Tag Archives: Iowa

Super Tuesday Week

Tuesday is Super Tuesday — the first Tuesday of the primary cycle in which any state can hold a primary contest.  As most states use state-run primaries, there will be a large number of states on Tuesday.

But, before Super Tuesday, several states that are using party-run contests will be holding Republican contests as the “window” for the Republicans opened yesterday.  (The “window” for Democrats opens on Tuesday.)  As discussed last week, one of the contests today is the second half of the Republican’s Michigan two-step with the Republican state convention which will be allocating the “district” level delegates.  In addition to Michigan, today will see events in Missouri and Idaho.

The Missouri Republican rules are somewhat ambiguous.  It looks like they are doing a traditional caucus with a 15% threshold and an unspecified winner-take-all kicker at local option.  But rather than allocating delegates based on today’s vote (which is what the national rules appear to require), they are merely binding the delegates chosen today to vote the same preference at the district conventions (which should effectively have the same result).  Missouri is using a caucus because our current Secretary of State repeatedly lied and claimed that the state-run primary was nonbinding (when the rules of both party made the primary binding) and a repeal of the primary was slipped into an omnibus election bill which passed despite the unanimous opposition of Democratic legislature).  The Democrats will be holding a party-run primary in three weeks with a mail-in option. Continue Reading...

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Iowa Caucuses 2024

The 2024 presidential primaries officially kicks off on Monday night in the frigid cold of Iowa.

Traditionally, the Iowa Caucuses have three major components.  First, they are used to create the local organization of the political parties as caucus attendees elect the precinct’s representatives to the county committee.  Second, they are used to choose the delegates to the county convention (which in turn will choose the congressional district/state convention delegates who will elect the national convention delegates).  Third, a preference vote is taken which is used to allocate national convention delegates.

Thanks in part to Iowa’s move to the right and past problems with counting and report the preference vote, the national Democratic Party has rescinded its permission for Iowa to conduct a pre-March preference vote.  Unlike their counterparts in New Hampshire, Iowa Democrats have worked with the national party (in the hopes that in the future they might get a pre-March spot back).  But it is helpful to have both parties hold their precinct caucuses on the same date and holding a later event would create timing issues.  So the Democrats will use their caucuses for the purposes of electing party officials and the delegates who will attend the county conventions.  But to comply with national party rules, there will be no presidential preference vote on Monday.  Instead, there will be a party-run primary that will conclude in March. Continue Reading...

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The 2024 Primary Process

The advantage of being the party in power is that you can make changes to your rules about your presidential nomination process without worrying about which potential candidate will benefit.  Barring the unlikely event that President Biden does not seek the nomination, he will be the Democratic nominee regardless of the rules.  So these changes will not impact who will win the nomination in 2024, and 2028 is way too far away for anybody to guess who will be running in 2028 much less who benefits from the changes.

First, as always, the nomination process is a battle between state laws and national rules.  And, under the First Amendment, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, the national party rules for choosing the national presidential candidate prevails over state law.  Of course, while the states are unable to bind the national party, the states do set the rules for who appears on their general election ballots.  As of now, no state laws designate anybody other than the national nominees as the presidential candidate of that party (and no state party has refused to certify their national candidate).

Second, the two parties have different rules.  Both sets of rules involve potential penalties for states that violate the rules.  In the past, the two parties had similar rules on timing of primaries.  But this time, thanks to the Democrat’s changes to the list of states that can go before the first Tuesday in March, the list of potential February contests is not the same for the two parties.  And each party has potential penalties for states that violate their rules. Continue Reading...

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The Midterms — Preview (Part 3)

By the time that polls close in Arkansas at 7:30 p.m. Central ST, we should be starting to get votes from the early states, but most of the key races will still be classified as “too early to call.”  Arkansas has become so red over the past two decades that none of the races are likely to be close.  The big races will be the ballot issue.  From the right is a proposition to require supermajorities for propositions in future elections and a provision enshrining a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in the Arkansas Constitution.  As we have seen at the federal level, this Free Exercise Clause on steroids will cause significant problems in Arkansas as everything will become somebody’s religious belief.  Arkansas will also vote on legalizing marijuana.

