Entire country as we winnow the field. I cannot be more excited for todays panel of experts who will die further into this. Our program will include one hour discussing the history of the Iowa Caucuses with a short 30 minute break where you can enjoy refreshments and visited the first in the nation exhibit on the first floor. We will then come back for an hour long discussion about the horserace of the current field of candidates. Now, it is my pleasure to introduce todays moderator. This iowa native is one of the best in the business. Having spent 34 years as a political reporter for the Des Moines Register, please join me yepsen. Ming david david thank you, susan. Museum andhank the staff for hosting this conversation. For better or worse, the iowa precinct caucuses have played a role in the election of american president s. And also, they have all spent time helping hardworking reporters seeking to make sense of it all. Starting from your left, they ldford, drake hoffman, theonna diaersity of northern iowa, nne bystrom iowa university, of iowaschmidt university, Kelly Winfrey, and pedro squire, university of missouri and formerly of the university of iowa. I might add in the interest of hype, this is probable the largest panel of iowa political scientists assembled on stage to talk about the caucuses. [applause] david i think it is only areing in this era where we all involved in watching a large field of democrats, it is good this is happening in state that is used for large cattle shows and debate stages. In keeping with the theme, i am told each scholar will have eight seconds to respond in two seconds to respond to attacks. As susan mentioned, we will have two discussions today. I want to thank the museum for this work and trying to develop a greater understanding of what our very significant evidence in s political history. I would like to thank cspan for being here today and making this accessible all over the world. I am a cspan junkie myself. I know many of you are. We appreciate them taking the time to make this a nationwide event where people from all over the country can participate and watch this discussion. [applause] david the first question, i will start with you. I would like to get a comment from each person on this stage. What is the significance of the caucuses in the nations political history and iowas political history . Have they been a good thing or bad thing for democracy . Dennis increasingly, i thought, caucuses are great for us, they give us things to do. We meet people across the country. We get to meet candidates. Help moderate appearances. Whether there is something good for the process itself of nominating a president , i am becoming less confident of that. We have to remember, iowa is not first because we are important, iowa is important because we are first. In any nomination process, whoever goes first is going to have extraordinary importance in the process. I think that we know this is historical accident, the way this arose. It is not the case that the Democratic National committee, Republican National committee had a set of criteria by which they decided which state could go first and by a rational basis, it turns out iowa fulfills those criteria. It is serendipity. It is historical accident. Until the rest of the country and the other states do not like iowas position, until everybody else can decide what should replace this process, iowa stays where we are by inertia. In that sense, it is a game theory problem. Everybody else wants to go first. Nobody is willing to let somebody else go first. My take is different. I think the caucuses remain a valuable part of the nomination process primarily because iowa ns take them seriously. The research i have done shows that iowans spend a lot of time thinking about what is going on, paying attention to candidates and events. Most importantly, because of ial approach iowa voters , provide information to later states about their sincere preferences, who they really think should be the nominee, not some kind of strategic effort. Unlike most States Iowans are , more likely to vote sincerely. That is, pick the candidate they like whether or not they think the candidate has a chance. Voters later on can use the information within the party to think about ok, where should we , go with this . I think that is a valuable part of the process. If someone else went first, eventually they would develop the same cabability. Iowa has been doing it for so long, iowans have a good sense of what is going on. David professor Kelly Winfrey. Donna donna hoffman. I would say i will take a different spin on this. One of the things a colleague and i have looked at this in terms of research, the role the caucuses play in strengthening parties within the state. Iowa has strong, healthy Political Parties and that is good for democracy even though a lot of people tend to want to issue parties, parties are a thing that are important. I will give an example. A year ago, we had a state senator in iowa who decided to retire. We had a special election. Of 2019. In march this person, this race garnered attention. The democrat in the race, who ended up winning, it was held by a democrat, estimated he had 10 president ial candidates do various things for him, including recording videos, encouraging people to vote. At was a special election. You have to