Pod Save America - Iowa Episode 2: The history and the rules

Episode Date: November 26, 2019

In episode two of this five-part miniseries on the Iowa caucuses hosted by Tommy Vietor and produced by Pineapple Street Studios, we’ll learn how violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention led to Iowa becoming the first contest of the campaign season. We’ll take you to a house party with undecided voters and to an actual caucus location from 2016 to explain how the process works. And we’ll watch field organizers in action and learn how they hustle to get Iowans to commit to caucus.

It's a pretty bottle. This is how I think most Americans pick wine. We all just sort of like what it looks like. Back in August, I went to a Cabernet for Corey house party in Urbandale, Iowa, which is just a few minutes outside of Des Moines. How are you today? Obviously, I wasn't going to show up empty-handed. Do you want a brown bag for that?

That's okay. This is great. You're a professional. You can carry it out. Thank you very much. So we leave the Hy-Vee grocery store, moderately priced bottle of wine in hand, and head over to Urbandale. Oh, I see some Corey signs. Here, you want to carry the wine?

Hi. Hello. How are you? We brought some Cabernet. Hi. We wanted to get in the store. There are five potential caucus goers sitting in a circle in Dave and Cheryl Jensen's living room. It's a nice scene.

There's some jazz on in the background, and their big fat cat keeps wandering in and out of the room. They all introduce themselves. I'm Lauren, born and raised on the south side of Chicago in a Democratic home. Mitch Smith, the field organizer we met last week, set up this event. Besides Mitch, everyone here is in their 60s or 70s, and all but one are longtime Democrats. Two of the people in the room are already committed to caucus for Cory Booker. They like the way he speaks, they like his energy, they like his optimism. In the end, we want somebody who can rock us to sleep, too.

Make us feel good at night when we go to bed, and we'll get up in the morning and things will still be okay. Yeah. That sounds nice. I miss that. Oh boy. Oh boy, do I miss it. The rest of the people there are undecided, including the hosts, Dave and Cheryl. And that is just classic Iowa. Most of the country is paying no attention to this primary, but this couple invited a bunch of strangers into their home to talk about a campaign that they have not endorsed yet. It's a pretty casual conversation. Well, I paid for my kids' college, and, you know, we took out student loans and paid it back, and why should we as a country be paying millionaires' kids' student loans? Mitch is mostly listening, but he occasionally jumps in to talk about Corey's record.

So, in the forgiving student debt, so Corey's only been talking about forgiving student debt for public educators. If Mitch didn't know something, he promised to follow up. Just one more item for his massive to-do list. If I were trying to replace you in writing your job description, I would say you are friend, organizer, party planner, sounding board, policy expert, communications expert, Booker expert. Is that about right? It's hard to disagree with that. I think that's the fun part of this job is having so many of those responsibilities. And meetings like this are the most fun part.

Mitch joined the Booker campaign early. He saw Cory speak in Des Moines on the day Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, in October of 2018. Mitch decided that day that if Cory Booker ran for president, he wanted in. Now he's working one small but crucial patch of Polk County. There are 99 counties in Iowa, but Polk, which includes Des Moines, will deliver almost a fifth of the state's delegates. We checked in by phone this fall.

I am definitely lucky that I only have one corner of one county. You know, what I appreciate is that my ability to connect with folks who live there has changed dramatically since I moved in. It's not just asking them, you know, hey, can we grab coffee? since I moved in. It's not just asking them, you know, hey, can we grab coffee? It's asking them like how their dog is doing or how their kids literally game went. Yeah, you're not meeting relatives and kids the first time you know that their baseball team is like six and four and that they're really vying for the playoffs. If they make the playoffs, then the grandma can't host the debate watch party that I want her to host. So I'm like, you know, rooting for the kids team, but also sort of not at the same time. I'm Tommy Vitor, and this is episode two of a special Pod Save America series from Iowa.

