a cattle’s eye view of the iowa caucus

Iowa has more pigs than people. A lot more, actually. I don’t know how many exactly we have of either, although I did hear once that the ratio is 5 to 1 in favor of the pigs. Which is part of the reason that I think the Iowa caucuses are silly. Candidates crisscross the state in the snow eating corndogs and trumpeting farm-state causes for months in advance; our phones ring off the hook with pre-recorded surveys (Press 6 for Ron Paul), pre-recorded candidate pitches (Hi, this is Bill Clinton), and unfortunately real people lecturing us on abortion; we mess the electoral calendar up because our state constitution demands we be FIRST IN THE NATION; and then it builds to a fever pitch and it’s all anyone can talk about and Iowa is mentioned a zillion times a day in the press and my own small town gets a front-page feature in the Wall Street Journal. After all that… only about 300,000 people show up to vote, or I guess closer to 350,000 this time around which I think broke some records. But let’s be clear: that’s not a whole lot of voters, even in a not-very-populous state (Iowa has about 3 million people and about 1.8 million registered voters.) Based on my quick and imprecise mental calculations, that means we’re looking at a ratio of pigs to caucus-goers of about 50 to 1.

But anyway. I’m going to stop now, because I don’t want to rain on Iowa’s only media parade. And because, honestly, there’s something sort of charming about the weird, anachronistic proceedings of caucus night. I say this as someone who just got back from my first caucus ever and who is currently watching as the Iowa results are plastered all over the news. It’s interesting… the most participatory form of democracy I’ve ever experienced, although not necessarily the most democratic. Like a throwback to the good old days, by which I mean the 1800s and town hall meetings and supremely archaic procedural rules that no one, including the caucus chairs, actually understands.

In case you’re interested, I took some notes. Kind of like liveblogging, only with a really long time delay, so I guess not really. Also probably not a very good overview of caucus rules — if you want that, the Wikipedia entry is decent.

The rundown:

6pm: We arrive at the caucus site. It’s in the gym of one of the elementary schools. An elderly lady slips and falls on the unsalted sidewalk outside, which reminds me of how I did that on the street earlier today. Seriously just fell, flat out. But anyway, the lady’s okay and we help her inside. She’s wearing an Obama sticker on her jacket.

6:05: Stop at the registration and sign-in table. In Iowa you can sign up to vote at the caucus, or switch party affiliations. We brought 2 forms of ID, just in case. Nobody asks to see it. They don’t check our address, either. What if we came to the wrong place to caucus? What if we weren’t eligible to vote? They wouldn’t know until later, and then they would have no way of knowing whom we voted for. Odd. They give us little stickers dots for proof of registration, the same ones that people use for price tags at garage sales. The woman at the desk tells me that the stickers fall off a lot, so I put it on the back of my hand instead of on my sweater.

6:15: We sit down in the folding chairs and watch as the cafeteria slowly fills. There are signs for different candidates on the walls in various parts of the room. Kucinich and Gravel in one corner, then Hillary gets her own corner, Edwards in the opposite corner, Obama in the corner by the climbing wall, and then Richardson, Dodd, and Biden sharing the wall behind us. The woman next to me has a fluorescent-yellow sticker dot on her nose.

6:40: It is getting extremely crowded, and people are still pouring in. They need a bigger room.

7:02: The temporary chair calls the meeting to order, and tells the alphabet registrars to start counting. She explains that we need to know how many people came so that we can determine the eligibility threshold. We’re electing 8 delegates, and for a candidate to get any delegates, he or she has to have at least 15% support.

7:04: Boring procedural stuff and announcements. The chair gets big points by skipping most of them.

7:08: There are 293 eligible caucus goers in the room. No wonder it’s crowded. The eligibility threshold is 44 people. The chair tells us that we have to go stand in groups by the signs of the candidate that we support. Then each group has to count its members.

7:20: Considering how long they’ve been having these caucuses, and how important they are, you’d think they’d have figured out a semi-efficient way to count a big, loosely arranged group of people. Apparently not. The people who seem sort of in charge and a few other people who enjoy shouting and/or standing on chairs are trying to get people in line. They end up deciding that the whole group should file between 2 rows of chairs while the counters make tally marks on the back of a survey form.

7:35: I’m sort of shocked that the numbers actually worked out. I think they might have fudged a little, just to avoid counting the big groups (Obama and Edwards) twice. Or not. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious which groups don’t meet the eligibility threshold.

7:40: Everyone is standing around talking. I think maybe a few people are canvassing other groups for votes, or talking politics. Especially the Hillary people, who are a few votes short of the eligibility threshold. The rest of us are just hanging out and waiting to be told what to do next. I run into about 10 people that I haven’t seen in a while. I guess it’s sort of inevitable, considering that my town’s not big, I’ve lived here my whole life, and there are currently 300 people in this gym. Speaking of which, it’s sort of stuffy in here.

8pm: They’re counting us again. This time we have to go out into the hall so that they don’t get confused and count us more than once.

8:10: I think I missed something while I was out in the hall. It seems like there was some problem with Hillary’s supporters not having the right number of votes and now they can’t switch, or maybe they did the counting wrong. Confusing.

8:10: I thought people were supposed to be able to switch if their candidate missed the eligibility threshold? But I guess not. Actually, I think they messed up a little on the procedure, and now the state Democratic committee is saying that they absolutely cannot count more than twice. Hillary’s people look sort of mad.

8:20: Obama has 5 votes, Edwards has 3. Hillary missed the eligibility threshold by one vote. Everyone else was in the single digits.

8:25: The chair just made a motion to not discuss any of the resolutions. For the best, I think, since about 70% of the people have already left. The Obama and Edwards supporters that are left are electing delegates for the county convention.

8:40: Home, and the results are already on news loop. I wonder if all the caucuses were as crowded and random as ours. Based on the scene they’re showing from Des Moines, it looks like maybe they were. I’ve had a bunch of people tell me it’s like herding cattle. Or, you know, cause we’re in Iowa, maybe pigs.