It’s time to ignore the Iowa Caucus

By Matthew Gagnon

In a surprise to exactly no one, this week former President Donald Trump dominated the Iowa Caucus, earning 51 percent of the vote, and beating his nearest competitor Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by roughly 30 points. 

The result was the best possible scenario for Trump. 

First, he won more than 50 percent of the vote, so he can legitimately say that he was the choice of a majority of caucus-goers, no matter how many opponents he has or what their collective support was. 

Second, his margin of victory was so large over DeSantis that he made his alternatives look small and unimportant. If the second-place finisher had been closer to Trump, it may have indicated that Trump was in trouble. 30 points? Not at all concerning for the former president.

Third, it was DeSantis, not former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley who came in second. Though DeSantis was widely expected to place second in Iowa for most of the last few months, Haley has been making a charge of late. Her rise in the polls in New Hampshire has given many Republicans the impression that she, not DeSantis, is the “not Trump” choice du jour, and as such she had risen to second place in recent Iowa polls. But with DeSantis beating her by two points in Iowa, Haley is essentially blocked from becoming the clear second choice, DeSantis stays in the race and he will continue to splinter the non-Trump vote as a result. 

But while it was the best possible result for the man who will almost certainly be the Republican nominee, there is a fundamental question we should ask: Should we care, at all, about the Iowa Caucus. 

I don’t necessarily mean this year, though of course that question applies to 2024. Really, though, I am talking in a more existential sense about any year.

Iowa is a quirky state. In the heartland, the population is not terribly reflective of the rest of the country, on either the Republican or the Democratic side, and thus the results do not tell us much about what anyone else in the country thinks about anything. The logic that says we should care about Iowa says that this is a feature, not a bug. By that logic, farmers, evangelicals and rural voters are the backbone of the country, and are often ignored by politicians, so paying close attention to the opinions of these people is necessary and good for the country.

A fair point, and I’m sympathetic to that argument. Then again, those voters get a lot more attention than they say they do, and politicians who pander to the demands of small groups with outsized power is what gives us wasteful policies like ethanol subsidies.

But beyond that, the caucus is also not even representative of Iowa itself. If you have never participated in one, a caucus is very different from showing up to a voting booth and voting in a primary. A caucus is a participatory meeting that requires an investment of significant time and energy to take part in, and as a result it is only the most dedicated and motivated activists that show up. The average everyday voter that doesn’t have any interest in going through such a meatgrinder stays away.

That is why turnout is always so pathetic in Iowa. This year, roughly 110,000 voters participated in Iowa’s caucuses, out of about 752,000 registered Republicans in the state. This is about 15 percent of the state’s Republican voters, meaning that we are looking at a fraction of a fraction of a weird state for cues as to who our president will be. 

Then again, in contested primaries, Iowa rarely chooses the eventual nominee of the party anyway. On the Republican side, Iowans chose Ted Cruz in 2016, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Mike Huckabee in 2008, none of whom became the Republican nominee. George W. Bush did win Iowa in 2000 as did Bob Dole in 1996 (barely), but in 1988 Dole won, and in 1980 George H.W. Bush, and again, neither was the nominee. 

The same is true on the Democratic side, though to a lesser extent. In 2020, Bernie Sanders won the most votes and Pete Buttigieg won the most delegates, while Joe Biden became the party’s nominee. Tom Harkin won it in 1992, Dick Gephardt in 1988. Maine’s own Ed Muskie got the most votes of pledged caucus goers in 1972.

The point is, Iowa is not particularly useful in choosing a nominee, and only seems to serve as a political graveyard for many candidates who drop out after not doing well there. 

So why should we pay attention to it?

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.