The Republican Party of Iowa’s Presidential Straw Poll is dead. This morning, members of the Republican Party of Iowa voted to cancel the storied event.
What has been the largest political event in the country in the off year before a contested Republican presidential race is no more. The event that George W. Bush once called a “great festival of democracy,” now belongs to history.
If we are being honest with ourselves, the 2016 Iowa Straw Poll has been in the intensive care unit for quite some time. Its health didn’t start to decline only after Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee announced that they would not be participating in this year’s event. Even before Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee in 2012, Iowans began openly contemplating the idea that the Iowa Straw Poll may be becoming a hindrance to the caucuses themselves.
In April of 2012, a day before the Republican Party of Iowa’s Caucus Review Committee held its first meeting to come up with ideas on how to prevent the reporting and verification flaws that were exposed in the 2012 caucuses, I published an article entitled Save the Caucus, End the Iowa Straw Poll. It may have been the most difficult article I have written.
I love the Iowa Straw Poll. The 1999 Straw Poll felt like a political super bowl for a kid right out of college working on his first campaign. In 2007, I had the privilege of being in charge of and organizing the event. I poured everything I had in to that event. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever envisioned that I would advocate for doing away with such a storied event that has played a major role in my political career.
The main objections I raised in the article were as follows:
The event forces the Republican Party of Iowa to commit to spend a lot of money before candidates commit to participate.
The Straw Poll put the Republican Party of Iowa and its staff at odds with candidates who enter the race late like Fred Thompson in 2008 and Rick Perry in 2012.
The event requires Republican Party of Iowa staff and officials to spend more time preparing for a fundraiser than it spends preparing for the caucuses.
The Straw Poll can put staff and party officials at odds with campaigns that choose not to participate. It’s the staff and sometimes the State Central Committee members who have to encourage candidates to participate. You are fooling yourself if you don’t think the relationship between the Walker campaign and the Republican Party of Iowa isn’t a little icy these days.
The event is the number one talking point used by critics of the Iowa’s First-in-the-Nation status. Critics either believe the event gives the state two-bites at the apple, i.e. outsized influence in the nomination process, or that it is a financial shakedown of the campaigns.
All of the reasons that I wrote about over three years ago are still valid today.
The caucus review committee really never produced any wide-sweeping reforms. If anything, the public hearings provided an opportunity for people to air their frustrations with how the results of the 2012 caucuses were handled. In the end, the Republican Party of Iowa’s State Central Committee under the leadership of former Iowa GOP Chairman A.J. Spiker, never voted on any of the recommendations the committee made.
It also didn’t help matters that Governor Terry Branstad stated publically on numerous occasions that the Straw Poll had out-lived its usefulness. Branstad first weighed in on the fate of future Straw Polls in November of 2012. At the time I wrote, “Branstad has now given future candidates a license to skip the event.” Branstad has softened his stance on the event after a leadership change occurred at the Republican Party of Iowa, but what I wrote back in 2012 still applies. Branstad’s public remarks about the event remain a key factor in candidates not feeling that they have to participate in the event.
Even though the Straw Poll’s credibility was being called into question by some high profile Iowa Republicans, there was still a possibility that the event could be pulled off. A large Republican field was a major bonus for Straw Poll advocates. While not everyone would be expected to participate, there would still have been plenty of quality candidates who either needed an opportunity to break from the pack or who had a must-win Iowa strategy who would be compelled to compete.
Despite the opportunity the large 2016 field of candidates provided the Iowa GOP to pull off another straw poll, the state party didn’t do itself any favors by taking an a lengthy bureaucratic approach in planning the event. In January, the State Central Committee voted to hold the 2016 Straw Poll. In March, they selected a new venue. In May, they announced some structural changes. And just a few weeks ago, the campaigns had their first formal meeting with the party, which was the first time they had a glimpse of how the event would work at the new venue.
The approach was all wrong.
Instead of a methodic five-month roll out of what the event would be like, the Iowa GOP needed to produce and deliver a concept to the potential candidates and those Iowans associated with a perspective candidate as soon as possible. The scariest thing in all of politics is the unknown, and nobody really had an idea of what the event would be like once the decision to move the event out of Ames was made.
Not only were the campaigns largely in the dark, but so were some third party groups that were interested in having a presence at the event.
The Iowa GOP needed to first communicate how the event would operate, and then convince potential participants that it would be beneficial for their campaigns to compete. The party needed to be more aggressive in selling the event to the campaigns, but instead they took their time and assumed the campaigns would participate in an event at a new venue without knowing or understanding what changes there would surely be.
