Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Congratulations to our presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden!
Takeaways from the wild final days of the Iowa campaign
PoliticoIf you were an alien visiting Iowa this weekend and were asked to guess the order of Monday’s results based on nothing but watching the top four Democrats speak, you would predict a Sanders victory, followed by Warren, Buttigieg, and Biden. (You would probably have a lot of other questions too: like what the hell is a Kum & Go, what is up with the giant windmills along I-80 blinking in unison at night, and why did the Democrats change caucus rules this year so that members of a viable undecided group are not allowed to switch on second alignment?)
The dangers of extrapolating from crowd size and subjective observations like the enthusiasm of attendees or the performance of the candidate speaking are obvious. A campaign can build a big crowd when it needs to with aggressive phone banking, bussing in supporters or adding a celebrity to the program. A candidate can nail a speech one day and botch it the next.
Still, the alien would notice that Sanders’s events, at least the two big ones this week with musicians, are large and electric, that Biden’s are small and sleepy, and that Warren and Buttigieg’s fall somewhere in between.
The Iowa caucuses reward enthusiasm, especially at the end. The famous three-step strategy that every campaign attempts to implement was popularized by former congressman Dave Nagle and is often summarized as: Organize, organize, and get hot at the end. In the final weekend of every caucus I have covered, the “hot” candidates were apparent from their final events.
You could see John Kerry’s events swell in 2004 as he rose from the low single digits in December to victory in January. In 2008, the late surges of Barack Obama, who won, and John Edwards, who zipped past Hillary Clinton, were visible in their final crowds. On the Republican side, the same was true for caucus winner Rick Santorum in 2012. (To my memory at least, this phenomenon was less obvious in 2016 when Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton just barely defeated Sanders.)
The dangers of extrapolating from crowd size and subjective observations like the enthusiasm of attendees or the performance of the candidate speaking are obvious. A campaign can build a big crowd when it needs to with aggressive phone banking, bussing in supporters or adding a celebrity to the program. A candidate can nail a speech one day and botch it the next.
Still, the alien would notice that Sanders’s events, at least the two big ones this week with musicians, are large and electric, that Biden’s are small and sleepy, and that Warren and Buttigieg’s fall somewhere in between.
The Iowa caucuses reward enthusiasm, especially at the end. The famous three-step strategy that every campaign attempts to implement was popularized by former congressman Dave Nagle and is often summarized as: Organize, organize, and get hot at the end. In the final weekend of every caucus I have covered, the “hot” candidates were apparent from their final events.
You could see John Kerry’s events swell in 2004 as he rose from the low single digits in December to victory in January. In 2008, the late surges of Barack Obama, who won, and John Edwards, who zipped past Hillary Clinton, were visible in their final crowds. On the Republican side, the same was true for caucus winner Rick Santorum in 2012. (To my memory at least, this phenomenon was less obvious in 2016 when Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton just barely defeated Sanders.)
If I were to vote in a presidentialprimary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
