How The Iowa Caucuses Work [LIVE]

David Kochel:

He could get in the day before the caucuses, because we don't print ballots in Iowa. We have blank sheets of paper. You write down your preference, you pass it in.

Eric Wilson:

I'm Eric Wilson, managing partner of Startup Caucus, the home of campaign tech innovation on the right. Welcome to the Business of Politics Show. On this podcast, you are joining in on a conversation with entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. Today we're recording live in person from the world, famous Capitol Hill Club to discuss the Iowa caucuses. It's the first nominating contest in the 2024 Republican Presidential primary. We'll dig into what they are, how they work, and what candidates need to do to win. We're joined by two Iowa natives and experts, David Koel and Nicole Slinger. David is the owner of Red Wave Communications, a Des Moines based political and public affairs firm. He's who you want to have on your team. If you want to win in Iowa, that's included six presidential campaigns. Now, Nicole is the president of Campaign hq, a Brooklyn, Iowa based phone call and texting firm that has a client roster as long as you're armed from across the country.

She's been a part of four Iowa presidential campaigns and is one of the few Iowa operatives with both an Iowa straw poll and Iowa Caucus win under her belt. That didn't make it into our trivia. The Iowa caucuses, as we know them today are for the Republican Party. Go back to 1976 when Gerald Ford narrowly beat Ronald Reagan. And ever since then, the Iowa caucuses have been the first opportunity for voters to have a say in the presidential selection process. So why does Iowa have this system? And we still use it today. Nicole, I'll let you start us off. Yeah,

Nicole Schlinger:

You bet. So after the 1968 Democrat Convention, which was widely viewed as a disaster, violence, protests, et cetera, Democrat Party decided that they wanted to spread out the nomination process to get more people involved. And as a result of that spreading out, Iowa has one of the most complex processes for choosing our delegates of any state in the country. And so for Iowa to meet that spread out process, we have precinct caucuses, county conventions, district conventions, and state conventions. And our delegates are not chosen until the state convention. And so Iowa wound up having to go first in order to meet the longer time schedule of the Democrats in 1972. And then Republicans followed suit and made their caucus first in 1976.

Eric Wilson:

And so David, I'll ask you, why do we still use this today?

David Kochel:

Well, because Iowa and New Hampshire, kind of the twin starting gates have protected each other in the process over the course of a number of decades. And obviously there's a lot of state pride involved. There's money involved. It's a big economic development feature in both of those states. And so the parties have kind of protected these places. And then as you build up over time, reporters get to know people. In Iowa, you got staff coming through all the time. Iowa for a long time was a competitive state, a purple state in the general election. So you kind of build up a muscle memory to it. And I think it's also kind of an interesting process. It's different from primaries, it's very grassroots. It's not as media dependent. It's getting more that way. But yeah, there's a lot of reasons why we have maintained this tradition. Also, once somebody gets to be first, it's hard to knock 'em out of that spot, although the Democrats have now done it.

Eric Wilson:

And one of the things that you'll notice with these early states is the voters there take their jobs very seriously. They may have a preferred candidate, but they go out and they go to all of the events, they collect all the literature, and they study all of the candidates New Hampshire, they want you to have been in their living room and shaking their hands eight times. So it definitely is a very different process than what we have elsewhere. So walk us through, David, how it works. So it is different and Republicans caucus differently than Democrats. So let's say I'm an Iowa Republican. What do I need to do to participate?

David Kochel:

Well, you need to know where your caucus is. Obviously the campaigns are very good about telling everybody that a caucus is actually a local neighborhood meeting. There are about 1800 precincts in Iowa, all of whom have to meet individually even though sometimes they're co-located in one place. The Republican party is a little different because we basically do a straw ballot. I get calls from reporters asking, well, how late could Glenn Youngen get into this race? It's like he could get in the day before the caucuses because we don't print ballots in Iowa. We have blank sheets of paper. You write down your preference, you pass it in. So you got these 1800 different meetings. They're fairly loosely organized. You got a chairperson who calls it to order. The campaigns really drive all the turnout you have. Then it quickly organizes. Then you have each campaign that has a representative there to speak on behalf of the candidate.

