Keep an eye on how the national press covers this. The White House, as you know, has been under immense pressure to offer concessions to address the continuing large number of migrants coming to the US-Mexico border. Now there’s a bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate. Last night Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that bill in DOA in the House. But Speaker Johnson said something more specific and revealing. He refused to bring up the bill and according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl said “Congress can’t solve border until Trump is elected or a republican is back in the White House.”
Two things to note here. First, Johnson isn’t saying they won’t consider this bill. He’s saying they won’t consider any bill until Trump is elected. Sherman appears to have accepted the GOP wording – that “Congress can’t solve [the] border until Trump is elected.” But there’s more here. Johnson is saying openly that they won’t pass any bill until Trump is elected. In other words, however out of control they claim the border is they want to keep it that way through November to use it as a political issue. There’s a bipartisan deal but House Republicans are rejecting it out of hand. That’s not terribly surprising. But your political opponents seldom state it so openly. It’s an opening for the White House. Let’s see if they take it.
Also keep an eye on the elite DC press. Johnson has just said he refuses to take any action until the election. He’s saying as clearly as he can he wants to hold on to it as a political issue rather than try to pass a bill. Will they keep adopting Sherman’s wording?
In a word, yes.
Why do they want to keep this going. Because this kind of thing thrills their blood thirsty base:
A woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande on Friday night in Eagle Pass, Texas, after U.S. border agents were prevented from responding, federal officials said Saturday.
In a statement, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said U.S. Border Patrol agents were made aware of the migrants’ distress by the Mexican government but were unable to enter the area from the U.S. side after Texas National Guard troops, under the direction of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, prevented them from doing so.
“In responding to a distress call from the Mexican government, Border Patrol agents were physically barred by Texas officials from entering the area,” the spokesperson said.
The deaths were highlighted Saturday by Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, who said the deceased were part of a group of six migrants in the river Friday night who were in distress.
Mexican authorities recovered the bodies of three of the migrants Saturday, Cuellar said in a statement. Identities and exact ages were unavailable.
“Border Patrol attempted to contact the Texas Military Department, the Texas National Guard, and DPS Command Post by telephone to relay the information, but were unsuccessful,” Cuellar said in the statement.
He continued: “Border Patrol agents then made physical contact with the Texas Military Department and the Texas National Guard at the Shelby Park Entrance Gate and verbally relayed the information. However, Texas Military Department soldiers stated they would not grant access to the migrants — even in the event of an emergency — and that they would send a soldier to investigate the situation.”
I’m sure the Great Pious Christian Mike Johnson prayed for more just like it.
McCay Coppins makes a point that I’ve been trying desperately to make a while now: people should be exposed to Trump not protected from him. They need to see what he’s become:
If Donald Trump has benefited from one underappreciated advantage this campaign season, it might be that no one seems to be listening to him very closely anymore.
This is a strange development for a man whose signature political talent is attracting and holding attention. Consider Trump’s rise to power in 2016—how all-consuming his campaign was that year, how one @realDonaldTrump tweet could dominate news coverage for days, how watching his televised stump speeches in a suspended state of fascination or horror or delight became a kind of perverse national pastime.
Now consider the fact that it’s been 14 months since Trump announced his entry into the 2024 presidential race. Can you quote a single thing he’s said on the campaign trail? How much of his policy agenda could you describe? Be honest: When was the last time you watched him speaking live, not just in a short, edited clip?
It’s not that Trump has been forgotten. He remains an omnipresent fact of American life, like capitalism or COVID-19. Everyone is aware of him; everyone has an opinion. Most people would just rather not devote too much mental energy to the subject. This dynamic has shaped Trump’s third bid for the presidency. As Katherine Miller recently observed in TheNew York Times, “The path toward his likely renomination feels relatively muted, as if the country were wandering through a mist, only to find ourselves back where we started, except older and wearier, and the candidates the same.”
Perhaps we overlearned the lessons of that first Trump campaign. After he won, a consensus formed among his detractors that the news media had given him too much airtime, allowing him to set the terms of the debate and helping to “normalize” his rhetoric and behavior.
