Other than in South Carolina, 2012 GOP Primary turnout has been somewhat flat, or below that of 2008. Up +3 in Iowa and +6 in New Hampshire, it jumped to +35 in South Carolina but dropped to -14 in Florida. It’s possible that the last minute surge by Gingrich and his debate performances brought some added excitement to the race, turning out voters in South Carolina.

South Carolina, of course, was the strongest state for Newt Gingrich. In contrast, turnout among Republican identifiers was down for Mr. Romney’s two victories so far, as well as for his near-win in Iowa.

While it’s possible to argue that Romney’s negative advertising in Florida lowered turnout, along with the lack of a special real estate-related initiative – one was on the ballot in 2008 – a closer look at the numbers still points to a problem, especially for for Romney.

In both South Carolina and Florida, district-level turnout was more likely to trend up in districts that went to Newt, and flat, or down in ones that went for Romney. Once one looks at party identification, the trend gets even worse.

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In last week’s essay, we quoted Winston Churchill’s memorable statement that “Democracy is the worst system there is except for all the others.  We also restated Churchill’s observation by noting that we need to revise our delegate selection process and “the sooner the better.”

This observation is most particularly true for the nominating process of either party seeking to replace an incumbent President or the party of an incumbent who is not running for re-election.

With Iowa’s caucus and the New Hampshire primary finished, we should pause and look at a little history to illustrate how our current process, in effect, disenfranchises a majority of voters.

In 1952, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois (perhaps one of that state’s last governors who did not go on to a career of making license plates)  was selected as the nominee at the Democratic convention through a series of state primaries and won the 1952 nomination at the Democratic convention on the third ballot.  Today, nominating conventions have no real purpose to them except for the public learning the nominee’s vice-presidential choice.  Bringing party professionals into the mix might spare us another Sarah Palin debacle.  Perhaps there is a role for smoke filled rooms, even though smoking would be banned!

In 1952 the process produced Senator John Sparkman as the democratic Vice-Presidential choice, an obvious sop to party bosses who did not trust the candidate Estes Kefauver, who went into the convention with the most pledged delegates. After the first two ballots Kefauver led but was overtaken on the third ballot when Stevenson was nominated.  The 1952 presidential race had earlier been thrown into disarray when President Truman announced that he would not seek re-election.  As we all know, General Eisenhower was elected President in November 1952. In 1956 Kefauver ran again and won the New Hampshire and Minnesota primary over Stevenson.  Although Stevenson was again nominated, this time around the party chose Kefauver as his running mate.

Fast forward to 1968 when President Johnson made his surprise announcement to a nation bitterly divided by the Vietnam War that he would not seek another term.  Senator Robert Kennedy won the California primary in June, defeating anti-war Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.  Kennedy in his final words said “on to Chicago” before being shot by a lunatic, Sirhan Sirhan.  In the end, Senator Hubert Humphrey received the nomination, but lost the general election to Richard Nixon, who had stated in 1962, after losing the California governorship, that we wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.

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A certified new vote count from Iowa shows Republican Rick Santorum — and not his rival Mitt Romney — won the state’s crucial caucuses, but results from eight precincts are missing, a local newspaper reported Thursday.

A final total shows conservative Christian candidate Santorum beat Romney, the frontrunner in the Republican battle for the right to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in November’s election, by 34 votes, according to the Des Moines Register.

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With 36 percent of Florida Republican likely primary voters, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has a double-digit lead three weeks before the nation’s first big-state presidential primary, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. But 54 percent of GOP primary voters say they still might change their mind.

Twelve points back in the Republican pack is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich with 24 percent, followed by former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum with 16 percent, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University survey finds. Texas U.S. Rep. Ron Paul is at 10 percent with 5 percent for Texas Gov. Rick Perry and 2 percent for former ambassador Jon Huntsman. This first look at likely primary voters, a more select group, can’t be compared with earlier surveys of registered voters.

There is almost no gender gap in the primary selections.

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Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has a commanding lead in the Jan. 10 New Hampshire Republican primary, according to three new polls released Friday that show Romney could become the first nonincumbent to sweep the first two GOP nominating contests in the modern campaign calendar.