While it took too long for the Iowa GOP to announce if there would be an event, where it would be, and how it would operate, the party also made a few other errors. The first was the cancelation of the land auction. Rename it, call it a sponsorship or something, but the auction has historically been the key component to getting campaigns to commit to the event.
Party leadership nixed the land auction because they felt it contributed to the perception that it was a pay to play event. Chairman Kaufmann was wrong to suggest that the land auction is what gave the straw poll the moniker of a pay-to-play event. Changes were made to the land auction in 2007 that were put in place to make sure that the common costs of putting on the event were more equally distributed.
The minimum price for candidates to pay was set at $15,000. The money raised at the auction helped offset the cost of infrastructure costs, such as security, parking attendants, first aid staff, additional safety lighting, additional cell phone towers, voting machine, port-a-potties, liability insurance, and of course, facility rental.
In 2007, the land auction generated $137,300 from eight campaigns. It helped offset facility and ground rentals of $188,124 from Iowa State University. Leaving just over a $50,000 gap that the party would have to make up with vendor sponsors and ticket sales.
The straw poll was a unique event to organize because the Iowa GOP was essentially responsible for the entire event, so the auction basically just a sub-lease of space to candidates. The candidates who wanted to pay more for a certain spot were allowed to do so, but it was never required. In 2007, the party only netted an additional $17,300 because the Romney, Brownback, Thompson, and Tancredo campaigns bid more than the minimum.
Getting rid of the land auction meant that there was no mechanism in place to get the campaigns committed to the event. The problem with the 2016 Straw Poll isn’t that Bush, Huckabee, and few others have said they don’t plan to participate, it’s that only Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson have said that they would participate. When candidates started saying no to the event, the party needed to counter with campaigns that would commit. The silence from the campaigns is deafening, and their unwillingness to commit is the major factor in why the party is pulling the plug on the event. The State Central Committee may have voted in January to have the event, but it’s the campaigns that actually decide if there will be a Straw Poll.
The Iowa GOP also didn’t do itself any favors a couple weeks ago when Cody Hoefert, the Co-Chair of the Republican Party of Iowa, sent the campaigns threatening text messages saying the county GOP leaders in the northwest part of the state where he is from would not be helpful to candidates who skip the Straw Poll. County GOP leaders also created a petition for Iowa caucus goers to sign to encouraging candidates to participate in the event.
Those heavy-handed actions backfired, and instead of getting candidates to commit to the Straw Poll, suddenly the Iowa GOP was getting some not so subtle reaction from some very powerful Republicans. The message was clear: the Iowa GOP, by demanding participation in the Straw Poll, was going down the road on which they could jeopardize the state’s coveted First-in-the-Nation status.
There are a whole host of things that got the Republican Party to this point, but the major factor stems from the fiasco around the results for the 2012 caucuses. The razor thin margin between Romney and Santorum on caucus night 2012 exposed some big problems with the caucuses themselves. It’s one thing to devote a lot of time and energy to the Straw Poll when the caucuses don’t experience any problems, but it’s another thing to be hung up on the Straw Poll when you don’t announce the correct winner on caucus night and it takes weeks to figure out who actually won, and even then, you mess that up too.
Again, lets be honest. Since the 2012 caucuses, Iowa has behaved like a spoiled child in front of the Republican National Committee, which votes to every four years on whether or not Iowa deserves it’s First-in-the-Nation status. The combination of the caucus night results, the Iowa delegation going to Tampa and awarding the majority of the state delegates to Ron Paul at the 2012 Republican National Convention, the fact that Iowa’s National Committeewoman voted against the carve-out for the four early states, and finally the recent pressuring of candidates who had not yet confirmed their participation in the event, shows that Iowa wasn’t putting its best foot forward.
With the Straw Poll dead, the Iowa GOP now has to deal with the negative publicity that comes with being unable to pull off the event. It’s not just a blow to the Iowa GOP, it is also a blow to the caucuses themselves. The important thing is not to dwell on what didn’t happen, but to focus on insuring that the caucuses themselves are the absolute best they can be.
The Iowa Straw Poll may be gone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the caucuses will suffer. Yes, this is a big change, but we should never be fearful of how this will impact Iowa. At the end of the day, Iowans still demand the opportunity to kick the tires on all the candidates. People will miss an exciting Saturday in August, but it may actually make the lead up to the caucuses more exciting than ever. Time will tell.
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I think it's a smart move that will be good for the party, even though there will no doubt be a great wailing and gnashing of the teeth by many in the Iowa GOP, for various reasons.