But if the glut of attention in 2016 desensitized the nation to Trump, the relative dearth in the past year has turned him into an abstraction. The major cable-news networks don’t take his speeches live like they used to, afraid that they’ll be accused of amplifying his lies. He’s skipped every one of the GOP primary debates. And since Twitter banned him in January 2021, his daily fulminations have remained siloed in his own obscure social-media network, Truth Social. These days, Trump exists in many Americans’ minds as a hazy silhouette—formed by preconceived notions and outdated impressions—rather than as an actual person who’s telling the country every day who he is and what he plans to do with a second term.
To rectify this problem, I propose a 2024 resolution for politically engaged Americans: Go to a Trump rally. Not as a supporter or as a protester, necessarily, but as an observer. Take in the scene. Talk to his fans. Listen to every word of the Republican front-runner’s speech. This might sound unpleasant to some; consider it an act of civic hygiene.
If he ever held any around where I live in Shithole California I would certainly do it. (As it is I watch way too many rallies and interviews with ecstatic Trump voters on Right Side Broadcasting.) I would like to see what Coppins describes in person and I agree with him that it probably says more than just following it on TV:
Regardless of your personal orientation toward Trump, attending one of his rallies will be a clarifying experience. You’ll get a tactile sense of the man who’s dominated American politics for nearly a decade, and of the movement he commands. People who comment on politics for a living—journalists, academics—might find certain premises challenged, or at least complicated. Opponents and activists might come away with new urgency (and maybe a dash of empathy for the people Trump has under his sway). The experience could be especially educational to Republican voters who are not Trump devotees but who see the other GOP candidates as lost causes and plan to vote for Trump over Joe Biden. Surely, they should see, before they cast their vote, what exactly they’re voting for.
[…]
I found the wholesome, church-barbecue vibe a little jarring. For months, my impression of the 2024 Trump campaign had been shaped by the apocalyptic rhetoric of the candidate himself—the stuff about Marxist “vermin” destroying America, and immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” The people here didn’t look like they were bracing for an existential catastrophe. Had I overestimated the radicalizing effect of Trump’s rhetoric?
Only once I started talking to attendees did I detect the darker undercurrent I remembered from past rallies.
I met Kris, a 71-year-old retired nurse in orthopedic sneakers, standing near the press risers. (She declined to share her last name.) She was smiley and spoke in a sweet, grandmotherly voice as she told me how she’d watched dozens of Trump rallies, streaming them on Rumble or FrankSpeech, a platform launched by the right-wing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell. (She waited until Lindell, who happened to be loitering near us, was out of earshot to confide that she preferred Rumble.) The conversation was friendly and unremarkable—until it turned to the 2020 election, which Kris told me she believes was “most definitely” stolen.
“You think Trump should still be president?” I asked.
“By all means,” she said. “And I think behind the scenes he maybe is doing a little more than what we know about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Military-wise,” she said. “The military is supposed to be for the people, against tyrannical governments,” she went on to explain. “I hope he’s guiding the military to be able to step in and do what they need to do. Because right now, I’d say government’s very tyrannical.” If the Democrats try to steal the election again in 2024, she told me, the Trump-sympathetic elements of the military might need to seize control.
\
That’s the crazy nonsense I hear when I watch those long broadcasts on RSB video before the rallies. You just cannot believe how completely deluded these people are.
“Joe Biden has been dead since 2019. James Woods the actor is playing Joe Biden.”
At some point we’re gonna have to have a national conversation about how many of Trump’s supporters are in the throes of a serious mental health crisis. pic.twitter.com/ws3UZq76xC
Coppins’ impression of Trump is typically perspicacious:
Seeing him speak in this setting after so many years was strange—both instantly familiar and still somehow shocking, like rewatching an old movie you saw a hundred times as a kid but whose most offensive jokes you’d forgotten.