Today, we're going to talk about how Iowa became the first contest in the Democratic presidential primaries. But first, let's take a second to nerd out on the mechanics of the caucuses, because one, I think it's really interesting, and two, I think it helps explain why campaigning in Iowa tends to feel less nasty and terrible than it does everywhere else. I'm not from Iowa, so I've never caucused myself, but I did get to visit one back in 2008 with Obama. Those couple nights before the caucuses were the coldest nights of the year. And we got inside, and it was just this sea of people. This is President Obama describing that 2008 caucus to Chris Liddell Westefeld

for his book, They Said This Day Would Never Come. Every age, different backgrounds, and you had farmers in overalls and, you know, seed hats, and you had young African-American kids, Latino moms. You know, the fact that people had brought their kids, and there were a lot of families who had shown up gave it this festive feeling. I still remember there was there was a guy who looked like Gandalf. He was dressed in this white robe and he had this long white beard and he had this white staff and at the top of the staff he had jerry-rigged this little

video screen that was playing my JJ speech looped over and over again. So the Gandalf thing was a little weird, but seeing all those people showing up and joyfully participating in democracy was actually pretty inspiring. And this was long before we knew the results. But I bet you're wondering why everyone was just hanging out at a caucus location. To understand that, we have to understand why a caucus itself is different. I think the simple way to think of it is that we're used to voting as people, individuals. When you participate in a caucus, you are voting as a community. Rob Sand is the state

auditor in Iowa. He is a young star of the state democratic party. He's a highly coveted endorsement and strangely he looks a lot like me. I'm not kidding I actually got stopped for a photo by a woman in Iowa who thought I was Rob. Really fundamentally what it comes down to is you're there together to decide how we are going to govern ourselves together, right? Ultimately, we're picking someone who is going to lead us, and so us picks that person. Iowa has been picking its candidates by caucus since the 1800s, and it kind of feels like a holdover from another era. In a primary, you can just show up at any time on election day,

you pull your lever, and you walk out. In some states, you can vote early, you can vote by mail, but it's a secret, solitary act. Not in Iowa. On caucus night, you have to be in line to get into your caucus location by 7 p.m. sharp. If you're late, you don't get to caucus. If you're on time, you then go into the school gym or the public library or whatever the location is, and you go and you physically stand in a corner with everyone else supporting your candidate. Or, and honestly, this is incredible to me, you might show up still undecided. Here's Rob Sandigan. I think one of the reasons that Iowa is really good at doing this is that there's a lot of

Iowans who agree with the idea that you don't know what you don't know. And, you know, you might have a favorite, but until you've actually stood in someone's corner, you might learn something new about them. You might learn something new about someone else. And you keep your mind open until the moment where you have to commit. There are a lot of critiques of the Iowa caucuses. A big one, and Julian Castro has been talking about this lately, is that the state is really white. We'll talk about that and all the other knocks on Iowa in our next episode. But for now, Iowa is still the first contest. Iowa still reigns supreme,

and candidates go all out in Iowa because winning or even just doing better than expectations can get you a ton of media attention and momentum. And they will need it because the New Hampshire primary is just a week after the Iowa caucuses. Technically, though, what you're competing for on caucus night are delegates. So come with me into the weeds of the delegate selection process.

Iowa has 1,678 precincts. So that means there are 1,678 mini elections happening on caucus night. At each precinct, people elect delegates to the county conventions. Every precinct awards at least one delegate, even if just a couple people show up to that caucus location. That's why campaigns try to be competitive everywhere, like David Plouffe mentioned in the last episode. And to get those precinct delegates,

a candidate has to meet what's called a viability threshold. This is very important. Generally, viability means you have to have support from at least 15% of the people in the room on caucus night. That math changes a little bit in some of the really small precincts, but basically the gist is if 100 people show up to a caucus location and 14 of them are supporting candidate X, that candidate, candidate X, is not viable because they didn't meet the 15% threshold. So the people that candidate, candidate X, is not viable because they didn't meet the 15% threshold. So the people that are supporting candidate X either get to pick someone else or go home.

That part's called realigning. And that realignment means that campaigns really care about being your first and your second choice. And it's also what makes Iowa so different. Okay, so I know I just threw a bunch of rules and numbers at you, but I promise it's worth understanding and ultimately not that complicated. So take 2016, for example. Here's what it sounded like at one caucus location in Polk County. Good evening and welcome to the 2016 Iowa Democratic Party Precinct Caucuses. Congratulations. As a participant in one of our state's most storied traditions, you are now a part of both Iowa and U.S. history. I'm sure you all remember 2016, unfortunately, that general election result,

but the Democratic primary was Bernie, Hillary, and Martin O'Malley. Here's Team Bernie making their case for their candidate. Do we carry on as we are? Or do we fight for fairness? We fight for fairness! And here are some folks who supported Hillary Clinton. She has the most experience and the most qualified on both sides of the aisle. She takes this very seriously.