Most of the good campaigns cover most of the caus with a surrogate or a speaker or even just a person from the neighborhood. I've spoken at several of mine. And then after those speeches are done really in the first half hour of the caucus, you write down your preference. It goes to the center aisle, passes up to the front, they count it, they key it into usually through a phone, kind of putting in the results for each candidate. And then you have the results. Now, Democrats are totally different. If you want Nicole to cover that or I can do that.

Eric Wilson:

Well, so what does someone say in their remarks at the caucus location? What's the last chance pitch?

David Kochel:

Usually it's a personal story. Sometimes it's just a template talking point thing that you get. And those are the ones that I always find the most interesting. Someone could just get up and start reading from a piece of paper, not at all compelling. I did have one person in 2012 who got up on behalf of Newt Gingrich, who obviously did not like Newt Gingrich and went literally through his marriages and every scandal and everything. And I just thought, because nobody stood up to speak for Newt Gingrich, so that's what they had over the volunteers. They just took it over and it was so much fun.

Eric Wilson:

So Nicole, from the organizational standpoint, with the work that you do at Campaign headquarters and turning people out in more typical elections, how do we know where someone's supposed to go? Is there a registered precinct that they need to go to, or can I just show up? At any Iowa caucus location,

Nicole Schlinger:

You have to show up at the precinct in which you're registered, and you must be on the list of registered Republicans. If you're not, you must provide proof of identification and then immediately fill out the voter registration and register as a Republican. So there is some measure of registration onsite. That's actually the cause of some controversy right now. There's been some stories about it. The legislature passed a bill to lay out what a caucus is and what a caucus is not. And so now whether folks can, right now the constitution for the Republican Party of Iowa indicates that people can vote in the caucus as long as they are either on the list of registered voters, registered republicans, or if they fill out the voter registration form on site.

Eric Wilson:

And so David, that's probably got to make it really hard from a campaign strategy to know who your voters are going to be. What is the strategy for a campaign, whether that's turnout, identifying voters, how does that differ with a caucus situation?

David Kochel:

Well, it's interesting because it's a very self-selected audience, and most campaigns now have the data infrastructure to basically be talking to all these campaigns or all these voters, whether it's through someone like Nicole who's a professional telemarketing firm, whether it's digitally, but there's many levels of organization where you are trying to find out the preference right now, never back down is probably knocked on couple hundred thousand, maybe 300,000 doors already in Iowa. Every time they do, that's the

Eric Wilson:

DeSantis, that's

David Kochel:

The DeSantis super pac. Every time they do an interaction, they record what that person said. Maybe they'll take a preference list. Who's your first choice, second choice, third choice, all that stuff goes into the hopper. Then you know who these voters, you start with a caucus list, you build out from there to the Republican primary voter list, but then you can message to anybody as long as they're an eligible elector in the general election, if they live in that precinct, you can reach out to them. We had a number of voters on the Romney campaign who really kind of weren't on the radar. A lot of L d s folks that we found just through kind of organizing that way, they'd never participated in a caucus, but Romney's running and they came out of the woodwork. So you do it a lot of different ways.

Some of it's door to door, some of it's precinct organization. You literally find precinct captains who go around and canvas the neighborhood on their own. Obviously now with digital innovation, you can get to people a million different ways on any of their screens, and you're constantly taking that feedback and putting it into the big data model. And then as you get near to the caucus, you are making sure they know exactly where to go, exactly what time you're getting rides lined up for them. A lot of these folks are older. You're talking about January 15th this year. It could be 10 degrees in Iowa and there might be a foot of snow on the ground. So you're doing everything you can to figure out a way to get that person out of their home into the school cafeteria or the library or a church basement and get them to show up on behalf of the candidate. So it's a complicated process, tons of inputs, and it's kind of a fun thing.

Eric Wilson:

So Nicole, dig in for us a little bit more about what that turnout operation, because it is not show up at your polling site, it is be at a meeting on a Monday night in a school gymnasium. You're sitting around for a while. How does that change your dynamics versus a typical G O T V program?

Nicole Schlinger:

Well, the first thing to know is that there's no absentee ballots. There's no absentee voting. You will vote at the caucus at seven o'clock when the ballots are passed out. So everything is in person, and it's entirely based on getting people turned out. So the first thing is that folks that you ID over the course of your campaign, their support can change and be flexible over time. So ultimately near the end, you're going back through and trying to verify with some blind ID to make sure. Are the folks who said that they were with me in March or April on January 13th or 14th, are they really still with me? Because like Eric said earlier, Iowans will go and see every one of the candidates, and many candidates will do the full Grassley, all 99 counties. And so people will change after seeing candidates in person.