He goes on to describe Trump’s typical, crude, rambling stump speech replete with the vulgar swearing which is apparently returned by the crowd shouting “fuck Joe Biden!” (That must be the evangelicals…)
But this was particularly interesting:
If one thing has noticeably changed since 2016, it’s how the audience reacts to Trump. During his first campaign, the improvised material was what everyone looked forward to, while the written sections felt largely like box-checking. But in Mason City, the off-script riffs—many of which revolved around the 2020 election being stolen from him, and his personal sense of martyrdom—often turned rambly, and the crowd seemed to lose interest. At one point, a woman in front of me rolled her eyes and muttered, “He’s just babbling now.” She left a few minutes later, joining a steady stream of early exiters, and I wondered then whether even the most loyal Trump supporters might be surprised if they were to see their leader speak in person.
My own takeaway from the event was that there’s a reason Trump is no longer the cultural phenomenon he was in 2016. Yes, the novelty has worn off. But he also seems to have lost the instinct for entertainment that once made him so interesting to audiences. He relies on a shorthand legible only to his most dedicated followers, and his tendency to get lost in rhetorical cul-de-sacs of self-pity and anger wears thin. This doesn’t necessarily make him less dangerous. There is a rote quality now to his darkest rhetoric that I found more unnerving than when it used to command wall-to-wall news coverage.
It should be unnerving and journalists should show it and analyze it and tell this story! Good for Coppins for doing it. I know they don’t generally want to portray the crowds as they really are but it’s part of this story.
Shortly before Trump began speaking, I met a friendly young dad in glasses who’d brought his 6-year-old son to the event. He’d never attended a Trump rally before and was excited to be there. When I asked if I could chat with him after Trump’s speech to see what he thought of the event, he happily agreed.
As Trump spoke, I glanced over at the man a few times from the press section. His expression was muted; he barely reacted to the lines that drove the crowd wild. The longer Trump spoke, I noticed, the further the man drifted backward toward the exits. Of course, I don’t know what was going through his head. Maybe he was just a stoic type. Or maybe his enthusiasm was tempered by the distraction of tending to a 6-year-old. All I know is that, halfway through the speech, he was gone.
The die hard MAGAs will never tire of him or his schtick. He is their favorite entertainer/leader/guru and whatever he says is, as he would say, perfect.
That guy who left will probably vote for Trump anyway. He was just disappointed to see that the guy he thought Trump was is really a creepy old man behind the curtain screaming “get off my lawn.” But I suppose you never know. Maybe he had an epiphany. But there does have to be at least a handful of people whose memories of him are gauzy now who would be shocked that the image they had in their minds is very different from the reality. He’s worse than ever. And his plans are being fleshed out by the Republican establishment institutions which have decided that MAGA is their destiny.
If you can’t get to a rally and want to punish yourself with a Trump rally, you can always go to Right Side broadcasting on Youtube and they stream them live. CSPAN does quite a few of them too. You should force yourself to see at least one. It will remind you of the stakes in a hurry.
“I support Trump because that kind of leadership is the ONLY way we will get the extraordinary actions needed to fix the disaster Biden has created,” the Florida senator and former Republican presidential candidate wrote.
He previously ran against Trump in 2016, during which he called him “an embarrassment” and a “con artist” before bowing out of the primary race. Since then, he’s been a careful supporter of Trump, dodging when asked to condemn the former president’s actions over the Jan. 6 insurrection or when asked to address Trump’s repeated election lies.
In his 2024 endorsement, the senator managed to toot his own horn while repeating Trump’s anti-establishment messaging. “When Trump was in WH I achieved major policies I had worked on for years,” he wrote. “It’s time to get on with the work of beating Biden & saving America!”
Remember when?
Rubio endorsed Trump today. This was Rubio calling Trump a “con artist,” said his Admin would be “chaos,” he has “no ideas of any substance,” is an “erratic individual” who has “spent a career sticking it to working people.” pic.twitter.com/k9lwJvZqH7
Here is Rubio mocking Trump for his terrible spelling, his makeup, his failed businesses, said he may have pissed his pants during a debate, said he was too old, hired migrants, and is a con artist. pic.twitter.com/RbQRKKb32w
He knows it’s all true. He is just a craven politician going with the flow today. And he figures (probably rightly) that if Trump loses nobody will remember his energetic bootlicking and he’ll just go on pretending it never happened.
