An Observational Odyssey to the Iowa Caucus
NGL ventured to the Hawkeye State on Monday to witness American’s beautiful, inalienable right: the right to vote (and how sometimes, it’s filled to the brim with bewildering, perplexing, stupendous silliness)
We had been talking about it for a while, but Sunday night — well, technically, Monday morning at 1 a.m. — my roommate Peter and I had to answer the important question: so we going to Iowa or what?
It was the caucus, of course, which —if you take CNN’s extensive coverage into account— is one of the hypest events of the election cycle. And as a noted hypebeast myself, I knew we had to follow the pulse of the nation as boots on the ground, observing the peculiar, quasi-democratic process of voting that Iowa employs.
Plus, I didn’t have any classes on Monday, and Peter likes adventures.
Anyway, we packed up our bags with a light plan (we’d drive three hours from Evanston to Davenport, where my guy Andrew Yang would be appearing at a canvass launch, before venturing on to Iowa City) and a big bag of pretzels, piling into my car and hitting the road around 10 a.m.
I know the title of this piece is a little misleading in the sense that it appears like I’m setting up a hit-piece, somewhat insinuating that a stuck-up college dweeb like myself only went to make fun of the way Iowans do things.
I’ll clear the air right now: I wanted to watch the caucus because I find it fascinating. Friends and neighbors actually standing in the same room, being civil, discussing their thoughts and beliefs to raucous roars of support…there’s something to be said about the political decorum we observed on the University of Iowa’s campus that was both refreshing and enlightening. Yes, it was retrograde and old-fashioned (the total votes consisted of literally stacking up cards people filled out, and the four people physically counting at the front ripped pieces of paper out of notebooks to write final tallies on), but the authenticity and genuine celebration of a simple practice — voting — flowed through the near-800 voters in our precinct.
I also knew there was a lot of problems with caucuses, many of them which are well-documented. It’s difficult for people with disabilities; it’s difficult for people who work late or wake up early; and it’s difficult for people with young children, particularly if they can’t pay for sitters. Plus, there’s the obvious: since everyone can see who you align with, peer pressure becomes a major factor, particularly after the first alignment (when voters whose candidates aren’t “viable” become up for grabs).
So with all that being said, after observing the caucus firsthand…I must say that I think it was quite the theatrical show to take in, chock-full of inefficiencies and head-scratching moments, a silly practice that teeters on pointlessness. Dave Tingwald, a man dealt a phenomenal name and tough caucus hand, did the best he could in steering our humble ship along; nonetheless, when you’re handing out pens to everyone in the room 74 minutes after voting was supposed to begin, you know this thing ain’t wrapping up anytime soon.
Plus, for our block of Iowans, the rankings were Sanders at 371, Warren at 286, and then everyone else. Each candidate needed 120 votes to hit the 15% mark and be deemed viable; after the two front-runners, Buttigieg was third with 71, and Yang was fourth with 46. The problem was, pretty much no voters wanted to join other candidates’ camps after theirs’ lost (Klobuchar’s 20-odd voters did side with Buttigieg, which was worth noting, along with the announcement of Biden’s mere 13 voters leading to collective laughter from the room), so roughly one-third of the ballots were moot in the end. Therefore, we ended up watching the deliberative process from 6:20 — 10 p.m….when the obvious winners ended up winning anyway.
I could go on about more of the quirks and mishaps, but if you’ve been following the news, you know that the Iowa Caucus was a shitshow everywhere. I mean, they frickin’ decided to flip a coin to determine the winner in some precincts!
Therefore, we’re not here to discuss what transpired any longer; no, we’re here to discuss The Six Ridiculous Amendments to Caucusing That Still (Somehow) Seem Less Ridiculous than Caucusing.
Let’s begin!
№1: A Massive Game of Rock-Paper-Scissors
Did you ever play a giant game of Rock-Paper-Scissors, or Rochambeau, or whatever you want to call the game where rock smashes scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper confusingly beats rock for the purpose of continuity?
If you took gym class in grade school, you most likely did. The word hype has been tossed around quite often in this article, though in all seriousness, there might not be anything in the same stratosphere of hypeness as Giant RPS.
Peep these kids going nuts while in gym class:
The chants were unreal for this one group going the more traditional route:
Even NBA star Jaylen Brown got in on the action, taking home the dub at a school in Boston:
This one might make the most sense out all of them. You realign precincts so that all voting has to happen in high school gymnasiums (lower schools and churches should work when necessary), and you pit everyone in the room against each other.