So making sure you know who your supporters actually are, then actually getting them to turn out is a more complicated process in part because you're trying to turn people out to a location that can vary from one caucus cycle to the next, that isn't their regular polling location. That can be difficult to find unless you're used to doing these things and you do them frequently. So it's volunteer phone calls, it's paid phone calls, it's text messages. When I worked for Senator Cruz, we did telephone town hall after telephone town hall. The wonderful thing about that was it gave us the opportunity to talk to a large audience at once, get people to commit their vote immediately on the spot, and then talk to them in detail what to do once they get there. David talked earlier about how a representative for the candidates will get up and speak on behalf of the candidates. You can be at a caucus for 45 minutes, an hour or longer before you get to vote. And people need to know and understand that and be ready for that process. They need to know that it's going to be a paper ballot. They need to know that they need to bring an ID with them just in case actually I take the backup. I believe the ID is required for everyone. Now, if I'm not mistaken,

David Kochel:

I think well, we'll find out once they do the call to convention, all that detail will be in there. It's not there now,

Nicole Schlinger:

But the notion of being able to talk to a large number of supporters all at once for a long period of time in great detail, and some of that happens on the phone, some of that happens, some of that happens at the doors, and some of it happens at in-person organizing meetings where the county chair, the precinct chairs, getting people organized. I've seen people, there is a volunteer activist in Victor, Iowa who will have what I can only call a pregame party before the caucus, and she will make cookies, and her cookies are fantastic, and she will gather everyone up so they can go to their caucus together. So it can happen in many different ways, but you have to do a lot of education and a lot of handholding and never take for granted. People know where to go and what to do.

Eric Wilson:

And David, you mentioned the innovations around the caucus and reaching voters. And I think of going back to the 2016 Iowa caucuses when I was working for Senator Rubio's campaign and thinking about technology and how it shapes campaigns, I remember that in 2015, all the reporters declared that it was going to be the Meerkat election, and Meerkat famously dropped out before Jeb Bush and

David Kochel:

Hey, we beat Meir Kat.

Eric Wilson:

Yes. But the key takeaway though, even though it wasn't the platform, it was live video and looking back at our Iowa caucus experience with Senator Rubio, it was those videos, the social videos that were streamed live to Facebook or Twitter from voters from those town halls that we were doing. So that struck me as the biggest technological innovation, if you will, of the 2016 caucuses. What are some other innovations we've seen over the years, not just technology, but in terms of strategy?

David Kochel:

Oh, gosh, that's a great question. Obviously, Obama very effectively used Facebook, Howard Dean Meetup. He was a huge innovator there, and all these kind of innovations have to have behind them something else, which is an energy, an interest, some passion. Dean famously just had all these people just started just spontaneously forming in these self-organized groups using that sort of meetup technology. I don't know. I think we kind of innovated on what I mean. Gosh, what's the technology we use for this meeting today? Oh, Eventbrite. Eventbrite. I mean, Eventbrite was a big kind driver of capturing data and getting people to do things. I remember working on that stuff in the Romney campaigns. You never know what it's going to be each cycle, I suppose this year, I'm sure that you're going to have a TikTok audience, you're going to have a Twitter or X audience.

You're going to have Facebook where you've got an aging population, but who is super online and super connected to politics. So who knows what the main story might be, but there'll be one, because anytime you have to get 180,000 people together on a discreet night in cold wintry, Iowa in a campaign that takes up all of our time, but for most people, they're not following this granularly. It'll be something, I don't know exactly what it is, but I can tell you this. This is one interesting piece of data I just saw on a poll that we did. 56% of Iowa caucus goers watched the debate a couple of weeks ago. That's kind of an amazing statistic. Does

Eric Wilson:

That compare kind of nationally?

David Kochel:

Do you have, oh gosh. Well, what did they have? 15? Was there 13 or 15 million? It's

Eric Wilson:

10%. Yeah,

David Kochel:

Right? Yeah. So maybe 6% of adults watched it, but 56% of Iowa CAU stores

Eric Wilson:

Watched it. Well, it speaks to these early state voters really take their jobs seriously. And so I know that we will talk about this later in the episode. There's a lot of criticism about, oh, why do we pick these states? But they really take their jobs seriously and kick the tires on our candidates. Nicole, you're obviously on the side of phones and texting. What innovations have you seen over the years that you've been working in the Iowa caucuses?