At 8:00 p.m. CST, polls will close in the remaining parts of Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota, and Texas (with those races covered in Part 2 of the preview).    Polls will close for the entire state in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Arizona will feature several key races.  At the state office level, Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State are all open seats.  The Republicans have nominated Trumpist candidates for these positions who refuse to commit to recognizing the election results in 2024.   Particularly for governor, they have nominated a media celebrity who is not qualified.  But these races are currently too close to call.  For Senate, the Republicans have also nominated an extremist.  It looks like Senator Mark Kelly will hold onto the seat, but the seat is probably the third most likely pickup for the Republicans after Nevada and Georgia.   If the Republicans have a good night, that seat could flip. Continue Reading...

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House Election Contests

Right now Republicans are trying to spin the House’s review of the results in Iowa’s Second District race.  But here is what the Republicans are not saying.

First, the Iowa race is not the only race pending in the House.  The Republican candidate in the Fourteenth District of Illinois has also filed an election contest even though he lost by more than 1,000 votes.  By contrast, the margin in Iowa is only six votes.  Yet Republicans have only attempted to dismiss the Iowa contest.

Second, election contests are not unusual.  While most election contests go nowhere, losing candidates sometimes file election contests.  Over the past ninety years, there have been 100 election contests filed. Continue Reading...

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2022 Elections — A First Glance

The 2020 elections left both the House and the Senate closely divided.  And two years is a long time in politics.  But experience has taught politicians two, somewhat contradictory, things that will impact what can get done during the next two years.

The first, especially for the House of Representatives, is that the President’s party typically loses seats.  But the reason for this normal rule is that a new President has typically helped members of his party to flip seats.  As such, this might be less true for 2022 than in the past.  In 2020, the Democrats only won three new seats, and two were the results of North Carolina having to fix its extreme gerrymander.  And only a handful of Democratic incumbents won close races.  And the rule is less consistent for the Senate, in large part because the Senators up for election are not the ones who ran with the President in the most recent election but the ones who ran with the prior president six years earlier.  In other words, the President’s party tends to be more vulnerable in the Senate in the midterms of the second term than in the midterms of the first term.  But the likelihood that the President’s party will lose seats is an incentive to do as much as possible during the first two years.

The second is that one cause of the swing may be overreach — that voters are trying to check a President who is going further than the voters actually wanted.  This theory assumes that there are enough swing voters who really want centrist policies and that they switch sides frequently to keep either party from passing more “extreme” policies.  Polls do not really support this theory and there is an argument that, at least part of the mid-term problem, could be the failure to follow through on all of the promises leading to less enthusiasm with the base.  But this theory is a reason for taking things slowly and focusing on immediate necessities first and putting the “wish list” on hold until after the mid-terms. Continue Reading...

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Congressional Election Contests

Under the Constitution, each house is the final judge over any dispute related to the election and seating of members.  Fortunately, this power is only rarely invoked.  But we may be facing one (or more) of those rare instances this year.

As this post is going live, we are in the midst of a recount for Iowa’s second congressional district.  Each county is individually certifying their recount.  Most of the counties have certified the new numbers, but a handful have not yet made their numbers official.  Based on the official numbers from the counties that have certified the recount result and the original count from the remaining counties, the margin is 35 votes.  But unofficial reports from the remaining counties show a swing of 36 votes which would mean that the Democrat would win by 1 vote.  Of interest in Iowa is the law governing recounts.  The law allows each county to choose between a hand recount or a machine recount or, maybe, a hybrid recount (in which ballots which are kicked out as overvotes or undervotes are examined to see if there is a valid vote).    These differences between the counties means that the final result from Iowa will differ from what a full hand recount would have shown or what a full machine recount would have shown.  And that invites further review.