get turnout up. Walking doortodoor in the neighborhoods. These are candidates themselves. About 10 of the candidates did that for this person. That helps the Political Parties in the state. That also keep the Political Parties competitive in the state as well, which helps iowa in the general election also. I amnk im going to going to agree with dennis. I lived in iowa for 26 years from 1996 through 2018. I now live in nebraska south of omaha. What i think over the years, when i was here, i felt the same thing others have said that iowans are serious about their choices. But i see this year something different, particularly on the democratic side. I worry about the participation in the caucuses and how hard it citizens to actually participate. They could be disabled, could have child care, could have to work. That worries me and what really worries me, i look at the field of democrat and i see in iowa the top three contenders are all white guys and it worries me about our field, other states will have to deal with and not having a more diverse field. David you do not put Elizabeth Warren in the top tier . I put her in the top four, but im saying the top three. Chmidt. Steffen s thank you. I came here in 1970 two start being at a university. In 1970 to start being an academic at the university. I have seen all the caucuses that make a difference. There were caucuses before the jimmy carter victory, but they were party events where you elect officers and do campaign plans and raise money. It is interesting for me to see pretty much the same questions raised every four years about the caucuses. Every four years. One of the things that comes up, as you get closer to the date of the caucuses, isnt there somebody better than the people who are running right now . Somebody who can really win and is really president ial . The answer is, no. There is nobody better. Simply because the process is, people present themselves, there elimination of the ones who cannot seem to get any traction, raise money, do well in polls. Then someone emerges as the candidate. That is the way it works. Maybe there are better ways to do it. We will talk about that later, maybe towards the end. During the attack tell party. During the Cocktail Party. There is no Cocktail Party . Im sorry. That is another event later in the month. I think it is an interesting process. It gives the news media something to do in times when there is no news because they can send reporters to iowa and report about hay bales and cattle and pancakes being flipped and deepfried things. I think the caucuses have a great historical place in american politics. At some point, maybe we move on to Something Else. I think it is an effective way to get out messages. I moved here six years ago. This is my second cycle in iowa. I have heard about it before i got here. I studied political campaigns. It is something that is unique. First, it is good for me. It is good for me professionally and my personal interests. I think there are some advantages to a system like this. It does allow candidates with low name recognition to stand out when they would not be able to in a national primary. If we went to the people who were pulling at the top before the caucus process started, joe biden be our candidate, Rudy Giuliani would be a candidate in 2008. Things shaft. Iowa has an important part. I also worry about how representative it is in terms of both how white our state is and candidates we end up selecting. There are some ways we can address that and keep the iowa caucus or Something Else comes along that better suits our current needs given the need for diversity and the number of candidates we have competing. Let me sum up what a lot of my colleagues have said. One thing i want to remind iowans is how special this process is. Having driven up this morning from columbia, missouri, the rest of the country is unaware there is an election coming. I was reminded when i passed the amy for america bus on 163. This is an unusual process. It is not the way it has always been. Our nomination systems have evolved over history. Configured will probably not last well into the future. One, enjoy it while it is here. Two, make sure you take advantage of it. It is a rare opportunity. In columbia, missouri, we have no president ial candidates running ads. We are protected from that. Your world will return to normal a month from now. As it stands right now, you get to be in the spotlight, so enjoy it. David some of us are looking forward to the resumption of farm chemical advertisements on television. Lets go back to the beginning. Tell us about 1968. What was happening in america . How this led to the early caucuses. 