Nicole Schlinger:

Well, I remember on the Romney campaign, we made all of our phone calls using prepaid cell phones and then filling out bubble sheets and sending them through a scanner. So I'm very glad to say that that is something we no longer do. But generally, more broadly speaking, the notion of universal data capture that we're not relying on cards that are put on a chair at a town hall meeting and having someone collect the cards and type the cards in. Everything that we do is all funneled to a single data source. And so we can aggregate in a way that really wasn't possible not all that long ago, really, this is going to be the first presidential election after Facebook versus guard. And so the rules about how we can dial and how we can call are going to be different. This is going to be the first big election where 10 D L C registration is going to be required on texting, which means that texters do have to identify themselves. And so all of those things are going to make a difference.

Eric Wilson:

So you're saying there's no Ben Carson's dropping out after the Iowa Caucus Anonymous text coming this year?

Nicole Schlinger:

I was in my call center all day, 75 miles from

Eric Wilson:

The cruise headquarters. I wasn't making any accusations. Yes,

Nicole Schlinger:

I saw it when everyone else did.

Eric Wilson:

So I think one of the really interesting things that you reminded me of, David, is Howard Dean. And so relevant to this day of the dynamics in our politics, which is that 2004 campaign with Howard Dean is when we saw Act Blue really take off as a force for fundraising. And the Democrats said, oh, we could get these grassroots small dollar donors all over the country to get behind someone. And Howard Dean didn't have any big money support. So it's interesting to see how you have this launch of a new campaign technology starting in 2004 for Democrats. The caucuses are a little bit more of a launching pad famously for Barack Obama, and unfortunately, Iowa Republican caucus goers don't exactly have the best track record when it comes to picking our party's eventual nominee. I looked this up over the last 50 years. If we look at the seven times, there's been a contested nomination, just two of the Iowa Caucus winners went on to also win the nomination. That's George W. Bush in 2000 and Bob Dole in 1996. So if it's not necessarily a reliable indicator of future performance, what are the right takeaways from the Iowa caucuses?

David Kochel:

Well, first of all, it's not not supposed to pick the nominee and the president. New Hampshire says they do that. But what we're supposed to do, and I think the real valuable function that the Coxs have is to win over the field. You get 15, 16 people running for president, and they all stay in, and particularly in a year like this, when Donald Trump has a pretty committed 30 to 40% base that aren't going anywhere else, you can't have that many candidates dividing up the rest of the vote. So our job is to try to just, David Epson, the famed Iowa political reporter used to say there were three tickets out of Iowa. There's more than that, but there're probably three really kind of good ones. And Iowa Republicans are, since 1988, pat Robertson's campaign are kind of dominated by evangelical voters, and they've tended to pick evangelical friendly candidates from whether it was Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee.

So they'll come out of Iowa the winner, but then a lot of times those candidates don't have the national support fundraising, so it'll kind of buy them a ticket into the conversation. But I think for a lot of national front runners in the Republican primary, they look at the caucuses of the thing more to survive than to win. And so you got to, in Iowa, caucuses are really expectations. So most of the work that the campaigns are doing are to try to prepare them. And particularly if you're a front running candidate with a lot of money and a lot of expectations, you're trying to manage those going through it so that the caucuses aren't an active, they don't hurt your campaign. Winning the caucuses isn't as important as kind of getting through them and getting into New Hampshire and the later states.

Eric Wilson:

And to that point, even though it is really a test of your campaign's organizational capacity, it's not a transferable skill necessarily. But I've found on the campaigns that I've worked on that were conventions, I mean, we really benefited from having that ground game. What are some things that campaigns are doing there, Nicole, to make sure that they're, yes, they're competitive in Iowa, but also building towards the future and the rest of the states? You

Nicole Schlinger:

Bet, like David said, it's about winnowing the field, but it's also about allowing, if you're a front runner campaign, this is an opportunity to test your message, to hone your message, to figure out what works and doesn't work in front of real people. And so you can figure out where your organization is weak, where it's strong campaigns who do well in Iowa, that benefits them later on, you're better off to make some mistakes and do some regrouping and learning and iterating on a small stage than you are later on down the road. That being said, front runners have also stumbled in Iowa, and so when we say it's about winnowing the field, sometimes that's about giving a level playing field to a Mike Huckabee or to a Rick Santorum. But sometimes that's also about vetting whether a Scott Walker is able to build a viable grassroots organization and a message that was compelling to voters. And so not every front runner candidate even makes it to caucus day, and that's important to note, and I would rather find that out in Iowa than find that out in October.