The three polls all show Romney—who currently holds a slender lead in Iowa—blowing out the competition next week in his adopted home state, while former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., has received only a modest bump following his surprising surge to a virtual tie for first place in Iowa on Tuesday. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is in second place in each of the three surveys, while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is fading. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who is staking his entire primary campaign on a strong performance in the Granite State, trails badly in each of the polls.

• Suffolk University in Boston, which has been conducting a two-day tracking poll for Boston-based WHDH-TV since Dec. 30, released its first poll conducted entirely after the Iowa caucuses. The latest results—compiled from interviews with likely primary voters on Wednesday and Thursday—show Romney leading Paul, 40 percent to 17 percent. Santorum runs third, at 11 percent, while Gingrich is fourth, at 9 percent. Huntsman is at 8 percent, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry earns just 1 percent of the vote.

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From CBS News:

(CBS/AP) DES MOINES, Iowa – With several attention-grabbing protests before Iowa’s caucuses, Occupy Wall Street activists proved their movement did not end when its encampments in big cities dispersed. But they also showed the group hasn’t matured into a political force, and it’s not clear whether it will become a liberal counterweight to the tea party this election year.

Following Tuesday’s vote in Iowa, on which the movement had little impact, Occupy organizers are pledging to stage more protests in New Hampshire and South Carolina as the presidential nomination process moves east. But the smaller-than-expected crowds, a muddled message that was mostly ignored by candidates, and tactics that seem to limit their appeal raised questions about its long-term viability.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Matt Lewis to discuss last night’s vote in Iowa, the potential departure of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, and how the race looks now with New Hampshire and South Carolina next on the primary calendar.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Mitt Romney celebrates GOP win; 2 rivals flounder
Quitters: Why a conservative exodus is bad for Romney
To fend off Iowa attacks, historian Newt Gingrich turns to ‘passive resistance’
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From National Journal:

After a disappointing sixth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses over night, Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. EST on Wednesday, the campaign announced on Wednesday morning.

Bachmann, who won the Iowa straw poll in August, won only 5 percent of the votes in Tuesday’s caucus. After the results, she cancelled her trip to South Carolina, where she would have campaigned to win the state’s primary on Jan. 21, Fox News reported.

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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Mitt Romney admits his eight-vote Iowa caucus victory was “pretty narrow” but says he’s got more staying power than runners-up Rick Santorum and Ron Paul or his other rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.

Heading off to New Hampshire, where Romney holds a healthy lead in the polls, the former Massachusetts governor predicts a long road to the nomination. Romney says his national campaign team and strong fundraising will set him apart from the pack.

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WEST DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday that he would head home “to determine whether there is a path forward” for his White House bid after he finished a distant fifth in the Iowa caucuses.

At times pausing to collect his emotions, Perry told supporters that he appreciated their work but that he needed to consider whether there was a viable strategy for him to restart his campaign in South Carolina.

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I’ll assume there was a time when giving Iowa permanent “first in the nation” status in our Presidential primary contests made sense. But, I don’t know when that time was. Mind you, this isn’t some East Coast gripe about “flyover country”; I grew up in the Mid-West and went to college in Iowa. I love the state. Sure, its voters are fickle; BOTH uber-lefty Sen. Tom Harkin and mostly-conservative Sen. Chuck Grassley are hugely popular in the state. That’s not independent. That’s borderline incoherent. And, of course, Iowa’s permanent status has saddled our country with one of the more disastrous government policies in history; ethanol subsidies. My main beef with Iowa’s permanent status is simply that we don’t use caucuses to elect Presidents.

Caucuses are very different animals than primaries. Having participated in one years ago, I can say there is much to recommend about them. But the demands of the caucus mean that relatively few people will participate and those who do participate are very different than other voters. To participate, voters assemble at a set time–tonight’s is 7pm CST. They hear speeches from other voters arguing for each individual candidate and then voting begins. The entire process can take up to two hours. If you’re sick, working, don’t have child-care or simply look upon a two hour voting process with dread, you can’t take part–only around a quarter of the active, registered Republicans will likely vote tonight.

