Spin Control: Anger over Iowa caucus problems partly the media’s fault

A failed computer app has some people predicting the beginning of the end for the Iowa caucuses as the three-ring political circus to kick off the nation’s quadrennial presidential sweepstakes.

Not solely because the caucuses are a 19th century system that doesn’t adapt well to 21st century sensibilities. Heck, caucuses didn’t adapt well to late 20th century sensibilities.

It was inevitable that what the caucuses were meant to do – start a long and involved process for picking a few delegates to another meeting, the Democratic National Convention, almost six months later – wouldn’t measure up to the needs of the 24-hour news networks and their drive to pick instant winners and losers in the presidential race.

But last week’s caucuses didn’t really fail in their main function, which is to start the process of picking delegates for the Democratic National Convention.

Despite the problems with producing a count of delegate strength for the cluster of Democratic candidates last Monday night, the Iowa Democratic Party will eventually figure out how many delegates for each candidate will move on to the next round of meetings, where they will be winnowed again before the next round of meetings, and so on until the state will have a representative sample to send to Milwaukee, where this year’s party convention will be held.

Even after they were elevated to vaunted “first in the nation” status, the final results of the Iowa caucuses often weren’t known that first night, because it took so long to get and tabulate results from thousands of meetings across the state. That doesn’t much matter to the people who were at those meetings, because if they were chosen to be a delegate to the next round of meetings, they knew it.

The only people really inconvenienced by Monday’s computer issues were the talking heads on the 24-hour news networks. And for that, they should not blame the Iowa Democratic Party, but themselves.

The national media, primarily round-the-clock cable news, built the Iowa caucuses into a seminal event on which they could rely for a mixture of folksy features and navel-gazing analysis for months. Sure, Iowans were somewhat complicit in this by being so darn nice. They agree to answer any foolish question that a well-coiffed, overdressed reporter might ask as they eat breakfast at a diner, visit a county fair, milk a cow or push a stroller down Main Street. Full, quotable answer, equal parts insightful comment about a candidate’s policy and folksy observation about his or her demeanor.

Most times, a reporter doesn’t even have to ask for their full name, occupation, age, party affiliation, marital status, number of children and number of times they’ve attended a caucus. When I was in Iowa covering the 1988 caucuses, I got the feeling that if I asked for a voter’s blood type, they would have gladly provided it.

It’s likely the Iowa chambers of commerce had a hand in this too, because once every four years they have the opportunity to fill up the hotels, restaurants and bars, not just in Des Moines and Iowa City, but in Davenport, Keokuk, Council Bluffs, Sioux City and Ottumwa.

The problems with using Iowa as a bellwether for the United States are well-known: It’s not as demographically or racially diverse as the nation as a whole, it’s more rural and the average age is older.

The national media usually spend about 45 seconds telling us those shortcomings before spending a half-hour discussing what the latest poll says about which candidates Iowa voters are supporting or which issues are most important to them for securing that support. It’s sort of like the long list of side effects read by the announcer at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial after the audio and video has proclaimed a new drug is a miracle cure for some condition.

When Jimmy Carter surprised everyone in 1976 by “winning” the Iowa caucuses, the national media found themselves struggling to answer two questions – Who is Jimmy Carter and where is Iowa? (Fun fact for your next political trivia contest: Carter actually finished second in the caucuses that year, behind “uncommitted.”)

After Carter won the nomination and the presidency, the national media decided never to be caught so flat-footed again. Every four years they ramped up coverage, so that now political reporters write about events that are happening not just in the election year, but up to two years before.

I plead guilty to such an offense, having written about the appearance of a certain governor at an Iowa political dinner in June 2018. But in my defense, it was our governor.

By summer 2019, cable news was going live from the butter sculpture at the Iowa State Fair with breathless recaps of stump speeches being made to small crowds eating corn dogs. By the fall, they were dispatching teams of fresh, young reporters to travel the back roads of the Hawkeye State. As soon as Christmas and New Year’s were over, they were counting down the days, hours and minutes to caucus night. The weekend before, they decamped anchors from Washington, D.C., and New York studios and set up panels of pundits and data crunchers to analyze the numbers.

The Democrats even played into their hands by agreeing to release extra numbers on how many people showed up for each candidate as well as the standard count of delegates each candidate wins. This had the double bonus of giving the general public something closer to an election that most people understand, as opposed to a caucus that many people don’t, as well as more numbers to crunch. It could even lead to two different winners, one who had the most people show up and another who received the most delegates, with a chance for talking heads to debate which was more important.

So it’s not surprising that the gathered media were extremely perturbed by a lack of losers to deride and numbers to dissect when the untested app didn’t work. But the need for that app was a response to the candidates and the news media’s need for quick results on caucus night.

One can expect a bit of reflective hand-wringing about whether they put too much emphasis on the Iowa caucuses and possibly a task force to discuss whether they should change tactics for 2024.

But I’d be happy to take the money of anyone who’s betting reporters won’t be traipsing all over the state in 2023, hanging out in diners, camping out at the state fair and interviewing county chairmen from Burlington to Spirit Lake about how many candidates they’ve had in their front parlor.