1968, as many people remember or know from history books, was a tough year. We had the troops sent to vietnam. Goldwater used to say during the convention, everyone is afraid that if they vote for me, we will have troops in vietnam. He said after johnson was reelected, people voted for me have troops in vietnam. We have about a half million troops in vietnam and that sparked an antiwar movement. He had the civil rights movement, the assassination of dr. King, the assassination of bobby kennedy. It was a tough time. We had the disastrous Democratic Convention in august of 1968, later called a police riot. Just to be quick, i will note that prior to or through 1968, certainly prior to 1972, only 25 of National Convention delegates were chosen through primaries. Most of the time, party officials, governors, senators, party chairs and so forth, they went to the National Convention with these votes in their pockets for the delegates for their state and spent them as wisely as they thought they could. When john kennedy ran in the 1960 West Virginia primary, he did not do it to get votes are delegates, he did it to show that a catholic candidate could get votes in a protestant state. Through 1968, only 25 of delegates were chosen through primaries. With the 1968 convention, the reaction was that the three most activated groups new to the process, single women, young people, and minorities had been locked out. With the disaster that occurred in chicago, there was impetus to change the process to open the nomination more to groups that had not been old white males. David that resulted in something called the Mcgovern Fraser commission. The party decided they would have earlier in events to allow more people to participate. Talk about 1972, george mcgovern, the first rounds of these caucuses. Dennis when we trace the history of caucuses, 1972 stands out. It is seen as having been the milestone where the iowa caucus attained the status that they enjoy today. That is a little bit misguided. Not many people paid attention to the Iowa Caucuses in 1972. They were first on the calendar purely by accident. It had to do with the rules by which the Iowa Democratic party operated and when they counted back in various states, they had to meet for the stages and caucuses they arrived at the beginning of a calendar and nobody paid attention and nobody made much of a fuss about it. The candidates did not make a fuss about it. We look at it now in retrospect and see that mcgovern did better than people anticipated and that was the first inkling that maybe he was going to go onto the nomination. He only spent a day and a half in the state before the caucuses. The media did not spend much time discussing them. After they occurred. It is not until 1976 that you see the modern caucus with all the attention that we begin to see starting with jimmy carter and his efforts. David there was something significant that happened in 1972. There were few political reporters who were here. One of them being johnny appel of the new york times, who wrote in his piece about the contest about the caucus that night that mcgovern had an unexpectedly strong secondplace showing. We start with this expectations game. Won but mcgovern did well, better than expected. Lets go to 1976. Jimmy carter picks up the playbook that mcgovern and his Campaign Manager wrote. What happened . Dennis that expectation game becomes built into the process with 1976. Jimmy carter was a virtually unknown governor of a Southern State that nobody paid attention to. When he said he was going to run for president , no one was excited about that. There were other democrats who were plausible candidates. What the Jimmy Carter Campaign did was actually campaign. From the time jimmy carter announced he would run, he began running a grassroots campaign. He was out there. He himself in iowa was knocking on doors. They were Building Campaign committees around the state. They were doing the kinds of things that we now take for granted in an iowa caucus nobody hadt that ever done before. So jimmy carter the Jimmy Carter Campaign creates this sense that something is going on in iowa and manages, partly on the followup to the story about 1972, to convince the media that what happens in iowa is going to matter and uses iowa as a springboard, a way to say, this guy from georgia you never heard of is a viable candidate because a bunch of people in iowa who had never heard of him either voted for him. Goes, won the story the caucuses and used that as the jumping off point to win the nomination and win the presidency and in winning the , presidency, sets up the underlying myth that you have to win iowa to win the presidency. That turns out to be very untrue for democrats for pretty much the rest of the caucuses until we get to barack obama. Nonetheless, the myth is there, it is built on, and things start happening with respect to iowa. On the republican side, there was nothing going on from a caucus perspective yet. That does not come until later. It is worth noting, jerry ford was under pressure from Ronald Reagan, and i remember as a teenager watching that convention and the uncertainty about whether or not ford had the delegates to win the run in 1976, part of why jimmy carter won the presidency was jerry fords we can stay. The idea that iowa meant something start with that. Jimmy carter did not win the cog of this. When the caucuses. In the caucuses. He lost to uncommitted. Of the things whether 1976 campaign on the republican side, they did a straw poll at caucuses. It was the first time the two parties caucused together. Jerry 41, but Ronald Reagan was strong. Reporters and people after the election said, Ronald Reagan illustrated fords weaknesses as a candidate and in the republican party. Underscoring that these people and iowa are telling us things that happened later. The government power to the antiwar movement. Jimmy carter goes the distance. Ford is vulnerable. In 1980, one of the super bowl campaigns in caucuses, talk about carter and kennedy. Fen