Election 2012: The Iowa Caucus

On January 3rd registered Republicans in Iowa will get the first chance at choosing their nominee for president. There's only one problem: the person they vote for will most likely never become President of the United States.

And this is not just a GOP electability issue, but a wider symptom of an electoral system that fails to accurately represent the will of the people, on both sides of the isle.

The last few months have seen the meteoric rise and fall of several candidates; Texas governor Rick Perry, Representative Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain were all leading in the polls before falling back into national political obscurity. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's campaign has returned from the dead and currently leads in Iowa with over 27% of the vote in most polls.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Meanwhile former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney struggles to hold in the polls even as he is labeled the inevitable "presumed nominee" by the mainstream media.
Romney has the best chance at winning against President Obama in the general election compared to all of the other GOP candidates, polling at 40 to 48% against Obama if the election were held today. Meanwhile Gingrich would be soundly defeated 38 to 51%.

Yet the media has made a big deal of every change in the polls in the lead up to the early Republican primaries, even though these numbers represent a very small and homogeneous slice of the American public. Only 119,000 people voted in the Iowa Republican caucus four years ago. If the turnout were the same on January 3rd, that 27% Gingrich holds in Iowa would only amount to about 30,000 people. Those 30,000 registered Republicans in Iowa would have immense influence, at least momentarily, over an electoral system that eventually affects 300 million Americans.

This is at the heart of the electability issue for the GOP. These early primary voters are much more conservative than the general public, and their choice of candidate will likely be too extreme to win a general election. The primary system itself is a way of quickly pushing through a candidate that has not yet been vetted to succeed in the general election.

In 2008 senator John McCain was declared the presumptive Republican nominee by mainstream media sources such as the LA Times after winning only three out of the first seven primaries, achieving final victory in Florida. Even though no candidate earned more than 40% of the vote in any of the initial contests, with the vast majority of delegates yet to be selected, McCain clinched the election. He did so with a little over a million voters, just 0.4% of the American public.

That's because February 5th, 2008 was Super Tuesday. On Super Tuesday many more primaries occur than at any other time, including states with "winner takes all" rules like Texas. This makes the early primary states key battlegrounds that lead to an electoral steamroller on Super Tuesday which no candidate can hope to withstand.

The Republican party has tried to correct this by adding another month before the "winner takes all" states get to play, delaying the start date for those states until April 1st. The GOP is hoping to copy the primary system of the Democrats, a long process that ensured a centrist Barack Obama won the nomination in 2008.

Don't mistake my critique as partisan. The Republican primary system is just one timely example of how our democracy has failed to provide the candidates that people truly want representing them - left or right.

Learn how the Republican nomination process works.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A.F.Sienko is the son of immigrants who gained asylum in the United States after fleeing communist oppression in Poland. His parents settled in the Brooklyn projects and worked seven days a week to pay for his education.

Sienko's political life started on September 11th, 2001 when he witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks from his High School window. This led him to enroll in Hofstra University's School of Communication to seek a degree in journalism. At Hofstra Sienko was the founding video editor of Nassau News Live, a hyper local online news site run by journalism students.

At Nassau News Live he covered the 2008 presidential election and the 3rd presidential debate at Hofstra using the latest in webcasting and online syndication technology. At this time Sienko learned to anchor, produce, and provide live technical support using some of the latest technology available with a crack team of student journalists.

After graduating with Dean's List in 2009 Sienko joined Be The Media, an online startup that taught organizations and individuals across the globe on using new media to get their message out. Sienko worked with journalists and journalism students at hundreds of universities and organizations, including the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, the Columbia University School of Journalism, and the United Nations.

Currently Sienko works as an independent media expert specializing in the fields of online journalism, social media, and live webcasting. In 2010 he helped draft a media kit that led to an agreement with national nonprofit HomeAid to host the largest virtual event to benefit America's homeless.