{"id":6640,"date":"2012-01-03T00:02:07","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T08:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=6640"},"modified":"2012-01-03T00:02:07","modified_gmt":"2012-01-03T08:02:07","slug":"how-important-are-the-iowa-caucuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/03\/how-important-are-the-iowa-caucuses\/","title":{"rendered":"How Important Are the Iowa Caucuses?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"3Iowa\"For the last couple of weeks  the race between Republicans to win the Iowa caucuses has dominated the news.  Millions od dollars have been spent.  Pundits have agonized over the unpredictability of the race, and it\u2019s impossible to turn on news without seeing a talking head drone on about the subject.  So I asked myself if the Iowa Caucuses are important enough to justify all the attention.<\/font><\/p>\n

Here are the latest standings, according to the Chicago Sun Times<\/a>.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

24 percent Mitt Romney<\/font><\/p>\n

22 percent Ron Paul<\/font><\/p>\n

15 percent Rick Santorum<\/font><\/p>\n

12 percent Newt Gingrich<\/font><\/p>\n

11 percent Rick Perry<\/font><\/p>\n

7 percent Michele Bachmann<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Republican Party is not really representative of Iowa.  Obama won the state by a 10 point margin.<\/font><\/p>\n

In addition, the Iowa caucuses are not really representative of Iowa Republicans.  Only the most dedicated activists attend. According to the New York Times<\/a>, the 2008 caucuses set an attendance record, but attracted only 118,192 voters.<\/font><\/p>\n

Now, let\u2019s assume that both that they equal their record, and that one of the above losers wins 51% of the vote, absurd though that may be.  51% of 118,192 votes equals 60,278 votes for the winner.<\/font><\/p>\n

Moving along, I live in Portland OR, home of 583,876 people.  60,278 would represent 10.3% od Portland’s population.  If I were to say to you,  \u201c10.3% of Portlanders like Mitt Romney,\u201d you might say, \u201cSo what?\u201d<\/font><\/p>\n

Lets look at this another way.  There are approximately 169,000,000 registered voters in the US.  60,278 would represent .036%.  That\u2019s 3.6 one hundredths of one percent, an insignificant number.  Seen in that light the Iowa caucuses hardly matter at all.<\/font><\/p>\n

What we have been experiencing here is pure media hype, and it gives a small handful of activists a lot more influence  than they warrant.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the last couple of weeks  the race between Republicans to win the Iowa caucuses has dominated the news.  Millions od dollars have been spent.  Pundits have agonized over the unpredictability of the race, and it\u2019s impossible to turn on news without seeing a talking head drone on about the subject.  So I asked myself […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","category-politics","category-19-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}