Tonight at 6:30 p.m. about 200,000 or so Iowans are going to brave the cold climate and head out to either a local school, neighbor’s home, or church in one of Iowa’s 1,784 precincts and support their candidate of choice for all your family and friends to see. There is nothing anonymous about a caucus. There is no pre-registration required and so long as you are 18 by Election Day you can participate. Each precinct is awarded a certain amount of delegates determined by turn out in the last general election.
How A Republican Caucus Works: You show up at the precinct location in support of a candidate, vote and then the delegates get divided accordingly.
How A Democratic Caucus Works: A Democratic caucus is far more confusing/interesting than a Republican one.
First of all, if you are not at the caucus location at 7:00 when the doors close, you cannot participate. At the start of the caucus, one person will speak on behalf of each candidate. The voters will then go to the area of the room designated for the candidate they would like to support. To be viable, a candidate must have about15% of the total number of people in the room. If a candidate has less than 15%, representatives from the other campaigns are allowed to make pitches to those supporters in order to have them join their team. Once this realignment has occurred the delegates are divided up amongst the candidates (the math is very confusing however the Obama site has a very cool tool to help explain).
It won’t be the number of delegates a candidate wins that gets reported in the media; its how many voters each candidate ends up with at the end of the night. Really, no one wins the Iowa caucus. In fact the delegates still have to go to county conventions, followed by state conventions at which the delegates for the national convention gets decided. This caucus, that jumpstarts that process, is what it means to be first in the nation.
1 comment:
Is this you? Way to go!
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/01/03/us/2008103CIRCUS_8.html
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