2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWhy We Shouldn’t Give a Damn Who Wins the Iowa Caucuses
Early in the 2016 Presidential election year all eyes will be on Iowa because on February 1st the state will host their first in the nation Presidential election process, the Iowa caucuses. Presidential candidates have long since been crisscrossing the state shaking thousands of hands. The television news channels are already featuring the latest results of polls taken in Iowa and it has been projected that the Presidential campaigns will spend as much as $30 million dollars in the state before the caucuses have been completed. No doubt on that Monday evening the major networks will have scores of reporters on hand waiting breathlessly to report the latest vote tabulations. However, if you look closely at how the caucus process works, and how few voters are involved, you will inevitably come away wondering why anyone would care which candidates will win in Iowa.
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99Forever
(14,524 posts)... an "inevitable" candidate that is very likely to get beat in Iowa.
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"
CajunBlazer
(5,648 posts)and it is not representative of the democracy we live in.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)elected to represent them on the next level. Lot of people in his area know him only as "that mentally ill kid who lives alone in that old house".
What they do not know about him and what the caucus found out was that he is very into politics, is a great speaker and this time around supports Bernie.
Party leaders my eye. This is the first time he has ever done anything like that.
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)And, will vote accordingly.
Gothmog
(145,313 posts)Winning Iowa and New Hampshire is meaningless according to to Nate Silver http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/bernie-sanders-new-hampshire/
There are other indications that Sanders is unlikely to win the nomination. He hasnt won a single endorsement from a governor, senator or member of the U.S. House of Representatives (unlike Obama at this point in the 2008 campaign). Sanders is also well behind in the money race (again, unlike Obama). These indicators havent changed over the past month.
But even if you put aside those metrics, Sanders is running into the problem that other insurgent Democrats have in past election cycles. You can win Iowa relying mostly on white liberals. You can win New Hampshire. But as Gary Hart and Bill Bradley learned, you cant win a Democratic nomination without substantial support from African-Americans.
Iowa and New Hampshire are not that meaningful this cycle due to the lack of diversity in these two states.