They have become completely un-moored from principles and morals:
More than 6-in-10 likely Republican caucusgoers — 61% — say that it doesn’t matter to their support if former President Donald Trump is convicted of a crime before the general election, according to the latest numbers from the new NBC News/Des Moines Register poll of Iowa.
By comparison, 19% of likely Iowa caucusgoers say a Trump conviction would make it more likely that they’d back Trump, while 18% say it would make them less likely to support the former president in the general election.
As with the other findings from the Iowa poll, the likely caucusgoers backing former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley — half of whom are independents and crossover Democrats — have far different perceptions about Trump and his legal challenges than other GOP caucusgoers.
Among Haley’s supporters, 56% say a possible conviction of Trump doesn’t matter to their Nov. 2024 vote choice, but 41% say it would make them less likely to back Trump.
Less than half of Haley’s tiny anti-Trump Iowa constituency say it would make them less likely to vote for Trump if he’s convicted by a jury of his peers for trying to stage a coup. These are the Real Americans the media has relentlessly insisted we’re all supposed to revere for their common wisdom and authentic all-American patriotism.
A right-wing party loses a free & fair election, claims election fraud, and refuses to certify the results – first the US, then Brazil, today it’s Guatemala. No armed militia but still chaos at the Capitol – pushed by the same people who pushed Jan 6.
Anticorruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo was fairly elected. The losers then blocked the peaceful transfer of power. The NYT shamelessly finds a new low in how to trivialize this attempted coup: “Tempers Flare as Guatemala’s Presidential Inauguration is delayed”.
One difference: in Guatemala the people in the streets with flags are the winning party, those trying to preserve democracy. As on Jan 6, everyone knew what was coming and converged on the Capitol.
The rise of authoritarianism is a global issue. The Biden administration has been quietly working to convince the losers in Guatemala to leave. Sen. Mike Lee (UT), who knew Jan 6 plans, is pushing for the coup – and Ric Grenell is there in person to cheer it on.
Because today was to be inauguration day, officials from the US and other countries – Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, Columbia – were present when the violence started. They issued a joint statement: “the will of the Guatemalan people must be respected”
Correction to Tweet 1: in Brazil, the coup attempt was a week after inauguration, a strategic mistake. In Guatemala it was on inauguration day. As on Jan 6, people waited, after dark, as order was restored to the Capitol, to see if democracy would win.
Here in the National Theater in Guatemala City awaiting @BArevalodeLeon when word came that he would finally be able to be sworn in, the room broke out into cheers of “si se pudo.” Waiting for the new President’s arrival soon. pic.twitter.com/mWndPiiRDT
January 6 is not over. Anti-democratic movements don’t stop on their own. The US must do its part by fully investigating and prosecuting what happened on Jan 6 – not just the gullible mob but the leaders who planned and directed it, and who are spreading the cancer worldwide.
I’m sure you all remember Ric Grenell, Trump’s once and future Director of National Intelligence and hardcore MAGA political operative. WTF is he doing messing with Guatamala’s election? He’s not in any office.
Grenell was an early acolyte of Viktor Orban of Hungary. He worked for him. He is part of a global network of white nationalist authoritarians. And he’s working it. I assume he’s also making money at it.
This is an excellent explainer of Trump’s 2024 agenda and it’s on TikTok, which makes me happy to see. This stuff has to blanket every corner of social media, repeatedly, if it’s going to penetrate.
So when we are actually in the hunger games, don’t NOBODY ASK HOW WE GOT THERE!! Y’all better start paying attention!! #thisidiotpic.twitter.com/r6BRL2vb3h
This from the BBC might be more appropriate for your cynical/apathetic grown-ups:
In November, it's the US Presidential election. Donald Trump wants to be the Republican Presidential nominee. Here's 7 mins on Trump and America's democracy. Produced by Mary Fuller and Michael Cox. https://t.co/Ib1Pvk7grkpic.twitter.com/ioj5SXuC5X
When I asked the European ambassador to talk to me about America’s deepening partisan divide, I expected a polite brushoff at best. Foreign diplomats are usually loath to discuss domestic U.S. politics.