there is a parallel between what is going on today and what happened in 1980. There were two candidates who were strong, visible, good name recognition. Ted kennedy of course. The blue blooded massachusetts senator and jimmy carter, who as we were just told, was jimmy who , who came out of this and was president. It became a battle between should we elect someone who is safe and who is president and is named jimmy carter, or should we move the party to the left and have ted kennedy become the standard bearer . It was a difficult fight inside the party and what it did was thentially, it cleaved party into two factions. We see some of that happening today. A lot of the discussion today is about moving left or staying safe in the barack obama, joe biden middle. It peaked at the Democratic Convention in Madison Square garden, where the fight became visible, the fight was covered, ted kennedy was struggling to get enough delegates and jimmy carter to hang on. It is not often you have an incumbent president successfully challenged. We know that eventually, jimmy carter prevailed and was on a course to reelection until another historical moment that has parallels today. What time is it . The iranian hostage crisis broke out, the iranian radicals who had overthrown the sha took over the american embassy, took american diplomats hostage, they were on television blindfolded, marched out of the embassy. Some of you my students here you do not remember that. It was dramatic. It was as dramatic as if you watch cnn today, what is going on with iran today. Jimmy carter was unable to successfully respond to that crisis and therefore, lost reelection. It was a moment you should study this a little bit, that history, kennedy moved to the left, maybe that would have worked better. Sometimes, there are parallels. Often there are no parallels. , sometimes there are. David one other thing that happened in was the rise of 1980 George Herbert walker bush, who beat Ronald Reagan in the caucuses, a surprising finisher who goes on and winds up being Vice President. He coined the phrase, i have momentum. That is one of the things candidates today look for. One of the other significant things, jimmy carter as president worked iowa hard. Withs carter had notecards iowans on it. So when kennedy started to challenge jimmy carter, he lost in florida. He is onto iowa and jimmy carter laid a trap for him here and two to one. Steffen i was at a friends farm, a hot summer afternoon before jimmy carters first nomination. A gentleman came down this farm lane and got off his bike and said my name is jimmy carter. , who is jimmy carter . That is how he played iowa. He bicycled through counties and other places, even went to a farm where there were a few people to introduce himself. Good interpersonal relations. David we move to 1984. It was a small democratic field, compared to this cycle. You had Walter Mondale who was the overwhelming favorite. Then you had a host of other candidates, most of whom were betterknown and regarded as more serious candidates. What happened was, the media set up expectations that mondale should win. When he got 49 , that did not seem convincing enough to a lot of the media. Surprisingly, gary hart finished with 17 , which put him into a position to then use that as a springboard to knock off mondale in a surprise in New Hampshire. That sets up the idea that we have certain expectations built into how we think the caucuses are going to go and when someone fails to meet those expectations, they fall by the wayside and in the case of 1984, that was john glenn. You may not recall, he was thought to be a serious contender. He had the right stuff movie. That was going to catapult him. He fell flat. He had about 4 of the vote in iowa. That was the end of his campaign. One of the things we have to anticipate, putting this into current context, what is it we expect and who is going to surprise us and who is going to disappoint us this time around . I went to ask about media and momentum. How does that work . Does it work and spending reporters momentum questions . A big part has to do with polling. If you can gain traction, especially when you are a candidate that is not wellknown, that gets our attention. Pete buttigieg is our current example. Most of the country probably does not know who he is or how to stay how to say his name, but once he started bubbling to the top half of the field, that is what it is like to get media attention. It is expectations, we expect joe biden to be at the top, that is not big news. But those candidates we do not expect will get more coverage. It is news. It is not news if what we thought is going to happen. It is only news if it is not what we thought. That underperforming or over performing becomes the center of media coverage. David before we leave 1984, there is one other significant thing that is worth mentioning. Just before the caucuses, iowa and New Hampshire cut a deal that iowa would have the first caucus and New Hampshire would have the first primary and caucuses could not become like a primary. The state democratic chairman in iowa and the chairman in New Hampshire cut that deal. The two states, instead of fighting each other over who would agree to , fight together. This is important today in this debate that is going on inside the Democratic Party about opening up and having access because whatever the democrats do, caucuses, absentees, even aw body count, it runs the risk of alienating New Hampshire. While it is an old deal that got cut, it is having an impact on the current race today. 