A miniature — of what exactly?
A favorite son of Iowa explains why the state is important:
Democracy is better served by a small scale contest that allows for grassroots candidates to build momentum, while representing the country as a whole. Luckily, Iowa is an almost perfect miniaturized 1/100th scale model of the United States.
For example, Northeastern iowa is filled with gritty and glitzy urban financial centers like Dubuque, “Iowa’s New York.” Iowa’s Missouri River West Coast teems with hi-tech Gay entertainment centers like Sioux City (”The San Francisco of Iowa”) and Council Bluffs (”The Malibu of Iowa”). With its fashionable supermodel nightclubs and machine gun-wielding drug lords, far southeastern Keokuk is our Miami Beach. And, in the center of it all, there is Des Moines, which is famous as “the Des Moines of Iowa.”
Iowa is also widely known as “The Diversity State,” with its vibrant Norwegian-American community and its equally vibrant German-American community, not to mention a growing population of German-Norwegian-American halfbreed mestizos. And, according to the most recent U.S. Census, Iowa has twice as many African-Americans as New Hampshire, and both of them are keenly involved in the political process.
Thus the political campaigns are sparing no effort. Politico:
no campaign is underestimating the importance of Iowa. And the top campaigns have been organizing on a level never seen before in the history of the state.
“Four years ago, John Kerry had the best organization,” Fischer said, “and I think his organization would be blown away by all the advances made by the campaigns this time. The level of sophistication, the micro-targeting, the staff and the field offices, they are not just a little bigger, but a lot bigger.”…
the Iowa caucus is now a highly professionalized contest. The top campaigns have ferociously smart people who understand Iowa and have the money to carry out their plans. The degree of targeting to identify potential voters has reached incredible levels…
The Clinton campaign, for example…keeps track of a “flake rate” — those people who say they are going to show up and vote for Clinton, but probably are not — and a “churn rate,” those people whose support ebbs and flows.
The campaigns have hundreds of workers who have lived in Iowa for months and years as campaign workers. Indeed, many of the workers have been in Iowa so long that they are now even registered to vote in the caucuses. What percent — 1%, 10% — of this folderol would occur in this “miniature of America” if the media did not decree and underwrite the importance of the 80,000 to 150,000 people who will caucus for each of the parties?