Only the most dedicated and motivated voters, whether for a candidate or an issue, will participate. Moreover, Democrat and Independent voters can show up and register as a Republican on the spot and cast a ballot. This can skew the results; just ask famous caucus losers John McCain, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Mike Dukakis or Ronald Reagan, among others.

The key to performing well in Iowa is to either become the chosen candidate of highly motivated issue voters or have a very strong field organization to turn out your supporters. Remember, only about 150,000 voters will take part tonight, so a strong ground game is critical.

The final Des Moines Register poll, released Saturday, provides the last, best snapshot of the state of the field: Romney 24%, Paul 22%, Santorum 15%, Newt Gingrich 12%, Perry 11% and Bachmann 7%. So, what to expect tonight?

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Scott Conroy from Real Clear Politics to discuss tonight’s Iowa caucuses, whether Santorum’s surge could lead to surprising win, and how Iowa’s results could impact the rest of the race.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

An Iowa Caucus Primer: How the Process Works
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The 2012 election is quickly approaching, but the majority of youth are not inspired by the candidates, on either side of the aisle.

Focus groups recently held by the Harvard Institute of Politics in Iowa exhibited the young voters’ opinions on the upcoming, Presidential election. The majority of the youth were not in full support of any particular candidate, but really, there was an overwhelming lack of support.

Similar meetings were held before the 2008 election, and the outcomes were vastly different. Youth were full of inspiration and awe for candidates like Obama, Clinton, and Huckabee. Now, though, they are left with the after taste of “hope and change” and no one, in their opinion, to faithfully rally behind.

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Our friends over at the Claremont Review of Books have a delightful and exhaustive review of several books on the Iowa caucuses.

For people in Iowa, perhaps more than in other states, a candidate’s pedigree and prejudices are relevant, and can play a role in the electoral outcome. Hillary Clinton’s contempt and snobbery in the 2008 election was surely detectable, and may have lead the former frontrunner to her distant third place finish.

Being from a rural, neighboring state seems to help a candidate’s chances, which may give credence to the critics of the fairness of Iowa, but it also gives a political voice to the Midwest in campaigns which are often focused on the coasts. Long-time Des Moines Register reporter David Yepsen noted that “[o]ne pattern that appears to be developing in the Iowa caucuses is a preference for Midwestern, or at least rural-oriented candidates. George McGovern of South Dakota, Walter Mondale of Minnesota, and Richard Gephardt of Missouri have all done well in the Iowa Democratic caucuses. But so did that Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.” Yepsen recently noted that “politicians in the Midwest know how to campaign to people in the Midwest. The audiences demographically are much the same.”

Presidential candidates from the prairie Midwest may have enjoyed somewhat of a regional advantage in the past, but Carter (twice), George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Kerry make this much less than an iron-clad rule. Even if, however, the Midwestern candidate advantage were true, this would be acceptable, since it would be good to give the Midwest a loud voice in the presidential selection process, especially in an age in which the coastal media dominates the cultural and political discourse. As Why Iowa? notes, the Iowa caucuses force coastal media elites to visit “Middle America, a place that many have never visited.” Iowa serves as a proxy for the wider Midwest and helps to make the presidential selection process more representative of the interests of Middle America. Iowa bears the weight of this representation burden well, as demonstrated by its record of civic obligation, open elections, and fair politics. The historian Dorothy Schwieder says that Iowa has “a sense of rootedness…that implies stability, permanence, and continuity; there is also a centeredness that connotes balance in both perspective and behavior. At the same time, Iowans are not known for showiness, glitz, or hype.” Iowans have a healthy sense of place, unlike some transient, coastal Americans. The historian Laurence Lafore once noted that “Iowans always speak of themselves as Iowans.”

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss Mitt Romney’s Wall Street experience, his cozy relationship with them now, and whether or not that would make him a good President.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Treasuries Set for Best Year Since 2008
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Earlier this week I wrote about David Goodner, the head of Occupy Des Moines and a professional activist in Iowa.

Here he is on video disrupting Newt Gingrich’s event at the Iowa Capitol.

