not happy with iowa?
by Ari Holtz
Published: January 7, 2008
The first votes of the marathon 2008 presidential election season have finally been cast in Iowa. Barack Obama pulled out the big win, Hillary got embarrassed. Mike Huckabee showed he’s for real, Mitt Romney proved you can’t buy a caucus win.
What, though, did we really learn?
While myriad interpretations of the results are being made by the pundits - candidate X now has momentum, candidate Y is now the front runner - all we really saw were the political preferences of predominately white, rural, middle class, heartland Americans. But it’s not even a random sampling of white, rural, middle class, heartland Americans. Rather, these were the folks who were cajoled to stand in obscure groupings in churches and gyms with inducements of pizza, free babysitting and transportation, a mere of 20% of Iowa’s electorate. Were these 20% noble patriots participating in a time honored political tradition or demographic anomalies doing a random dance of the obscure?
Quite obviously, the answer is a little of both. But if the obscurity is part of it, both in terms of the process and the participants, why was the country on pins and needles waiting for the results? Why are campaigns and candidates made and broken in Iowa?
Iowa is hugely important because Chris Matthews, Tim Russert and Katie Couric tell us so. The media tells the public that Iowa is important, we believe that Iowa is important, and - voila - Iowa becomes important. It’s the classic self-fulfilling prophecy. The messenger defines the story, sets the narrative and then delivers it as if it was objectively reporting on events occurring in a vacuum.
There are several reasons that the media is motivated to create an event of significance where there really is none. First, the more important they make the story, the more we watch and the better the ratings are. Second, the more important the news channels and newspapers make out Iowa to be, the more the candidates want to win and the more money they give to these very same media outlets to purchase ads. The media has a huge financial incentive to make Iowa as massive an event as possible.
But is the media solely to blame? After all, the media only provides the product. We, the news-following public, buy it up. And we buy it up on several levels. Nationally, we allow ourselves to believe the hype. Barack is now the front-runner and Hillary is wounded and in trouble. Huckabee pulled off a coup and Romney is devastated. Really? Because some small state voters favored Obama by 8% over Hillary? Because white, rural conservatives largely supported a preacher over a former Massachusetts governor? Do these results actually say anything about the broad appeal of respective candidates to the larger American public?
More insidiously, though, we buy into Iowa in that we let the results there influence how we vote. Early national polls of candidate support are considered meaningless by those in the know because the first contests widely affect subsequent ones. Iowa largely alters New Hampshire, as New Hampshire’s results alter those of South Carolina and Nevada. Get that snowball rolling and it rolls powerfully.
So, why do we buy into the Iowa myth? Why do Americans believe that Iowa illustrates anything more than the opinions of a tiny percentage of a demographically non-representative tiny state? For the same reason that we eat fast food, are sedentary, drink too much, don’t consider 3rd world labor abuses when we buy cheap clothes and drive SUVs.
Because it’s easy.
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