Likewise, it seems like the race in New York’s twenty-second district is also close.  Because New York counties are not required to report interim counts, we will not know the final counts officially until all of the counties certify their results.  Some of the counties have officially released their current counts, but, in other counties, reporters are relying on sources to report the state of the count.  It appears that the race in New York is as close or almost as close as the race in Iowa.  Currently, final results are up in the air as the courts have been asked to review provisional ballots to determine which ones should be counted (and, apparently, one county used post-it notes to distinguish between the already counted ballots and the rejected ballots and those post-it notes fell off in transport). Continue Reading...

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Where Things Stand

In part because of one sore loser, this year’s election seems to be the one that will not end.  And that means that almost any post based on current information is no longer accurate several days later.  As noted in previous posts, there are three big questions:  1) when are absentee ballots due; 2) when will the vote be certified; and 3) what states might be subject to recounts.  There is also the never-ending litigation being filed by the Trump campaign.

At the present time, California is probably the biggest state in which we are still waiting for late absentee ballots with a deadline of Friday.  At the time that I am writing this post, the margin in the Twenty-Fifth District is less than 100 votes; so late arriving ballots could be a key.  In addition, a recount is a real possibility.

The other big state in which there remains a significant number of ballots to be counted is New York.  At the present time, Democrats have apparently lost the Eleventh District (Staten Island).  There are three Democratic districts that have not been called, but Democrats now lead in two of the three.  There are also two Republican districts that have not been called, but the Republicans have significant leads in both.  Whether the remaining votes will actually swing the districts is unclear. Continue Reading...

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Midwest Senate Races

With a little over two weeks to go, there are two Senate races in the “farm belt” part of the Midwest that are relatively close — Kansas and Iowa.

Kansas has been a pleasant surprise.  The Republican leadership in D.C. dumped a ton of money into the Republican primary to defeat Spawn of Satan Kris Kobach, and most people assumed that, having succeeded in getting Roger Marshall the nomination, the Republicans could go back to ignoring Kansas.  But a funny thing has happened.  Apparently, the divisions in the Republican Party haven’t healed.  While Trump looks likely to win Kansas, his numbers are rather low for a Republican in such a deep red state.  And if Trump only gets in the mid-50s, Roger Marshall can’t afford to bleed any support away.

Part of the problem for the Republicans is that Kansas is a geographically big state.  While about one-third of the state lives in close proximity to Kansas City, the other two thirds are pretty scattered.  And that means that candidates running their first state-wide race have to introduce themselves to a lot of people who have never heard about them before.  While both candidates face this problem, the Democratic candidate, Barbara Bollier had only minimal opposition in the primary which meant that she could run positive ads introducing herself as a former moderate Republican who only became a Democrat because the Kansas Republican Party had fallen off the far-right cliff.  Meanwhile, Marshall had to deal with a very nasty campaign in which many of his past sins were broadcast to the rest of the state for the first time.  In the end, Marshall won the primary because the party leadership told the voters that he was the only viable alternative to Kobach and that Kobach couldn’t win, not because Kansas voters liked Marshall. Continue Reading...

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Cut Time

A political party serves two fundamental purposes.

First, people form and join political parties to advance policy.  (Of course, there are disagreements on the exact priorities or the specific details of policy proposals.)  In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that the Framers made was not anticipating that, once there were elections for federal offices, the groups in New Jersey that favored rural farmers over “urban” merchants would unite with similar groups in Georgia (and vice versa for the groups that favored merchants) rather than stay isolated in their own states.  Simply put, if you want a single-payer health care system, you are more likely to get it by forming a large group with other supporters of that type of proposal than working on your own.

Second, the way that political parties try to advance policy is by getting their candidates elected to office.  You can’t pass a single-payer system if the opponents of single-payer have the majority in Congress or control the White House.  And political parties win elections by finding good candidates and raising and spending money to support those candidates.   Especially in the year before the election, money tends to be spent on creating tools (like voter databases and helping state parties) that are available to all candidates that run on the party’s ticket.  And at this point in time, with the exception of the last handful of state primaries, the parties have their candidates. Continue Reading...

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