Eric Wilson:

So for our listeners and folks here now, what should we be watching for on caucus night to get an early sense of the outcome? What's the Waukeshaw County, I guess, of Iowa that's a bellwether to get those up to the minute insights.

Nicole Schlinger:

If anyone's going to make a dent in Trump, whether it's DeSantis or Tim Scott, I think you have to look in northwest Iowa, Sue Lyon, O'Brien, Osceola counties, if there's a coalescing, that's where my Huckabee and Rick Santorum made their mark. And if anyone is going to exceed the expectations that are set out for them, it's going to be up there. And whether they report earlier enough or not, for you to know that is a different story, but how they go is going to determine who over performs and underperforms.

Eric Wilson:

Alright, David, it's northwest Iowa to Nicole. What about for you?

David Kochel:

Yeah, for me it's probably the Des Moines suburbs, the Northland County, to beat Trump in Iowa or to get close to Trump in Iowa. Looking back to the 2016 kind of model, you have to have the Cruise Coalition and the Rubio Coalition and the person who can figure out how to unlock those very different types of voters who are the most open to someone other than Trump is the way that you will be successful. It's really tricky to do, but yeah, Dallas County, Ankeny, Marion, Iowa, Bettendorf, some of these suburbs of the larger cities in Iowa are really important. And those are kind of those Rubio voters that I don't think anybody's really figured out how to message to them because in the environment we have now, I think people are kind of starting from MAGA or the more conservative voters and not really talking to them as effectively yet. So we'll see where that goes, but I watch the suburbs. I think at the end of the day, those are also the voters that win general elections for us. And so where they're headed says a lot about what kind of candidates we want to go into the general election.

Eric Wilson:

Well, there were two presidential candidates right now who were on the bus with us a lot in 2016 on the Rubio campaign, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott. So we'll see if they're in a position to build on that coalition. Nicole, you alluded to this, the results, right? So we know that it sounds like it's a very d I Y process. You're writing down names. How does counting happen? And it can take a while for us to know the results. It can.

Nicole Schlinger:

The first thing I would say is Arizona and California can take 10 days to report their general election results. I don't think that it is reasonable to expect 1,731 Precinct Caucus volunteers to be able to report something by midnight. That being said, the way that the counting process works is the precinct chair and co-chair collect all of the ballots. There is an observer one from every campaign. It's usually the person who speaks on behalf of the candidate, and so they do the counting with all of the observers watching. They count it twice. They determine what the count is, they announce it to the members of the caucus who are still there. And then typically on the Republican side at least it's been something where you either call it in or use an app.

Eric Wilson:

David, what do you have to add to the election process? Is there any way that we're going to get some insights or are there exit polls, that kind of stuff on election

David Kochel:

Night? Well, there will be, I think there usually are exit polls. I don't find them to be terribly useful except to kind of get some demographics that might inform some of the chatter that night. It is pretty, I think it's a faster process than almost any other one, even though you say not to midnight, but a lot of these precincts are really small. Sometimes if you show up 20 minutes late to a caucus, the voting's already happened. One of those things, like really small precinct that has nine people in it, I mean, say who they're for or done, key it in and let's go. Some of the larger ones they go, they're sick of

Eric Wilson:

The TV commercials from the last year.

David Kochel:

Just get it over with. I think the Democrats have made a huge mistake with how they've organized theirs. This 15% threshold, which I don't know if you want to talk about that. It adds a level of complication that clearly they were not capable of having technology in place to actually do that work and count those things. They didn't start until very late in the process. When I ran the Coxes in 1996, I started in the previous January trying to figure out how to handle all of that, how to train people, what the phone technology was going to look like. Obviously 1996 is way different than now, but I think the Democrats really started about 90 days out. You can't build an app in that time to deliver results from this incredibly complicated process with all this winnowing happening in the room and then all the waiting of their delegates.

