One of the things I noticed about the various campaigns this year was the relative level of understanding they exhibited about the actual caucus process. Edwards, of course, has been running in Iowa for 5 years, and his campaign exhibited a good understanding of caucus tactics. Senator Dodd's staff had a good deal of experience from the Kerry campaign and also understood the process. That understanding, of course, turned out to be insufficient to overcome a lack of "traction" with the public. Obama's people were enthusiastic and were quick learners. In addition, I noticed many of their local precinct captains were Edwards folks from 2004.
So, if you can stand one more diary on the Iowa Caucuses, follow me over the fold for a little local flavor.
The paperwork from the 17 precincts in my county is trickling as Caucus Chairs drop it off and/or mail it in. Our county results were similar to the statewide results. With a total of 115 County Convention Delegates to elect, the results were: Obama - 41 (35.7 %); Clinton - 38 (33.0 %); Edwards - 35 (30.4 %); Dodd -1 (0.9 %).
Attendance in our county was about 2.35 times that in 2004.
Some notes about the campaigns:
In order to participate, a person must be a registered Democratic voter in the precinct (except those who were born between July 4 and November 4, 1990 who are too young to register but will be old enough to vote in the General Election). As seems to be the story across the state, Obama drew more of the new registrants than did any other candidate.
My little precinct is allotted only two county convention delegates, so our viability threshold is 25% of the caucus. We had attendance of 20, so it took 5 to form a viable group. Now, when you do the math, you see that there could be as many as 4 viable groups. But only two groups can elect a delegate. When we divided into groups, we had 7 for Obama, 5 for Edwards, 5 for Clinton, 1 for Dodd (me), 1 for Richardson, and 1 Uncommitted. During the realignment time, we took the opportunity to complete the remaining business of the caucus: consideration of resolutions, election of members of the County Convention Committees and of the Central Committee.
At the end of thirty minutes, no one had realigned. We voted for 5 more minutes for realignment. I made a pitch to the Clinton group to join with the non-viable groups to elect, at their discretion, a delegate for Dodd, Richardson or Uncommitted. Had they taken us up, they would have denied a delegate for Edwards. However, none of the Clinton group would budge. They came to caucus for Hillary and would not realign, even to Uncommitted in order to keep Edwards from getting a delegate. I was perplexed. But all three of us uncommitted folks had Clinton as our third choice among the top three, so we realigned for Edwards and Obama, ending up with 1 Delegate for Obama and 1 for Edwards.
So as a practical matter, the Clinton supporters chose to give a delegate to Edwards.
From the anecdotes I am hearing from around the county, similar tactical mistakes occurred in other caucuses. That is, Clinton supporters had other opportunities to realign with non-viable groups to reduce Edwards and/or Obama's delegate count but did not take advantage of those opportunities.
Remember that Governor Bill was saved from an embarrassing finish when Harkin jumped in in 1992, making the caucus results irrelevant. It looked like early on that Gov. Vilsack was poised to run interference for Hillary in 2008 in the same manner, but he turned out to be much less popular than Harkin as a favorite son. So Hillary had to compete. But rather than learning how to compete, it seems to me that the campaign chose to run an election campaign and to ignore caucus tactics that could have given her a bit better showing - with the exact same turnout. This may explain why Obama won by a larger margin than predicted in even the closest of polls.
In other words, had the Clinton campaign trained its precinct captains on the finer points of preference group strategies, they could have had a better showing. Could they have bested Obama? Probably not. But as close as they were with Edwards, they may well have been able to reduce Edwards totals enough to finish in second.
In the end, I am glad it is over. I am hoping that the next time we have a Democratic Presidential nomination will be in 2016 and by that time, the party will have figured out a better way to choose a nominee.
Until then, we wish you all the best.
Update:
It was pointed out in the comments that no reference was made to making a similar pitch to the Edwards group. While I did make a general pitch at the beginning of the alignment period, such a specific appeal was not made to the Edwards group because during the final realignment time, one of the Obama group was moving to Edwards to make the split Obama - 6, Edwards - 6, Clinton - 5, Uncommitted and Other - 3. So the Edwards folks had their delegate unless Clinton and Uncommitted/Other joined together. As noted previously, all three of us had Edwards as a higher choice than Clinton, so it seemed to us better that Edwards get the delegate than Clinton.
I apologize for the omission.