Instead, the ambassador unloaded for an hour, warning that America’s poisonous politics are hurting its security, its economy, its friends and its standing as a pillar of democracy and global stability.
The U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach, the envoy mused. “I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every fucking day.”
As voters cast ballots in the Iowa caucuses Monday, many in the United States see this year’s presidential election as a test of American democracy. But, in a series of conversations with a dozen current and former diplomats, I sensed that to many of our friends abroad, the U.S. is already failing that test.
The diplomats are aghast that so many U.S. leaders let their zeal for partisan politics prevent the basic functions of government. It’s a major topic of conversations at their private dinners and gatherings. Many of those I talked to were granted anonymity to be as candid with me as they are with each other.
For example, one former Arab ambassador who was posted in the U.S. during both Republican and Democratic administrations told me American politics have become so unhealthy that he’d turn down a chance to return.
“I don’t know if in the coming years people will be looking at the United States as a model for democracy,” a second Arab diplomat warned.
Many of these conversations wouldn’t have happened a few months ago. There are rules, traditions and pragmatic concerns that discourage foreign diplomats from commenting on the internal politics of another country, even as they closely watch events such as the Iowa caucuses. (One rare exception: some spoke out on America’s astonishing 2016 election.)
But the contours of this year’s presidential campaign, a Congress that can barely choose a House speaker or keep the government open, and, perhaps above all, the U.S. debate on military aid for Ukraine have led some diplomats to drop their inhibitions. And while they were often hesitant to name one party as the bigger culprit, many of the examples they pointed to involved Republican members of Congress.
As they vented their frustrations, I felt as if I was hearing from a group of people wishing they could stage an intervention for a friend hitting rock bottom. Their concerns don’t stem from mere altruism; they’re worried because America’s state of being affects their countries, too.
“When the United States’ voice is not as strong, is not as balanced, is not as fair as it should be, then a problem is created for the world,” said Ronald Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda’s longtime ambassador in Washington.
Apparently, they don’t just blame Trump but “politicians” by which they should say “Republicans” for not being willing to compromise. That’s a failure of the media.
They don’t read little red books. They wear little red hats. They want to obey he who is their retribution. They Live!
Trump wants to normalize the unthinkable, says Ruth Ben Ghiat, and not be held accountable for it. And that’s okay by his followers. Laws are for other people.
New video about the authoritarian dream of having immunity from prosecution and how authoritarians normalize the unthinkable. Please share. pic.twitter.com/gGRXGkONoA
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that, when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
Two months after King died in Memphis in 1968, another assassin murdered Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. On the day of King’s assassination, Kennedy broke the news to a crowd in Indianapolis where he was campaigning for president as others are today in Iowa:
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black–considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible–you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization–black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a difficult year. Two heroes died at the hands of men who hated the change King represented and Kennedy promised. The Civil Rights movement King led had already accomplished much, at least on paper, by the time of his death. Without his leadership, progress on civil rights slowed even as the backlash to progress gained momentum, if in the shadows at first.
As the Vietnam War dragged on, American popular culture turned to cynical antiheroes. There was Dirty Harry (1971), followed by Death Wish(1974) the year Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, and by Taxi Driver (1976). Rocky (1976) may have won best picture the next spring, but American optimisim was waning. By 1980, Ronald Reagan had won the presidency, introducing America to the cynicism of trickle down economics riding on the support of the religious right backlash to the 1960s and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
On this King holiday, that backlash continues with white resentment to the shifting power dynamics represented by Barack Obama’s presidency layered on top. Like homicidal maniacs in slasher-films, it’s hard to keep white supremacists from rising like the South again.
Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk means to tarnish King’s memory this day (The Root):
“We’re gonna be hitting him next week,” Kirk stated last week on his podcast. “Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it’s MLK Day. We’re gonna do the thing you’re not supposed to do. We’re gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr. You better tune in next week. Blake has already been preparing. It’s gonna be great.”