They were destined to fail. And unfortunately for Iowa, they may never be back for a Democratic caucus. I think it's a shame, and there are a lot of reasons for it. You touched on it earlier with the Republicans not being able to really produce winners out of Iowa, but to me it's kind of sad because it's a tradition that I think is really important in politics. These kinds of retail hand to hand campaigns are essential. They sharpen candidates. I've seen candidates get so much better for having been through the caucus process, and I'd hate to lose it, but yeah, if you can't deliver fast and accurate results because the news cycle demands a winner. That night we benefited in 2012 winning by eight votes that night for Governor Romney, and then two weeks later, as the candidates were debating in Charleston, the results were certified. Santorum won by what, 22 votes or something like that, 34. Anyway, we do owe it to the country to do it right, otherwise we don't deserve to keep this honor of going

Eric Wilson:

First. Yeah, and there's a real education process that comes with that. It's not like a typical election. Nicole, the Dems are moving towards other processes under the banner of diversity. What are some unexpected outcomes from that decision that you think that the Dems might have to reap down the road?

Nicole Schlinger:

It is possible that they will have candidates that are able to progress substantially through the nomination process. Maybe not this time, but maybe in another cycle when they don't have an incumbent president who have not had to talk to voters one-on-one day after day. And really, like David said, sharpen their skills and hone their message and understand the American people. And people could potentially get very far into the process and you can wind up having a nominee that is not what you expected and hasn't been vetted the way you get vetted when you go through a place like Iowa.

Eric Wilson:

Well, now that we have a live audience, I want to turn it over to folks for questions in the room. I'll repeat them for the mic, but feel free to raise your hand and we'll weigh in on this. So the question is about texting. Disclaimer, you were talking about 10 D L C and making sure that you are registered with the carrier. So I'll let you elaborate more on that, Nicole.

Nicole Schlinger:

Yeah, you bet. So the cell phone carriers have banded together and created the campaign registry and campaign verify and are requiring all senders of texts to submit and register through that. And that means it is knowable who is sending texts and on the face of it, the reason for it is so that people can't send texts masquerading as someone other than who they are. So essentially the carriers will have a way to find folks who are impersonating and things like that. So

Eric Wilson:

We're not going to see a paid for by on text messages necessarily. It's more for the carrier to understand who's sending traffic on their network.

Nicole Schlinger:

So you could track that. Now the other thing is, for most folks who are sending m m s messages, typically you will have a disclaimer on the image or the video.

Eric Wilson:

So the question is about obviously there are benefits of technology for reaching voters, but there are risks, whether that's security or disinformation, things like that. Can you talk, Nicole, about possible risks that are out there as we head into these Iowa caucuses?

Nicole Schlinger:

Yeah, absolutely. I think you mentioned, I think the first is anytime there's a large amount of data that's stored in the cloud, there's always a security risk. So that's the number one data is of course only as good as its source, and so there's always the risk of having information that's incorrect. Certainly. And then to the question earlier, it is easier than it used to be that every once in a while you'd get a plain wide envelope with a typewritten photocopied letter that didn't have a signature or disclaimer on it, and it would say something that was maybe wouldn't have been said any other way. There's a lot easier ways to do that and to disseminate information that can be of dubious truthfulness.

Eric Wilson:

How effective do you think it's going to be having paid canvassers, door knockers going to folks, they might be coming out of state? Obviously the DeSantis never backed down. PAC is investing heavily in this. Does that play in Iowa?

David Kochel:

Well, it's a very effective way to capture data for sure, and I think if it's executed properly, that's kind of the highest use. I'm not sure as a persuasion vehicle, it's the best use of money. But capturing information from a real life voter in person is Iowa voters tend not to lie to people who come and stand on their front porch and ask them a question. Now there are risks. I have a family friend who lives on a farm in Plymouth County who had a DeSantis person pull up to their home, was probably a 22 year old African-American from Florida who did a great job on the door. But driving up to a farm in Plymouth County with Florida plates and getting out of the car and you're a young black man, it was, and this woman is 82 year old woman. It was one of those things where as a campaign operative, it gave me anxiety hearing the story, it turned out to be an incredibly good interaction with that voter.

