January 23, 2007

The Daily Troika: The Iowa Republican Caucuses Are Neither Republican, Nor Caucuses

The McCain Inevitability Train rolls on. Today, the campaign announced that two very prominent Iowans had agreed to join McCain's team, although one of them defected from Gov. George Pataki's PAC a while ago. Ed Failor, Jr., the exec. vice president of Iowans for Tax Relief and the exec.dir. of Pres. Bush's re-election campaign in the state, will be a senior adviser. And Karen Slifka, a well-regarded Iowa consultant who ran the Midwest regional political desk for the Bush-Cheney campaign, will assist McCain's Iowa team in building a campaign organization.

There's one key, really, to winning in Iowa, and that is to train as many precinct caucus leaders as possible. First, though, you have recruit people in every precinct of every county. Then you have to spend money to train them. In '00, Bush's Iowa campaign spent more than $2 million finding and training caucus leaders. (They held more than 300 sessions across the state.)

The Republican caucuses purport to be a couple hundred straw polls put together. Caucus attendees choose their preferred candidate by secret ballot.

But the actual delegates to county conventions (which then select delegates to state conventions -- it's a very involved process that takes weeks) aren't allocated on the basis of the straw polls. They're elected, that night, in addition to -- and completely independent of -- the straw polls.

(Note that we're not talking here about the 8/11 statewide straw poll in Ames, which also requires a hefty, nimble organization.)

The more organized McCain is, the more potential delegates he has at every caucus, the more caucus leaders he has directing the process, the more actual convention delegates he can pick up, and the more supporters he can turn out on caucus night to support him in the straw poll.

A major caveat: the media will report the results of the straw poll, not the results of the aggregated delegate elections. So in theory, one candidate could "win" the statewide caucus poll and yet still not recieve the majority of delegates. That distinction will probably be lost on caucus night. The "winner" will be the person who wins the straw poll.

But if the Republican nomination becomes an all-out delegate race, then organization matters a heck of a lot.

The Troika won't begin to summarize the Democratic caucus process. Basically, they sift themselves into preference groups (don't laugh) and send delegates based on the the proportional strength of those preference groups to the next level. But it's more convoluted than that.

As the public face of one of Iowa's largest conservative grassroots groups, Failor knows Iowans in every county who can help recruit caucus leaders for McCain. And Slifka knows how to organize them. They're a potent combination for McCain. Add to the mix Chuck Larson, the former IA GOP chair and state senator, and Dave Roederer, who ran Bush's Iowa campaign in '00, and Marlys Popma, who sits alone in the top tier of social conservative activists in the state -- and you can see why McCain's strategists believe they can help a candidate who eschewed the '00 caucuses compete solidly in the '08 caucuses. [MARC AMBINDER]

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