1988, religious conservatives and the gop. Donna hoffman, talk about the rise of religious conservatives. Donna in 1988, this is a surprising caucus in some ways. We were talking in 1980 about George Herbert walker bush getting momentum, winning over Ronald Reagan who would get the nomination. In 1988, reagans term limit ended. Bush will run for a term. He comes in third in the caucuses. Dole from kansas will win the caucuses. Sandwiched in between bob dole and bush is Pat Robertson. Another parallel because here is someone who kind of came out of nowhere, was a televangelist, never held elected office, and is able to bring attention to himself because he beat expectations, gets media attention, not just in the state, but after he comes in, a surprising second to parlay that into making a campaign of it across the country. Wounding bush somewhat in the process. Bush will go on to win the nomination. Another thing we see in 1988, iowans like candidates from neighboring states. Bob dole from kansas does win. Sometimes they gets a candidate a little bit of credibility. We are seeing that potentially with amy klobuchar. David the next few races, we are going to quickly skip. In 1992, there was no republican count. President bush was running for reelection. Senator harkin was running for the democratic nomination, so democrats bypassed the state. In 1996, buchanan came in second behind bob dole. Dole won. 2000, the bush and gore both win their respective caucuses and go on to win in november. Those three caucuses do not seem to have had the historic impact that some of these other things we are talking about. Lets move then to 2004. I am watching this clock. You talk about the howard dean game. For most of us who remember 2004, the thing we remember is the dean scream. On caucus night, when it turns thirdward dean comes in despite being perceived as the front runner for months, he tries to parlay that into saying, we are going to continue. His voice rises. It gets louder. He kind of yells at the end. You can see it on youtube. It is funny because in retrospect, looking at it, it does not seem to be that big a deal. At the moment, it was. A pecan the focus of the stories and it points out the opposite , side of the expectations game. The failure to meet expectations. Howard dean is expected to win, he comes in third, john kerry wins, john edwards comes in second. Howard dean is a distant third. At that point, his chances are shot. It is mainly because everyone thought he would win. He does not win. The media talks about it in that way, negatively. In the research we have done, we look at this media effect. It is clear that candidates who beat expectations on the Positive Side get a lot of attention and a bump. Candidates who fail to meet expectations on the negative side, like howard dean, get quick attention, but then the media turns away from them and moves on to other candidates. What is interesting about this point, if you look at the polling in the runup to the caucuses, howard dean hit his Leading Point several weeks ahead and began to shift downwards in the last few polls. John kerry became the leader in the last couple of polls, but that was not really enough for the media to shift its expectations, so he gains from beating howard dean, goes on to win the nomination but lose the presidency. David thats relevant to this this relevant to this year, particularly applicable to Elizabeth Warren, who skyrocketed at the beginning and now has slipped because the media scrutiny that comes along with that rise. This person may become president , media people have to pay attention. It is applicable to joe biden, who cannot afford to do badly in iowa as the National Front runner and who a month ago started tamping down expectations for that reason. David lets move to 2008. Obama, clinton, and edwards. This is a significant caucus year. You have two leading candidates in the Democratic Party. The first woman who is competitive for a nomination of a major party, and barack obama, first africanamerican male, very competitive. It is about expectations. If you remember at that time, obama was behind clinton by double digits in the summer. It was not until the Des Moines Register came out with a poll around thanksgiving time in 2007 showing that obama had taken the lead. A lot of people at the time doubted people because she put emphasis on independent voters that might show up in the caucuses, but her figures turned out to be on point and since that time, her poll is rated as an a plus by 538. Good polling by the Des Moines Register. One other thing i would say, we did not mention this earlier, you probably all know this. The caucuses are different and i are different in iowa. The republican caucuses are a straw poll. They reported numbers. The democratic is a complicated process. I thought it was important for me to not be registered in either political party. I participated as an observer in the republican and democratic caucuses. I want to bring up the importance of caucus mouth. Math. Cus that is one thing the Obama Campaign understood. They had a great team. One of our graduate students was in charge of it. They understood caucus math. Obama was relying more on social media to get people out. One of the things that happened that year, barack obama was leading going into them. He got 36. 