Here’s the key, though: you don’t get to choose who you go against after each round. The person closest to you becomes your next opponent, so that voters from a majority group don’t attack the smaller groups in unison. In the end, the most popular candidate should win the precinct’s delegates from a sheer numbers perspective, but there is ample opportunity for scrappy underdogs to stake their claim as Rochambeau maestros.
Quick, easy, and hype. It’s like the Project Management Triangle, except it somehow manages to hit on all three!
№2: Sock Wrestling FTW
Ah, Sock Wrestling. It’s like the Bruno Caboclo of the Olympics: Two years away from being two years away from being two years away from being considered an official sport on the world’s biggest stage.
As an avid ultimate frisbee player — where, at tournaments and, depending on how seriously your team takes practice, sock wrestling is often practiced and celebrated — I can attest to the deft athleticism and ability to operate in small spaces that sock wrestling requires of its participants. Basically, the rules are this: Two participants enter the ring, and only one can come out with both socks on. Whichever wrestler can heist their contemporary’s hosiery — all while defending their own precious socks — takes home the hardware.
There are many different approaches to succeeding in sock wrestling. You can go all-out for the quick win in McGregor-like fashion; you can go the counter-attack route, in which you bait the competition before going in for the kill; and you can go the War of Attrition route, in which you tire out the competition by nimbly avoiding their prying paws until they wave the white flag of defeat.
For you, the reader, I’m not sure what your optimal strategy would be. What I do know, though, is that it would make a lot of sense for Iowa to employ sock-wrestling for their primaries.
Think about it. It’s quick, not as physically-intimidating as real wrestling, and even more entertaining than caucusing. I believe the way in which to institute this new form of voting is that you still attend your precinct, and each group of voters elects a precinct captain to take on all of the other captains. It then becomes a bracket where the group with the most amount of voters is the one seed, the group with the second-biggest amount the two seed, and so forth. This makes sense because if your candidate’s group has more people in it, odds are you’ll have the best sock-wrestler of the bunch (though it does leave room for historic upsets). If your captain loses, they’re put into the losers bracket, where the total amount of delegates determined by where your captain finishes.
Plus, this means that the candidate who wins the state is the one with the most high-quality sock wrestlers under their belt, and who wouldn’t want to stick that on a campaign ad come November?
№3: Pope-Style, Straight from the Vatican
I’ll admit, as an M.O.T. myself, I can’t really tell you what the Pope does, when the position became the modern version we know it to be, or what he’s supposed to be known for.
What I do know is that when I went to the Vatican, it was a pretty incredible experience. We had some really aggressive tour guide barrel through the humongous lines outside for us, so that was definitely a plus, yet I think it’s the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s famous ceiling that pushed it over the top for me. I guess I’ve never been to the Louvre and seen the Mona Lisa (though my friends have given it pretty mediocre reviews), so my frame of reference for world-class art is limited. Nevertheless, there was something about walking through the smallest country in the world, and the palpable feeling of holiness throughout.
The process of selecting a new pope is often joked about due to its confusing use of words like “conclave” and “cardinals”; regardless, I wholeheartedly believe it’s a more effective way of choosing a leader than a caucus. Here’s how they do it:
Basically, cardinals — a “leading bishop and prince of the College of Cardinals in the Catholic Church” — from all around the globe gather in Vatican City when the previous pope steps down. They must be under the age of 80, and it takes place behind closed doors in the Sistine Chapel. Ballots happen throughout the course of the day, in which a cardinal needs a two-thirds majority in order to win. If no one takes the ballot, they go again and again until they find a winner.
But here’s the coolest part: after each round, the cardinals bind and burn each ballot in a special furnace. If the chimney emits black smoke, it signals to the crowd that there’s no clear winner; if the chimney emits white smoke, the voting has ended, and a senior cardinal will emerge and introduce the new Pope.
So, in Iowa, here’s my proposal to do it pope-style. Say you’re in the precinct I was observing, and there’s roughly 800 people. Every group of 10 people gets to elect one captain, and the 80 captains go into a closed-door room. The captains in that room are not allowed to leave until 54 of them agree on a candidate; each time a ballot is completed, they employ the same furnace technique as the cardinals. This gives the rest of the voters the opportunity to either stay and watch, or leave after they pick their captain in the first place.
