You can forget
about the Iowa Caucus.
I’ve started to see
repeated references to the Iowa Caucus in political commentary, and in analyses
of putative 2016 presidential candidates.
The Iowa caucus is
about as far as you can get from a realistic poll or survey of voter sentiment
that has relevance to the viability of presidential candidates in Iowa or the country.
Think about it:
the sample is too small, the sample is self-selected (not random), candidates
can effectively "buy" votes by promoting voter participation, the
Iowa Caucus itself has nothing to do with the legal way that presidential electors
are selected in Iowa....
This particular piece of presidential bamboozlery is set for Feb. 1, 2016, almost a year from now.
In 2012, before the last presidential election, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney “battled” for victory in the Iowa Caucus—Santorum won by 34 votes.
But wait: both of the Republican candidates got about 30,000 votes --
that's about ONE-HUNDREDTH OF ONE PERCENT of the estimated 230 million
Americans who were eligible to vote for president that year.
The Iowa Caucus produces no strategic information about who
will win the Republican nomination. It does not in any useful way represent the
thinking of American voters. I dare to suggest that if the Iowa Caucus didn’t
get any national publicity, no candidate would bother trying to win it.
Why are the news
media and the cable TV talking heads already starting to blather about the Iowa
Caucus? They can say that it’s “news,” but that doesn’t make it “information.”
It’s too soon, too
trivial….
Fuhgeddaboudit.
Copyright © Richard
Carl Subber 2015
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