Iowa Caucuses

For more than 3 decades, the Iowa Precinct Caucuses' Presidential Straw Polls, known as the Iowa caucuses, have dominated the kickoff of the U.S. presidential nomination process. Traditionally placed first among the nomination contests, Iowa's grassroots-heavy precinct-level party meetings grow in importance far beyond the local delegates they select. Since 1976, when former Governor Jimmy Carter (D-GA) won Iowa's straw polls, propelling himself to national prominence, capturing the Democratic nod, and sweeping to the White House over then-President Gerald Ford, candidates, media, and voters alike have seen Iowa winnow the presidential field for the New Hampshire primary that follows.

A caucus is a party meeting. At caucuses, partisans gather to make decisions on whom to back and what to do. In the U.S. presidential nomination system, specifically, caucuses are local party gatherings at which delegates are selected to go on to conventions at the county, district, and/or state level that ultimately determine the delegates the state's party sends to the national convention and thus, indirectly, which presidential candidates the state supports. The local nature of the process and its exacting requirements tend to reinforce the importance of political organization relative to broad advertising.

Most state parties today hold primaries rather than caucuses. In primaries, any party regular (and sometimes even those outside the party) can show up at voting stations just as in a general election. Reforms in the Democratic Party from the early 1970s, generally followed by Republicans in later years, placed strict limits on presidential caucuses, steering more and more states toward the primary method of selecting national convention delegates and away from the caucus-to-convention system.