Who will actually show up in Iowa to caucus?
Posted on December 31st, 2007 at 1:58 pm by Contributor ArchiveHere’s a peek at who might be caucusing in Iowa Thursday, from the Des Moines Register:
The answers to two questions could determine the winners of the Iowa caucuses.
For Democrats: Which campaign will attract the most first-time caucusgoers?
For Republicans: Does Mike Huckabee have the organization to support his lead in the polls?
No clear Democratic favorite has emerged, and the Republican race remains fluid, with just four days left until the caucuses kick off the national presidential nominating season.
Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have put a majority of their Iowa effort into the time-intensive and potentially risky project of tapping into new caucus participants.
“There’s no question that first-time caucusgoers will turn out this year,” said Dave Barnhart, Clinton’s caucus director. “The question is: Who are those caucusgoers going to be?”
Meanwhile, GOP activists around the state say that while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has a traditional campaign organization, there is little evidence of a statewide Huckabee organization, although the former Arkansas governor also is being helped by networks outside his campaign.
“His organization is fairly invisible to me,” said Ann Trimble Ray, the Republican chairwoman from Sac County ? located in the most conservative section of the state. “They are recruiting from a different pool than we usually find our activists coming from.”
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The most interesting question to me is how many Ron Paul supporters will caucus. He consistently polls fifth in both IA and NH, but his people insist that he will place third or higher in IA and may even win NH. That seems very improbable to me, but it could be that he really is going to pull people that have never voted before and are being ignored by pollsters. I don’t think so, but it is possible.
Russ,
A lot of people said that Howard Dean was going to win in Iowa with a similar internet-fed, grassroots campaign that had a lot of young support.
What happened is the young base he was banking on didn’t show up on caucus day and the caucus veterans decided to go with someone they felt was “electible” in John Kerry.
Now I’m not saying that will happen again, but there are some similiarities in how their campaigns have come together.
The difference I see is that Dean tried to centralize the grassroots organization when he got a lead, which failed miserably.
Ron Paul on the other hand has let various groups of supporters work on their own for him, as opposed to taking orders from a central campaign manager. An example of this are the “money bombs”, which his campaign itself had little to do with, but was a manifestation of Paul supporters outside his central campaign structure.
I think what Dean couldn’t do Paul will. I’d be satisfied with a 3rd place finish in Iowa. It will force the press to pay attention to him (or should I say quit blackballing him) so the message can be seen and heard.