Last month at America Fest—which was organized by Turning Point USA—Kirk also used his platform to go after King. “MLK was awful,” he stated. “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe,” referring to judging people by the content of their character and not skin color.
How cynical is that? Kirk would not fare well if judged by either.
King was satisfied that if he would not get to the promised land, he at least got to climb to the mountaintop and look over and behold it.
Asheville, N.C. hosts perhaps the country’s oldest MLK prayer breakfast, second in size in the southeast only to Atlanta’s. The keynote speaker for Saturday’s 43rd edition, James E. Ferguson, II was born here and, after graduating Columbia’s law school in 1967, co-founded the first integrated law firm in North Carolina. Looking out over the crowd, he reminded the 1,100 attendees that a gathering like this was illegal when he was growing up. The very notion was inconceivable. That was then. Despite backlash and cynicism, progress continues.
Photo by author.
Richardson concludes:
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Donald Trump as Iowa experiences subzero temperatures ahead of the caucuses: “You can't sit home. If you're sick as a dog, you say ‘Darling, I gotta make it.’ Even if you vote and then pass away, it's worth it, remember."
Bob Ray has participated in Iowa’s Republican caucuses in the past, but not this year. Ray is blind, and with snow clogging the roads and subzero temperatures gripping the state, showing up on Monday is a non-starter.
“I’m 75 years old, and I’m not going to want to get out that night,” he said.
To some here, the Iowa caucuses are an exemplar of democracy, binding communities together and allowing everyday voters to connect with candidates who, a year from now, may be running the country. To others, they are an antiquated system that excludes those who — due to a disability, a work shift, a flat tire, child care needs, extreme weather or any other factor — can’t turn up on the one night every four years when Iowa voters get a say in picking presidential nominees.
Voters must be at their precincts at 7 p.m. Central time on Monday, where they will hear speeches from representatives of the candidates, fill out ballots and, if they want, observe as the votes get tallied. No early or absentee voting is allowed, except for a tiny number of military service members.
States adopted caucuses in the early 19th century to choose delegates to send to national party conventions. As primaries became popularized nationally in the 1970s, Iowa stuck with its caucuses. Over the last half century the state has soaked up attention from candidates and the media by holding the first presidential nominating contest in the country.
The vast majority of states now conduct primaries, which allow more people to participate because voters can cast ballots whenever convenient on Election Day — or, often times, before then by voting by mail or at an early-voting site.
Democrats are increasingly critical of caucuses, and they are conducting a mail-in primary in Iowa this year that concludes in March. Iowa Republicans remain committed to the caucuses, saying that even in inclement weather, the process has been proven to work.
This is what the experts think is the “advantage” of caucuses:
Candidates need to connect with voters in a way that makes them willing to take the extra steps the caucuses require, she said. Because of the structure of the caucuses and Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status — at least among Republicans — candidates repeatedly visit the state and hold small events where voters can drill them about their stances. The arrangement makes Iowa a proving ground for candidates, and successful ones find that it strengthens their campaigns, she said.
“If you get rid of a process like this, I think it’s much easier for candidates with big money and a lot of name recognition to sail in, run a bunch of ads in an expensive media market and dominate the airwaves and thereby gain a lot of casual support,” she said. “And that can’t happen in Iowa. You’ve got to have a lot more than that.”
Really? Donald Trump has barely turned up in the state and he just holds rallies with the faithful.He’s [polling nearly 30 points higher than his rivals. And Iowa routinely turns out winners like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz and Pat Robertson who are total duds beyond the state. It’s worthless.
These caucuses are dominated by the most aggressive, sometime belligerent, supporters who run roughshod over less assertive personalities.
There’s a reason for the secret ballot.
While Iowa’s system allows citizens to frequently meet candidates, it also results in lower voter participation. In 2016, the last time there were competitive primaries for both parties, just 15.7 percent of eligible voters attended either Republican or Democratic caucuses.
A week later, more than half the eligible voters in New Hampshire cast ballots in that state’s primary, according to data kept by University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald. Many other states with primaries had turnout rates in the 30s that year, more than twice as high as Iowa.
