Patti Solis Doyle and the 2008 Iowa Caucuses
By Kirk Tofte on July 11, 2008 at 6:00 PM in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iowa
As someone who lives in Des Moines, Iowa and worked as a volunteer precinct captain in Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency prior to the 2008 Iowa caucuses, I am still haunted by what happened to her candidacy here. Earlier this week it was reported that Hillary’s national campaign manager at the time of the Iowa caucuses, Patti Solis Doyle, has been hired by the Obama campaign. This news has caused some in the media and elsewhere to comment upon the role Doyle played in Hillary’s campaign prior to her being replaced as her national campaign manager in early 2008.
From my limited perspective, the role Doyle played in Hillary’s campaign in Iowa was a mixed bag, at best. My biggest criticism of the campaign throughout the fall was that Hillary was being kept too far from the people attending her events and from the reporters (particularly with the national media) who were covering those events. This approach made it easy for some to characterize Hillary as being aloof. It also led to embarrassing moments such as the charge that her campaign had planted questions with event attendees in Iowa.
My constant request last fall was for the campaign to “let Hillary be Hillary.” This is exactly what she was allowed to do in the later contests and the main reason why she won Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, South Dakota and so forth.
Beyond my criticism of Hillary being too closely protected from Iowans and the media, I have few negative things to say—on balance—about the campaign she conducted in Iowa. Almost everything, however, about the nature of this year’s Iowa Democratic caucuses worked to Hillary’s disadvantage.
First of all, the left-wing of Iowa’s Democratic Party was very anti-war and felt that they had found a candidate in Obama who deserved support for his initial stand against the War in Iraq. Some (particularly those under age 30) found him to be attractive because he was young and black. It also did not hurt that Obama was from the neighboring state of Illinois.
Perhaps the biggest factor in Obama’s success in Iowa, however, was in an area that I completely misunderstood. It had to do with the $15 million or more in television ads he ran portraying himself as someone uniquely equipped to change the way Washington works. The ads were patterned after those his media consultant, David Axelrod, had used in Obama’s senate race in Illinois and in the most recent governor’s race in Massachusetts.
These ads drew a disproportionate number of moderate Republicans and Independent voters to Obama’s campaign. Most had never participated in an Iowa Democratic caucus in the past and these voters were the ones who really made the difference for Obama.
Finally, there was consistent evidence in polls taken before the caucuses that the second tier of candidates in combination (Richardson, Biden and Dodd) was the choice of roughly fifteen percent of Iowans. But on caucus night less than three percent of the delegates chosen were assigned to any one of these three individuals. This was the result of the Iowa Democratic caucuses’ archaic and undemocratic “viability” rules. Almost all Richardson, Biden and Dodd supporters ended up caucusing for Obama or Edwards.
Obama won in Iowa with roughly 37% of the delegates chosen and Hillary virtually tied Edwards at 30% of the delegates elected. The total number of Iowans who supported Hillary, however, was roughly equal to the number that John Kerry garnered here in his winning effort of 2004. Support for Obama totaled something like 83,000 Iowans versus about 68,000 voters each for Hillary and Edwards. In other words, a mere 15,000 Iowans made the critical difference in the nomination process for the Democratic Party this year.
Iowa’s viability rules probably gave Obama and Edwards as many as 10,000 extra supporters each. Had votes here on the Democratic side counted as they did on the Republican side (where there are no viability rules) the outcome might have looked like this:
Obama 32%
Clinton 30%
Edwards 25%
Richardson 7%
Biden 4%
Dodd 2%
As many as a third of Iowa Democratic caucus attendees this year were either re-registered Republicans or Independents. If fifty percent of them—or 37,500 voters– supported Obama (a low estimate, in my opinion), over forty percent of his total support came from nominal Democratic Party members.
Hillary could have attracted few of these supporters to her primary campaign in Iowa and she undoubtedly had many women who crossed party lines to support her here. But due to the focus of his advertising campaign and of his grassroots operations, Obama won the lion’s share of former Republican and Independent voters. If Richardson-Biden-Dodd supporters and Republican-Independent voters were taken out of the equation, I believe Hillary beat Obama by roughly 58,000 to 45,000 votes.
One has to give credit to the Obama campaign for seeing the path to victory that they followed. But the way the media played up the nature of that victory was beyond the pale and is what really gave Obama the nomination. How in the world can anyone claim that a 15,000 vote victory in a caucus state like Iowa is more important than a ten percent win in the California primary? But the effect of Obama’s win in Iowa was that it was infinitely more important that anything he or Hillary achieved thereafter. Something has to change about that particular equation in the future.
by Ronald Scott
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