7 of the caucus delegate vote that night, but he was also playing math to where if he saturated how many delegates were together in a room, he could peel off people his team and they put them into edwards camp because the other thing they were trying to do is make Hillary Clinton finish third. She finished third by less than one third of 1 . 29. 8 . It was widely reported that she finished third. In my view, that damaged her Campaign Going forward. David lets talk a little more about Hillary Clinton, first woman candidate. How women get treated. I know you and Kelly Winfrey have done some scholarship over the years on this subject. How was Hillary Clinton treated . Is it changing . What did you observe . I did a study that year of her coverage in the Des Moines Register. What i found out is she was and this is typical for all women president ial candidates they are covered more on campaign strategy. They are not covered on the issues. Obama was linked to issues twice as many times as clinton. That is something we saw in the research dating back to the early 1990s, late 1980s, women are treated differently by the media. It has improved for women running for statewide races like governor and senate and congressional races. But we still see this difference in coverage is when a woman runs for Vice President or president. David Kelly Winfrey, what are your thoughts . Kelly it is certainly still a problem. One of the things that is interesting this cycle is have not seen in the past. Women tend to not be covered on policy that much, but because Elizabeth Warren is a woman with a plan, she has been scrutinized for those policies in ways that are not similar to what you have seen in for example pete buttigieg. There is still some inequality there. You also get the electability question in everything from local media to National Media when it comes to women candidates. I think it is even a little harder this time because Hillary Clinton lost to donald trump. There is a concern, that must mean that women are not electable. Even though i like this woman, i do not think she is electable. I have survey research that i completed, it indicates that while Elizabeth Warren as liked, is liked, there is concern she might not be able to win a general election. David i want to get into electability in the second panel. I want to move to 2012. What happened with the reporting of the republican results . Dennis this is where, when we talk about horserace matters, you have to be careful. Two weeks before the caucuses in 2012, mitt romney was shown as the leader certainly and , everybody expected him to win. Rick santorum at that point was in the low single digits. On caucus night, santorum seemed to lose to romney by eight votes. A couple weeks later, a missing box came in from somewhere in iowa from one of the precincts that put santorum up by 34 votes. The former chair of the Iowa Republican party had to deal with that, and he was in a tough situation, but you have to remember, caucuses are internal by the partiesn themselves, not by the state electoral machinery. These things can happen at times. Santorum complained that that cost him momentum, but my argument was because he exceeded expectations by finishing in a virtual tie with mitt romney, he already in fact won the caucuses. David but the republicans screwed up the count. There have been other things counts that have been questioned, argued about throughout the history of the caucus. The we haden an argument between the Bernie Sanders people and Hillary Clinton people. There is always error in counting. When it is close, it can matter. We saw that in 2012 and 2016. The other thing to recognize, we also need to put the caucuses in the proper perspective. This is a Caucus Convention method. All you are doing is selecting delegates to go to the next level of convention which is the , county. People can change their minds in the 30 days between those periods. With clinton and sanders, you had an interesting race because clinton is going to come back from her 2008 loss, she will eventually get the nomination, but sanders gives her a surprising run for her money especially in the state. ,it comes out as tight more or less. Butclaims to have won clinton claims to have one. The state delegate equivalent was virtually a tie. You can do the percentage. They were separated by four tents of a percent. Ties. E places, there were the rules for some of those places, they flipped coins. That became part of the narrative. Hillary clinton had rigged it somehow because she won more coin tosses. Other point to discuss, sanders did extraordinarily well. Say sheclinton could had won. That was important for her going to the next day. David in 2012 and 2016, races were decided by microscopic margins. Two weeks after they declared romney the winner, republicans said, it was really rick santorum. Which crushed his campaign. If you do not win the headline the day after the caucuses, you are done. Some controversy about that. Then, the 2016 dispute led the bernie people to demand that the initial preferences of people as they come to the caucus he tabulated, which is a first, which causes