And he presented himself really well. Obviously cared about the job that he was doing and the candidate that the super PAC is supporting. But it's like the opposite side of that is Howard Dean had all these people come in from all over the place, really young, progressive kind of radical voters all wearing that same colored neon hat, and it was a huge turnoff for a lot of these small town, well now they're Republicans, but those rural Democrats I don't think took very well to those folks coming in and having that kind of tactile representation in the campaign. It just didn't feel, it didn't feel real coming from folks like that. But I think it's an effective strategy, particularly the data that you get from us is probably the best data you can get because Iowa voters don't lie to your face. They might lie to a pollster, but I don't think that they're going to tell you something that isn't true when you come to their front door.

Eric Wilson:

And thinking about the technological challenges that we're facing today with algorithmic filtering the fragmentation of media, one of the most effective ways that we have to reach voters is through relational organizing. So using friends and peers and relations to contact voters, get through those filter bubbles. You don't get that with a paid canvasser from out of state. And I think it's a risk that we run as a party as we rely more on those paid canvassing firms. I know it's always easier to manage an invoice than a person and giving the volunteers pizza and all the headaches that come with volunteers going off script or the problems. But as we're seeing this media and technology shift, having those relationships on the ground are going to be so important. Nicole, what are your thoughts of paid canvassing paid volunteers, as it were?

Nicole Schlinger:

I don't see that as being an either or. I think of that as being a both. And when you need to get to a hundred thousand doors in a very short period of time and you're trying to ramp up a volunteer operation, the numbers just may not be in your favor for something like that. On the other hand, when we have volunteers, oftentimes we put them on the absolute most soul crushing work we can possibly put a volunteer on, which is live Id calls. And so I think it makes sense to have the tools and the culture to develop our volunteers into micro influencers. But should we continue to do the IDing and persuading that we can do on the doors and the phones and by text? Absolutely. But our volunteers that are this most precious resource, we can use them to their highest and fullest and best use. That's organizing. The word organizing was meant to mean organizing your friends and family and people in your neighborhood and people not getting on a bus and going to another county and knocking on stranger's doors.

Eric Wilson:

We've got time for one more question before we wrap up. So what are some of the big milestones between now and the Iowa caucuses that are going to shape the field? Obviously, we don't have the Iowa straw pole anymore, unfortunately killed it. I would've thought that that was a good business opportunity for an Iowa operative. I don't know, but it outlive its

David Kochel:

Usefulness.

Eric Wilson:

What should we be looking out for? Is anything going to shape the field, whether that's Iowa or nationally, between now and then?

David Kochel:

Well, I'll start on this one. The data that I have been looking at suggests that the debates are the biggest thing right now that are moving things. Obviously, Iowans pay close attention to the national kind of conversation, whether it's on Fox or online or wherever. But with 56% of caucus scores watching that first debate, that's pretty huge. I think those are the opportunities because they're live and spontaneous that something might happen. Obviously, I don't think that Republican caucus voters in Iowa are following the legal stuff with former President Trump very closely, but that doesn't mean that there can't be something that happens that's kind of earth shattering, whether it's if Mark Meadows testifies and it's on camera and who knows what could happen. I think there are things out there that could be wild cards. Everybody talks about financial disclosures. Yeah, that matters. It's kind of important.

But for me, number one are the debates. Number two are extraneous news events that we can't foresee, but that might have a big impact. And then I think kind of watching the horse race conversation, I think Iowans are a little more immune to it than a lot of other voters, which is why the race is much closer there than it is nationally. But some of that also has a buildup. There are obviously trends. The last couple of months, DeSantis has been on a downward trend. He may or may not be able to reverse that. You've had some other kind of flavors of the month.

Eric Wilson:

Nicole, what would you add to that list?

Nicole Schlinger:

I would add to that Christmas, the caucus is going to be on January 15th and everything will come to a screeching halt three weeks before that. And the campaigns that have legitimately dedicated organized volunteers are going to be able to pick back up very quickly. Campaigns that are able to regroup and pick up exactly where they left off are going to have a big advantage over those who can't and don't, or who don't plan for that.

Eric Wilson:

Well, my thanks to David and Nicole for a great conversation. Thank you to Campaign HQ for hosting our event here in person. You can learn more about Campaign HQ as well as David in our show notes. If this episode made you a little bit smarter, gave you something to think about, all we ask that you share it with a friend or colleague, you'll look smarter in the process. More people hear about the show, so it's a win-win. Remember to subscribe to The Business of Politics Show wherever you get your podcasts, and you can sign up for our email updates at business of politics podcast.com. With that, thanks for listening and thanks for being here. We'll see you next time.

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