Are you breathless with excitement? You should be if for months you’ve been listening to the augurs of the news media, the pundit class, and polling industry who have been reading the auspices to divine who will win today’s Iowa Caucus vote.
Admittedly, there’s something absurd, unreliable and anachronistic about the entire endeavor. In ancient Rome, the auguria publica were consulted on all matters of state, reading the omens for any important decision in the flight of birds. Are the modern augurs any more reliable in reading the omens in the flights of candidates?
We shall see. But, of course, that’s all we ever had to do – wait and see –and now the waiting is over. The larger question is, “Who cares? It’s Iowa, for god’s sake. It is hardly representative of the nation. In terms of racial composition, the state most like the United States as a whole is Illinois. Iowa is 39th most like America racially. In terms of persons with a bachelor’s degree, Delaware is most like America, Iowa is 24th. With a median age of 37.7, Virginia is most like the country, Iowa is ninth.
Iowa is third in approximating the nation’s median income after Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It is tied with Florida, Indiana and North Dakota, however, for being most middling in the number of people saying religion is very important at 53%. Alabama is most godly at 77% and Vermont the least at 32% — or perhaps just has the most honest people.
Still, if Democrats are trying to decide which candidate has got what it takes to win in November, Iowa is a poor yardstick to use. In 2018, Democrats won big by getting the votes of a majority of women, especially college educated women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians while losing men, especially white men and non-college educated voters by large margins. Iowa is white, rural and old. Democratic voters are diverse, urban and young.
Iowa is also an unreliable bellwether. In elections since 1972, the (non-incumbent) winner of Iowa the caucuses has had only a 55% chance of going on to win the nomination and a 17% chance of being elected president. In fact, since 1912, New Mexico has voted for the presidential winner in the fall more often than any other state. In the last 60 years, Ohio and Nevada have that honor, but in the 21st century, Ohio and Florida have matched the overall outcome most often.
It would make a lot more sense for Democratic candidates to expend their time and treasure showing they can win states that really matter in November, and those don’t include unrepresentative Iowa with its scant one percent of the nation’s population, nor New Hampshire which almost always votes Democratic, nor South Carolina which hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president in 40 years.
Swing states are where elections are decided and where the candidates should be concentrating their efforts. So, enjoy the caucus results, but don’t mistake them for meaningful. Here endeth the sermon Except, I will digress to add one slight ancillary rant. It arises from considering voting and the states and it concerns the outdated and distorting way senators are allotted, as required by the Constitution and as reflected in the electoral college.
To get the small states to sign on to their handiwork, the framers tossed them a bone by giving each state, regardless of size, the same number of senators – two. Those two also give undeserved weight to small states in their electoral college vote. Maybe in 1787 that was fine since the difference in size between large and small states was not immense. Today it is.
The nine largest states – California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina – now account for 50% of the population of the country but get only 18% of the senators. The most populous twenty states account for 75% of the population but only get 40% of the senators. That means the remaining thirty states represent only 25% of the American people but are allowed to elect 60% of the Senate.
Thus, thirty states, many of them rural, southern and prairie, each with tiny populations of less than one percent of the people, can be thanked for a reactionary, roadblock Senate dedicated to opposing the interests of a majority of the country. Mitch McConnell may be happy, but the Constitutional cobblers must be spinning in their graves.