She supported women and children her entire life. And as a mother of three daughters, it's high time we elect a female president. And here's Martin O'Malley's guy valiantly making his case. As a Democrat, I feel blessed that we have three fantastic candidates. And I'm not going to beat around the bush. It has been a very, very hard choice for me. After the first count, here's how it stacked up. There are eight uncommitted. 26. 26, O'Malley. 218, I believe.

No. 215 for Sanders and 210 for Clinton. I was trying to do it from memory. My apologies. All right. Listen up. One more thing to say. In order to be viable, your group has to have at least one member.

And that's what we're doing. We're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it.

We're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it. All right, listen up. One more thing to say. In order to be viable, your group has to have at least 69 members. So O'Malley was not viable in that precinct. Okay, five minutes. O'Malley's voters could get behind somebody else, or they could just call it quits and go home. Sanders and Clinton supporters started making their case. You want this country to stay the same, you go home to Philadelphia.

Three people left. Everyone else ended up realigning. Okay, so all of the undecided and all O'Malley realigned and now commencing recounts for Clinton and Sanders. After realignment, Clinton ended up having more supporters in the room than Bernie did. Here's where we now stand. Uncommitted, zero. O'Malley, zero. Clinton, 232.

Sanders, 224. For a total of, hold on, hold on, 456. We lost three people in the melee, apparently. So when it got totaled up, Hillary Clinton got five delegates from that precinct, and Bernie Sanders got four. Like I said, people, second choices matter. And by the way, this whole process took like two and a half hours. Another thing about realignment. In the past, it was an easy way for campaigns to sort of spin

their loss. They could say, you know, we did really well on the first count. We're this close to being viable, but it just didn't work out. This year, they're not going to be able to do that. The Iowa Democratic Party is going to be recording what they call the first expression of preference, which is basically that first count we all heard. Then they'll record that final expression of preference, which is the count after the realignment. Here's Troy Price, the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party. Yeah, that's right. So we're releasing the numbers on first alignment and the numbers on second alignment or final alignment, I should say. So it's going to be able to tell a better story of what happens on caucus night. You know, there's campaigns who don't do well,

like to say, oh, well, I, you know, the raw result would say this, that, or the other thing, but we've never actually had that information. Now we're going to be able to have that information, which is good. I think it helps bring greater transparency to the process. It will be fascinating to see what these new results mean for how campaigns spin their win or their loss or how the media covers the results. Because these little rule changes, these little tweaks could have a big impact on the expectations game. Another interesting wrinkle is that this year, just because there are so many candidates running, every precinct is just going to have a bunch of candidates that aren't viable. The math just doesn't work out any other way.

So that means in every precinct, you're going to have a swarm of neighbors trying to convince people who are supporting a non-viable candidate to come over to their side. Here's Rob Sandigan. And so they say, well, hey, who's your second pick? And here's all the reasons why I really like this candidate. And it's a way that I think can actually be a better way to do it because you end up at the end of the caucus having felt like you all made some choices together where you listen to each other, you make your pitch for everybody. And then as you realign,

again, you're able to make pitches for why people should come realign in your direction. And I think that that's something that can actually sort of deescalate tensions because you're all in the room doing it together. I've heard from a lot of Iowans that in 2016, the realignment process was pretty contentious. I mean, I was in my caucus and it was, you know, the room was split. There was no mixing and mingling. It was a very divided night.