Here he is, in plaid, disrupting Mitt Romney’s Iowa campaign office.

Nine members of Occupy the Iowa Caucuses were arrested outside of Romney’s offices. Of those nine, however, four were from out of state. Perhaps the Occupy the Iowa caucus movement isn’t nearly as grassroots as we have thought?

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Evangelicals are in a civil war in Iowa. If they could unite behind a candidate, they could defeat Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in the Iowa caucuses, but they can’t. Part of the problem is that three candidates are running for evangelical support but Iowa simply isn’t big enough for the three of them. They’re splitting the vote. Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum are all making a play for the social conservatives they need to propel them onward. In 2008, sixty percent of the participants in the Iowa caucuses were evangelical.

Eight days ago Rick Santorum won the personal endorsements of two evangelical leaders—Bob Vander Plaats, CEO of the Family Leader, and Chuck Hurley, President of the Iowa Family Policy Center. The endorsements may have been just enough to push Santorum up in the polls—at Bachmann’s expense. Vander Plaats asked Bachmann to drop out and endorse one of the social conservatives.

The Bachmann team is simply imploding with the defection of a top aide to the Ron Paul camp.  She herself has said that it would take nothing less than a “miracle” to win. When you have to keep insisting that you aren’t dropping out—it may be time to drop out.  Look to Bachmann to exit stage left after Iowa. The question becomes who will she endorse.

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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – At least $12.5 million and counting has blanketed the airwaves ahead of next Tuesday’s Republican presidential caucuses, with hard-hitting commercials awash in ghoulish images and startling claims. Most are coming from a proliferation of new independent groups aligned with the candidates.

To hear the ads tell it, Newt Gingrich is a “serial hypocrite,” Rick Perry “double dips” as governor and the “liberal Republican establishment” is plotting to anoint Mitt Romney as the party’s presidential nominee. The attacks, the bulk of the commercials on the air, reflected the volatile state of the race five days before the first votes of the GOP presidential nominating contest.

After a slow start, the ads in Iowa are coming on fast and furious.

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Michael Barone has a thoughtful piece on the Iowa caucus in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. He writes in “As Iowa Goes, So Goes Iowa” that the Iowa caucus often doesn’t decide who wins the primary, let alone the general election.

Iowa Republican caucuses have a poor record in choosing their party’s nominees. In the five presidential nominating cycles with active Iowa Republican caucus competition, the Hawkeye State has voted for the eventual Republican nominee only twice—in 1996 for Bob Dole, in 2000 for George W. Bush—and only once was the Iowa winner elected president.

Part of the issue Barone notes is just how few Republicans actually participate.

In a state of three million people, a bare 119,000 Republicans showed up for the caucuses [in 2008]. Some 60% of them identified as evangelical or born-again Christians—a far higher percentage than in any presidential contest in any large non-Southern state that year.

By contrast, in the 2010, over 600,000 Iowa Republicans voted in the general election and more than 200,000 voted in the gubernatorial primary. This year fewer Republicans will vote in the Iowa caucus, despite a deeply unpopular incumbent Democratic party.

Why are so few Republicans showing up to vote in Iowa? Perhaps it’s because the Iowa Republican caucus is for insiders.

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“The very people who supported Obama in ’08 are the Occupy organizers,” David Goodner told The Los Angeles Times this week. “That same energy has shifted from the electoral arena to the streets.” Obama, says Goodner, gave birth to the Occupy movement when he “failed to deliver” on the promise of widening the tax base, securing Medicare and Social Security, abolishing “Wall Street greed” and limiting campaign spending.

So who is David Goodner?

He is a 30-year-old veteran Iowa protestor, who works with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund. He is frequently arrested and in controversy, so much so that the FBI infiltrated his organization because they were concerned he might be plotting to disrupt the 2008 RNC Convention.

Though no one will say it officially, Goodner, who vows to disrupt the Iowa caucus, is part of the reason the Iowa Republican party announced on Tuesday it was moving its voting tabulation to a secure location.

Last week he was escorted out of a security during a news conference headed by Newt Gingrich. The picture above really is worth a thousand words.

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