heartburn in New Hampshire. Stay tuned. And, which will have a lot of confusion on caucus night in the reporting of the results. What information do reporters get . What information do they get first . That will shape their story. Does the Iowa Democratic party release the raw body count and then the delicate equivalents or do the delicate the delicate equivalents and then do the body count . Those caucuses are significant because of the stakes that are involved in a caucus victory or loss and the changing in the rules. Wasnt at the russians who messed with the ballot boxes . [laughter] david we do not know. Dennis, i want to talk about 2016 on the republican side. The rise of conservative populism, donald trump doing well. What did you see there . Dennis when i attended and covered caucus events on both sides in 2016, particularly on the republican side, it is not based on data, it is just experience covering caucuses and getting the sense of a crowd. There was a lot of anger and fear at republican events. Just concern about where the country was going. They never saw barack obama as a legitimate president. You had an argument from someone like ted cruz there is a mirror image of this on the democratic side going on today you have some people in 20 on some people on the republican side, republicans lose president ial elections and candidates are not conservative enough. We have that reverse argument on the democratic side today. The argument is, there is a natural conservative majority in the country and if you nominate , the right person who is consistently conservative, they will win the election and solve all of the countrys problems. That was the approach of ted cruz. You had scott walker, who tried to be a more pragmatic but still conservative candidate. In a lot of events, donald trump would show up. On one hand, there was an entertainment value. Here was a tv celebrity. On the other hand, audiences connected in certain ways. My carefully cleansed phrase has been that mr. Trump always represented the middle finger segment of the american electorate. The people who were fed up with politics and politicians as usual. There was a big audience for that kind of message, certainly on the republican side because they thought the standard republican candidates were not taking care of business. He obviously capitalized on the and continues to do so. David does anyone on the panel recall the similarities between the bernie voters and trump voters and after the nominations by the time we got to the general election, what percentage of Bernie Sanders people wound up voting for donald trump . It was a high percentage. I saw something recently, i believe it was 87 of Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Hillary Clinton, but that was a bigger margin than obama a large percentage of Hillary Clinton voters voted for obama. It was in the 90s. There was a significant difference, about 10 percentage points. Book on the 2016 election there was a team that came here , and they did research about people who attended sanders rallies, trump rallies, ted cruz, and Hillary Clinton. What they found is that some of the sanders and Trump Supporters shared characteristics as far as what was motivating them to support that candidate. Kind of that tear down the system kind of thing. Share is that Bernie Sanders is not a democrat. He is coming from a different using thehe has Democratic Party as a vehicle. Donald trump is not a republican. He is a republican because he ran as a republican, got elected, but his policy positions, his criticism of george w. Bush and the war in iraq, he is attracting those people who do not like the actual candidates of the people of the party and want something different. People have to run on a party because you cannot win elections as an independent or a democraticsocialist. You have to hijack a party and use the Party Machinery and identity and hope you are attracting enough people, which donald trump did and Bernie Sanders never got there. I think sanders is doing the same thing now. I know a lot of people who really do not think Bernie Sanders should be running as a democrat. He should be running as a democraticsocialist. We can talk about that in the next phase. Looking at the other side of this that is what the candidates , were saying. What i found was Bernie Sanders and trumps rhetoric was similar. It was about in fact blowing up the system, the big guys are screwing you over. They had different definitions of who the big guys were, but it was still similar rhetoric. Ive done analyses of six or eight speeches from each of the candidates that i recorded in iowa. They track together incredibly closely, compared to every other candidate. David we have a few minutes left before we take our break. I raced through these races quickly. Behinder thoughts left or observations you have . One of the things i wanted to ask about, having looked at this process early on, what things do you see in the evolution of the caucuses today . How have they changed . I think we still enjoy this myth that was created by jimmy carter, the candidate spending nights around the state, building up an organization from grassroots, that i think has come and gone. We now see the role of money playing a much bigger part in the process than was the case 20 or 30 years ago. Technologically, things have