first-tier one. She probably still wins the nomination anyway in that scenario, but with much less room for error.