That's Trey Price again. And I'll tell you, like, that was tough. I mean, there was at the county level, I mean, friendships were lost. People were screaming at each other. People who had been in each other's weddings were no longer friends anymore. Like, it was really a rough period. This year, though, things feel a lot more fluid. A recent Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa caucus goers showed Mayor Pete leading Warren, Biden, and Sanders. But only 30% of those polled said they are firmly decided on their choice. 62% say they have a first choice, but

they could still be persuaded. Back at the Cabernet for Cory House party, that's exactly what Mitch Smith, Cory Booker's field organizer, was trying to do. Shift hearts and minds. Like David Jensen's. shift hearts and minds. Like David Jensen's. Hi. Yeah, I'm David. Politics has always been a part of my life. I was gassed at the 68th convention. It's very nice. I listened to Joan Baez sing. That was nice too. When he says gassed, he means tear gassed. And funnily enough, that convention, and particularly the chaos outside of that convention, is the reason why Iowa goes first. In 1968, the Democratic Party held its annual nominating convention in Chicago, and it had been a traumatic year. President Lyndon Johnson had announced he wouldn't be seeking re-election. The Vietnam War was still raging, and then Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated.

The contenders for the nomination were Hubert Humphrey, who was LBJ's vice president, Senator Eugene McCarthy, who was the anti-war candidate, and George McGovern, a senator from South Dakota. Inside the convention hall, the party bosses were lining up behind Humphrey. Outside, thousands of young people were protesting the party's sidelining of McCarthy in support for the war in Vietnam. The Chicago police tear-gassed the protesters, including David. Humphrey won the nomination, and Nixon won the White House. For most of our history, the nominees were chosen by elected officials and party leaders, while the rest of us just watched. But the chaos in Chicago was a terrible look for the party.

So the Democrats formed a commission to come up with a new way to choose their nominee. This commission was headed by George McGovern, who just lost the nomination, and Donald Frazier, a representative from Minnesota. The whole idea of the thing was to engage more grassroots Democrats and give them real power in the nominating process. That plan did not, however, specify that Iowa had to go first. David Yepsen is a veteran political reporter in Iowa. Back in 2007 and 2008, I read every single word he wrote. I tried and failed to spin him all the time, and I basically woke up every day

terrified that he would write something negative about Barack Obama. Before retiring from the Des Moines Register in 2009, David was the unofficial dean of the Iowa Press Corps. The 1972 race was the first contest that he covered. That's where it begins, the streets of Chicago, that the party tore itself apart over Vietnam. It came out of that convention, and the loss to Richard Nixon and the party said,

we have to reinvigorate ourselves. So when the Iowans started thinking about how they were going to set up their selection process, they spread out the contest. If we're going to have a national convention in August and have a chance to run for delegates and we're going to do our state convention in June, then that means we really have to start this process in, oh my gosh, February or March. The people who put it together, they understood, well, this is going to be an early place where it starts. But it's also true that there were staffers at the state Democratic Party who literally understood how long it took an old Gestetner mimeograph machine to print thousands of platform resolutions and copies of the platform. And they had it timed. Richard Bender was an activist who was working at the party at the time, actually timed it.

So they understood, gosh, if we're going to get all this information out to all over Iowa, to thousands of people, we've got to have time to get it printed. Okay, it's really an accident, a historical accident. That is Richard Bender. And kids, a mimeograph machine is like a copier before Xerox. It involved a crank, purple ink that smelled funny, and it took a while to print out the forms for each stage of the election process. It was not just like the famous tale about the mimeograph machine.

It was all these factors. You know, admittedly, we kind of thought it would be nice to be first. So it's 1972. Iowa's going first in the process. Nixon's running for a second term. The war in Vietnam and the draft are both ongoing, and Democrats are lining up to take on Nixon. There's McCarthy, there's Ed Muskie, the anti-war senator from Maine, and then there was the first Black woman to ever run for president, the legendary Shirley Chisholm. This feels wild and awful to say right now, but the segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, also sought the Democratic nomination. And the man who came up with this new nominating order, he also got in the race, George McGovern.

Here's David Yepsen. he also got in the race, George McGovern. Here's David Yepsen. I give, you know, the credit or blame for these caucuses to George McGovern and to his campaign manager, Gary Hart, who in 1972 figured out that, well, these Iowans are starting their process in February. And, you know, we could go out there and get a little splash of attention headed into New Hampshire. So that prototype of using Iowa as a springboard to later events was really started by them. Gary Hart ran George McGovern's campaign in 1972. There were a handful of us trying to put together a national campaign for a not very well-known candidate.