changed. We have social media as a way to organize and mobilize supporters in a way we did not before. I think the caucuses themselves have changed dramatically over 40 years. The process that was in place in 1976 and 1984 is different than the process that has been in place for the last eight years. David where are we headed with that . Dennis anecdotally, the republicans used to have a straw poll. 2011 was the last straw poll. I had a visitor from britain who was interested in politics. For jimmy carter, he came out here and he is under the radar. Tim polin t was appearing at a coffee shop in a small town west of des moines. We went out there, and sure enough, there was governor plenty from minnesota talking with three or four voters. There were 33 media people surrounding them. There is nothing under the radar anymore. The broader point maybe i am a contrarian the issue of the counting for example, the to bear were not built the burden that the rest of the country puts on them for president ial politics . David talk about social media. What is the impact today of social media on campaigning . It is increasing in each cycle and it will be different in 2020 because of the pension for the president to tweet policy and for people to engage with him in to eat as well. It forced the Mainstream Media to use twitter to cover the president. One of the things that my colleague and i did is that we used a panel from iowa state that they have done for several cycles on likely caucusgoers and we were interested in their media diet. Particularly from 2016, we found that likely caucusgoers, information on the internet was in fourth place. They got most information from cable news and local news network, local, cable, and newspaper. Internet was fourth. I was about 35 or so. It was about 35 or so. If they actively followed a president ial candidate on twitter and liked his or her posts they were likely to , caucus. We found the social media effect. David started doing research on that with a colleague. I think this whole research a thing i am getting into and kelly as well, the impact of social media on the political processes. I think we are finding more interaction in each election cycle. I think 20 20 is going to be one. Findinghat is what i am with this cycle. The survey shows that Television News sources are still above internet sources. Cable news, network news and local news. After that was social media. It seems to be rising above some traditional sources radio and newspaper. The other thing i will say about it is social media allows candidates to communicate directly with voters about what their stance on issues are, allows them to respond. One thing that has been important in iowa is using it to organize, to get people to show hours, orts, to happy whatever to get them involved in ways that were harder to do when you have to call or door knock. The 1988 election with Pat Robertson going into the caucuses i think is more important than has been given credit. What he did was he legitimized politics for evangelicals. Evangelicals stayed away from politics because they said it is secular, it is dirty, it is not godly. When he ran, evangelicals slowly became active in politics and we see how active they are now in 2020. They have decided politics is the way for them to basically bring godly and scripture to the american political system on issues like abortion and gay rights. It was quite important in 1988 that he presented himself as a president ial candidate. David i think religion has always played an Important Role in iowa politics. You go back to the civil war and the role of faith on both sides and prohibition, the civil rights movement. There is a religious left. I talked about evangelicals and i would hear from evangelicals on the left who say, we are in a different camp. They are motivated the antiwar movements. This is continuing a tradition in which faith and religious values play a role in the outcome of elections on both sides. David you started this off by asking what was different. There is a lot that is still the same. This is still about organizing at the precinct level. It is still about doorknocking. It is still about persontoperson contact. We have been in the field asking likely caucusgoers what is going on. At this point, we have 90 of our respondents say they have been contacted personally by at least one campaign. It is still about that person to person politics, even in a world of social media, in a world of money. What the money is buying in iowa now is organizing. It is offices. It is staff. The ability to build a campaign from nothing and show us you can build and sustain something going forward. One thing that is important, it is unique to iowa. Iowanssomeone come to their dooo shake the hands of the candidate. It necessarymakes here, not because it is unnecessary way to campaign, because it is what islands demand of what iowans demand of candidates. We will take a halfhour break and will come back and talk about the good stuff, which is who is winning and what is your handicap on the race . With that, we will take a 30 minute break. Please take a moment to see the caucus history exhibit, and we will be back at the bottom of the hour to talk about the horse race. Thank you. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org]
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