The Iowa Caucuses

By Rhodes Cook

Finally, after months and months of preliminaries, the voters begin to have their say.

Iowa’s precinct caucuses the night of Jan. 24 launch the 2000 presidential nominating process for both the Democrats and the Republicans, although Republicans in Alaska have drawn minor billing with caucuses of their own scheduled for the same night.

The Republicans boast a field of six candidates, while the Democratic contest between Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey is the first one-on-one competition in either party since the 1980 Democratic duel between President Jimmy Carter and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Carter thumped Kennedy that year in Iowa by a vote of 59-to-31 percent, a defeat from which Kennedy never really recovered.

That was the only time that a candidate won the Iowa Democratic caucuses with a majority of the vote until the 1990s, when native son Tom Harkin and President Clinton won easy victories.

Meanwhile, no Republican candidate has ever won more than 37 percent since the Iowa GOP began holding a straw vote in conjunction with their precinct caucuses in 1980. (No caucus votes, though, were held in 1984 and 1992, when incumbent Republican presidents were running for re-election.)

None of the candidates making their second try for the White House in 2000 have much of a track record in Iowa. On his first run in 1988, Gore skipped the Iowa caucuses altogether and ended up with less than 1 percent of the vote. Republicans Steve Forbes received 10 percent and Alan Keyes 7 percent on their first presidential tries in 1996.

Meanwhile, the father of Texas Gov. George W. Bush had mixed success in the Iowa caucuses. George Bush upset Ronald Reagan in Republican caucus voting in 1980, but finished a distant third in 1988.

The two parties tally the caucus vote differently. Iowa Republicans hold a quasi-primary in the form of a straw vote that is taken at the beginning of the neighborhood precinct caucuses. The tally has nothing to do with delegate selection but is the focus of media attention.

Meanwhile, Iowa Democrats officially count the vote in terms of projected delegates to the state convention, and turnout is usually presented as an estimated total.

Tables and maps will be updated and an analysis of the Iowa results will be posted after the Jan. 24 vote.