Monday night hosted the Republican and Democratic caucuses in Iowa. To someone new to these caucuses, they may look extremely overcomplicated and hard to understand. And they would certainly not be wrong.
So, what is a caucus? A quick Google search will yield the result. “A caucus is a meeting of the members of a legislative body who are members of a particular political party, to select candidates or decide policy.” It’s basically a glorified voting event then, right? Wrong. Iowa is the first state in the country to hold caucuses for the Democratic and Republican parties, meaning that this event is crucial for campaigns to get off the ground for the 2016 presidential race.
The GOP has the simpler caucus process. First, the Pledge of Allegiance is said. Next, voters select their candidate in a binding vote. Finally, each candidate gets a chance to sway any voters in one pitch before a secret ballot. Votes are counted and sent to the Iowa GOP headquarters for counting.
The top GOP candidates in Iowa, from left to right; Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz
The Democratic process is much more complicated. Attendees at the meeting must declare a preference for a candidate immediately. The candidates groups must be “viable,” that is they must have around 15% of the total caucus turnout in each precinct. After first-round votes, any people in non-viable groups have a chance to join with a group that passed the threshold. A big difference from the GOP is that the Democrats do not have a secret ballot, meaning that people have to vote in front of everyone, and therefore are subject to a great deal of peer pressure.
The top Democratic candidates, from left to right; Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, Bernie Sanders
Now that there’s some background, what exactly does all this mean? Generally, the caucus is about 20% of registered voters in Iowa, but the event holds a huge amount of influence in presidential campaigns. The Iowa caucuses have shown their ability to make or break a campaign, especially in 2008, when then Sen. Barack Obama took a massive lead over Clinton to eventually win the party nomination. So, for all candidates, this is game time.