So we began to look at the calendar, and we had a very smart guy named Rick Stearns. And so one day in, I think, the fall of 71, I asked Rick if there were any process, any delegate selection process that began before New Hampshire. He said, yes, Iowa has caucuses, but no one has ever paid attention to them. So I said, okay, we're going to organize Iowa for McGovern. And that's what we did. And that's what, if I may say so, put Iowa on the electoral map. McGovern didn't win Iowa. Ed Muskie did. But McGovern did better than anyone expected. He won the expectations game. More on that later. But it was such a big deal that Gary Hart still remembers the lead of the New York Times that next day. The lead sentence was, the musky bandwagon slid off an icy road in Iowa tonight. That's great.

I memorized it. So that's when Iowa began to be important. McGovern went on to win the nomination and then lost badly to Nixon that November. Like, really badly. He didn't even win his home state of South Dakota. But Hart is still a fan of the Iowa caucuses. Caucuses tend to reward candidates who organize at the grassroots. Primaries tend to reward candidates who are better known. And I think a balance of both is a good thing. Primaries themselves did not begin

to be important until John Kennedy ran in, I think, six or eight primaries in 1960 to demonstrate to party leaders who up to that time had selected the nominee that he had a following across the country. So in the grand scheme of things, primaries themselves have not kind of existed forever. They were a kind of an invention of John Kennedy's campaign in 1960 as we invented caucuses in 1972. Kennedy's campaign in 60 as we invented caucuses in 72. I really believe in grassroots politics because for two reasons. One, it gives less well-known candidates a chance, but second, it gives real people in early states particularly a chance to render a judgment or form a judgment of candidates up close and personal. And that's very powerful.

Gary Hart actually went on to run for president himself, and that's a different story for another day. But today he lives in the mountains of Colorado, and he actually has a blog. He was one of the first politicians to start blogging back in 2003. And he writes a lot, thoughtfully and and pretty beautifully about the state of our politics. It has to turn around in 2020. It really does. And that's why, in a way, the selection of candidate to go against Trump is going to be one of the most critical choices of our lifetime and perhaps a long couple of lifetimes. But what happens next year is going to be, in a way, the future of our country. But the big question is, will Iowa pick someone who can beat Donald Trump?

More on that when we come back. And we're back. I'm Tommy Vitor, and this is a special Pod Save America series from Iowa. I mentioned this in the last episode, but there's a saying that there are three tickets out of Iowa, meaning basically, if you don't finish in the top three, your campaign is toast. Here's Richard Bender. if you don't finish in the top three, your campaign is toast. Here's Richard Bender. I think actually it was Yepsen that coined that phrase, three tickets. I have known him since he was a high school student, by the way. It's not that big, Iowa. Have I mentioned that yet? Here's David Yepsen. I said there's three tickets, first class, coach, and standby,

because the nominee of either party usually came out of those top three finishers. Well, John McCain changed that. So you've sort of got to say first class, coach, standby, and baggage. One quirky thing about the Iowa caucuses is that you don't necessarily have to win the Iowa caucuses to be perceived as a winner coming out of the Iowa caucuses. Right. It's called the expectations game. How well are you expected to do? And this race is sort of like 1983. Walter Mondale's ahead. The former vice president is ahead. Can he win big enough? And then who among the rest of the candidates will come in second? Who will be the alternative to Mondale? Boy, this race feels a lot

like it. Is Biden going to win? Can he win enough? And who among these others becomes the next Gary Hart? Can Iowa still sling somebody all the way to the White House? I'm just not sure it can. And interestingly enough, I think this cycle, it's so big that it has driven the Democratic National Committee to change debate rules about who gets in. And they're setting the threshold for who gets in to these debates. But it strikes me that the Democratic National Committee, by doing that, is really becoming the great winnower, if you will, of candidates that Iowa used to play. the great winnower, if you will, of candidates that Iowa used to play. Isn't that kind of an unfortunate shift from giving power to regular people and voters, asking questions in their backyard, to a bunch of party operatives in Washington?