Sure, it’ll probably be hell for precinct captains who have to slog on in the room. Yet for the other 90%, they get to watch smoke come out of a chimney! What’s more hype than that?
№4: Do a Disc Race!
I unfortunately already gave away the fact that I’m an avid ultimate nut, though there is a different tradition that can be pulled from the piece of plastic we hold near and dear to our hearts: disc racing.
Disc races are a straightforward process open for creative interpretation. All you need is a disc for every single participant. After that, it’s up to you how you want to vary the rules. Do you want to put a bag of M&Ms in each person’s disc, and see who can gobble up the most in one minute? Go for it! Want a team of 10 to form a human pyramid, and the top blocks can’t start drinking/eating/whatever-your-heart-desires-ing from their disc until the bottom blocks have finished theirs? Why the heck not?
For Iowa’s sake, however, I’d opt to go the traditional route of disc racing. Basically, you put one big table in the middle of the room, and every participant gets down on both knees with their disc at mouth level. Discs are filled to the top with a drink like, say, I don’t know…chocolate milk! Yes! Chocolate milk!
Given traditional drink sizes, from qualitative experience, it’s widely accepted that a standard disc can hold 4.5 drinks, or in this case, 54 ounces of chocolate milk. Therefore, I believe that — should we use the disc race model — every single person in the room starts drinking at the same time, and the first x amount of voters to finish win a delegate for their candidate of choice.
There’s some clear inherent problems here. For starters, what if you’re lactose intolerant? What if you’re physically incapable of getting down on two knees? And what if, like me, you’re just really slow at drinking chocolate milk?
This all should definitely be taken into consideration when deciding whether or not to implement disc races as a form of primary voting. Nevertheless, it’s over in minutes (you’d be surprised by how quickly some people can drink chocolate milk), and, logistically speaking, other than needing to milk a lot of brown cows, it would be pretty painless.
Also, it still feels less absurd than the caucus, so there’s that.
№5: Feed Dem Ravenous Hippos!
When doing the heavy research necessary for this article, I really delved into the near-majestic history of the democratic process. I studied the Greeks and Cleisthenes; I read the Magna Carta in its entirety; and I considered the Founding Fathers and their role in modern democracy.
Then I threw it all out the window. Democracies are iffy — they suffer from conformity bias and slow decision-making. I decided, hey, to hell with it all. Why not just play the game where a bunch of colorful, funny-looking mammals try to sadistically consume a plethora of small plastic balls as they scurry around helplessly?
I’ve been postulating about how to implement the game onto a statewide level. There were all sorts of variations that came to mind; for example, when everyone signed in as they entered their precinct, why not give them a ball to write their candidate on? Then once the clock hits seven, a color-coded “hippo” (wearing official t-shirts custom screen-printed by the state of Iowa) for each candidate is sent out. Each hippo then has two minutes to collect as many balls as possible; they get one point for each one of their candidate’s balls they “eat” (which means stuffing it in their shirt and making sure it doesn’t fall out), and half a point for any other ball. In the end, each hippo wins the number of delegates proportional to their relative score, and sends those delegates on to the county.
Now, this sounded good and all, but then I thought, Really, Nate? You can hate on the caucus if you want, but c’mon — this seems pretty ridiculous, ya know?
Yeah, voice in my head, you were right. We don’t need to over-complicate things! That’s what got us into this mess in the first place!
Instead, I think Iowa should just build one custom Hungry Hungry Hippos board and have each of the candidates vying for a spot sit down and play the game. Voters and observers alike are then welcomed to watch the game live as it unfolds in University of Iowa’s famed Kinnick Stadium; overflow viewers are also encouraged to stream from the state’s public website. Whoever wins, wins Iowa. Easy as pie.
№6: Just Vote Normally Like Damn Near Everyone Else
Elections and voting machines aren’t perfect, and they’ve had their clear bumps in the past (see: Florida in 2000).
And yet, like accounting software and vasectomies, they get the job done, and they usually don’t lead to days of controversy and strife. So why Iowa sticks to its archaic, hilarious, arguably-undemocratic and mind-boggingly ludicrous form of caucuses, I have no idea.
Nathan Graber-Lipperman is an Andrew Yang stan who still isn’t comfortable enough to proclaim himself a gang member. You can follow him on Twitter here.