The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event

Objectives. The competitiveness of the 2008 presidential primaries in both the Republican and Democratic parties has prompted a reconsideration of the role of delegate-selection rules in influencing the strategic behavior of presidential candidates. Using advertising and candidate state-visit data from the 2004 and 2008 presidential nominating campaigns, we reexamine the strategies presidential candidates use when competing for the nomination of their party. Methods. Using the Wisconsin Advertising Project Data from 2004 and 2008, we estimate several multiple regressions designed to analyze the factors predicting candidate visits and advertising. Results. We find that, to a large extent, the rules of the game help predict where candidates allocate their political advertising and campaign stops; candidates consider whether a contest is a primary or caucus, they pay attention to how many delegates are at stake, and they consider whether a state’s delegateallocation method is largely proportional or winner take all. Yet we also find some differences in how the rules influence frontrunners and long-shot candidates, and we discover how other factors, including a candidate’s access to financial resources, influence the allocation of ads and visits. Conclusion. Our findings offer some of the first empirical evidence for the idea that a state’s delegate-allocation method influences candidates’ resource-allocation behavior. That these rules matter at all is somewhat of a surprise given that the delegate-allocation methods used by states have become more homogenous within each party.

Following the Rules? Candidate Strategy in Presidential Primaries*

The significance of presidential nomination politics in the major parties is abundant and obvious as viewed through the lens of practical politics. This is no less than the process by which the parties set the choices to be faced by the electorate in the November election. But analytically, presidential nomination provides a window of opportunity to consider the impact of organization within a contemporary political environment dominated by media and money. For, in fact, caucuses, as mechanisms through which parties conduct delegate selection, lend themselves well to strong organizations and "retail methods" of campaign politics. This quality is underscored with the Iowa precinct caucuses that--for reasons of context and calendar--purportedly reward candidates who excel at organization. This article examines presidential nomination politics in Iowa on an abstract level approaching the state as a critical case; if traditional organization and retail methods are to matter anywhere, they will matter in this environment. As such, it considers how one might challenge the media-dominated model that now characterizes much of U.S. campaign politics, especially that directed toward the presidency. More concretely, this article explores the 1996 GOP presidential nomination contest in Iowa. It focuses on how candidates use organization to compete, and it assesses the impact of this tool on candidate Success. Theoretical Context Iowa caucus politics provides opportunities for significant activist impact on the course of presidential nomination politics. At the same time, it offers an environment marked by disincentives for participation, one in which--at least theoretically--a strong organization will make a difference in the outcome of the caucuses. In this section, I describe a framework to understand activist involvement in politics. The application of this framework to the Iowa caucus setting helps explain why Iowa caucus politics is a critical case. Given the formal rules that structure presidential nominations, dual tasks face candidates vying for the nomination of one of the two major parties. The first of these is raising funds to finance a campaign and, importantly, to sustain it through the inevitable bumps of the nomination season (Brown, Powell, and Wilcox 1995).(1) The second task, indeed the one to which much of the fundraising effort is directed, is the persuasion and mobilization of the activists; their involvement in primaries and caucuses determines a vast majority of the delegates who will attend the parties' nominating conventions and who will ultimately nominate the presidential candidate. I focus on this second task, the candidates' efforts to persuade and mobilize in the caucus setting, and use a theoretical framework to structure expectations about the role of strong organizations. The job of the candidate in caucus politics is to mobilize his supporters to the caucuses, which are used in a handful of states for presidential delegate selection. There are a variety of activities undertaken at the Iowa precinct caucuses, including the initial stages of delegate selection and, at Republican caucuses in most years, a straw poll measuring preference of the caucus attendees for the party's nomination candidates. Additional activities deal more directly with party organizational business and include consideration of platform planks and selection of party officials. In short, much significant work is accomplished at these meetings. Yet, it remains that for activists, incentives for nonparticipation are high. There are two strong dynamics in a caucus setting that work against participation among party activists and others who are generally interested in presidential nomination politics. The first involves the high cost of participation. Attending a caucus, as opposed to "merely" voting in a primary, means that the individual commits to a meeting at a narrowly specified time. …

Does Organization Matter? A Critical‐Case Analysis from Recent Presidential Nomination Politics

The impact of the Electoral College on U.S. presidential elections is often criticized by academics and political commentators. One facet of its impact, the winner-take-all allocation of states’ Electoral College votes, serves in practice to overweight some votes in some states relative to other votes in other states. These disparities in the relative impact of votes in a presidential election can be large. Here, a metric is introduced to quantify the magnitude of these disparities in each presidential election. Using that metric, we show that states whose votes were overweighted in a presidential election subsequently received higher levels of federal grant spending under the newly-elected (re-elected) administration.

/pdf/swing-states-the-winner-take-all-electoral-college-and-zbkj9bjamz.pdf

Swing States, the Winner-Take-all Electoral College, and Fiscal Federalism

There is a debate regarding the impact of swing or independent voters in American politics. While some argue that swing voters either do not swing or have a marginal impact on campaigns, the decline in voter partisan identification and the rise of independents means that they have a potential impact on elections, making them a desirable commodity to candidates. Additionally, presidential elections represent a unique case for swing voters. A robust literature notes that during the presidential primary and caucus process, voters in states such as Iowa or New Hampshire effectively have a greater voice in the election than those in other states. This is due to the number of voters in these states, and the strategic importance of having their primaries and caucuses positioned at the beginning of the presidential selection process. Additionally, the Electoral College is criticized as giving disproportionate influence to some voters or states, or as otherwise distorting the results in presidential elections because of its winner-take-all method of allocating votes in 48 or the 50 states. But these assertions notwithstanding, can the impact or distortion that swing-voters have in some states compared to others, in terms of their relative influence on presidential elections, be quantified? Relatedly, does the Electoral College distort the impact of swing voters? This study presents a new method to assess the impact of swing voters within the winner-take-all method that states use to allocate electoral votes. By looking at several recent U.S. presidential elections, we quantify how the winner-take-all method of allocating electoral votes produces disparities in the voting power of citizens across states.

Swing States, The Winner-Take-All Electoral College, and Fiscal Federalism

The presidential nomination process has been the subject of a number of studies in recent years, some prompted by the numerous changes in national convention delegate selection procedures, particularly in the Democratic party, since 1968. Recent works have analyzed the outcome and strategic environment of the nomination process (Keech and Matthews, 1976; Polsby and Wildavsky, 1976).1 Others have described various attributes of process participants (Kirkpatrick, 1975; Soule and Clark, 1970; Soule and McGrath, 1975)." Some studies have also analyzed the impact of new national Democratic party delegate selection guidelines upon candidate fortunes and national convention delegate attributes (Pomper, 1976; Lengle and Shafer, 1976; Jackson, 1975).3 This article analyzes several impacts of such rules upon delegate selection in two states, Iowa and Wisconsin, during the 1968-76 period of national party rules reform.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3329684.pdf

New Rules, New Games: National Party Guidelines and Democratic National Convention Delegate Selection in Iowa and Wisconsin, 1968–1976

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New Rules, New Games: National Party Guidelines and Democratic National Convention Delegate Selection in Iowa and Wisconsin, 1968–1976