I think, no, it's not bad that party operatives are involved. This is a political process. You're electing a president of the United States. I think that person ought to be somebody who has some command of politics. We treat politics like a dirty word. I want somebody who can do the job. You can make a case looking at Trump's presidency that electing someone who has no political electoral experience has been a mistake. So Iowa obviously has an outsized role in the political process and the way we select a president. Has Iowa earned it? Well, I may not be the most objective person. I mean, we all can think of better ways to run a

presidential nominating process. And you can do one on the back of a cocktail napkin. So it is what it is. Iowa is important because Iowa is first. But the alternatives, it keeps going, Tommy, because of inertia. It stays in motion because there's not something that counteracts it. Secondly, that inertia always means that somebody is planning a strategy for four years from now. Somebody who runs, doesn't do well, but runs a credible race. And the same is true in the Republican Party right now. Mike Pence is out here, you know, visited the same flood twice. And, you know, the evangelical community hosting Republicans, Tom Langford, Tim Scott, these people are showing up at events here already.

So this is all about a 2024 campaign. And so that's how it happens. But also it's worth noting that this is a weird year. The field is huge already. It seems to be growing by the week. And that's led some people to think that there could be more than three tickets coming out of Iowa. And you have people like former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg getting into the race late and seemingly planning to just skip the state entirely. seemingly planning to just skip the state entirely. While we can't predict who's going to win,

it is still clear that Iowa is going to play its traditional role of winnowing down the field and giving a big boost to those who do well in the state. Olivia Ellis, who we met last time, is working hard to make sure that Elizabeth Warren has one of those tickets out of Iowa. Olivia didn't have much growing up, but she was valedictorian of her high school and got a scholarship to college in Massachusetts. She worked two jobs with a full-time course load because she didn't want to graduate with a ton of debt. Olivia volunteered on Warren's Senate campaign and now is taking a year off to work on the presidential. I first met Olivia back in August.

We were at the Warren field office in Ames, which is in central Iowa, about 45 minutes north of Des Moines. Spending time with Olivia is like freebasing hope and enthusiasm. I literally picked up my life and moved out here for Elizabeth because I did fall in love with her in Massachusetts originally, and I feel like that energy is contagious. Back then, she was having a lot of one-on-one coffees with people who were just kind of curious about Elizabeth Warren, and door knocking and phone calls and generally just building out relationships. In October, things were pretty much still the same, but the intensity of the door knocking had increased. In fact, the Warren campaign started calling it Knocktober.

Knocktober is just a time when we create a massive voter contact operation where we train volunteers to go out and knock on the doors of their neighbors to get them to commit to caucus for Elizabeth Warren. So, okay, when we were hanging out in August, I felt like it was that preliminary phase. There were a lot of like half-hour coffees with potential supporters. You're getting to know people. You're hearing at issues like genuine good faith listening tours. Now we're in Noctober Fest. What's your day-to-day like?

Has it changed a lot? The only difference I would say is Iowans are really feeling the urgency now. February is just around the corner, and we want to make sure we have as many people in our corner on caucus night as possible. So Noctober is definitely in effect. But we're just giving more responsibility to those people that we did have coffees with beforehand, making sure that they are trained and able to talk to their neighbors about Elizabeth. So those early coffees, they really bear fruit? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's definitely

necessary. Definitely necessary. Because the saying is, come for the candidate, stay for the organizer. So we want to make sure that they're bought into Elizabeth, but also us as well. So you got a one the other day from a woman who sold you deodorant at CVS. How'd that interaction go? How do you get from like Old Spice to caucuses? Well, I just think that every moment is an opportunity to organize. Every single person we talk to is a potential supporter of ours. So, yeah, I wear my sticker around everywhere I go, my Elizabeth Warren sticker, in the hopes that someone will notice me. And so, yeah, I was just replenishing my Dove deodorant. And one of the women checking me out was like, oh, Elizabeth Warren, like I've heard of her. And I'm like, really, what do you think? Um, and so we just sort of

engaged in a conversation that way. And by the end of it, she was all in and committed and ready to participate in knocktober and knock on, knock on some of her neighbor's doors. So were there people behind you at line at CVS being like, yo, can you just pay for the fucking deodorant? And like, we're trying to get out of here. Actually, the person behind me committed as well. No way. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. And I think that Iowans are used to it a little bit.

It's a unique place. I organized in Massachusetts for a little bit, and I'm not sure if that shit would fly. I also noticed you got a precinct captain. I believe your first precinct captain, a guy named Roy. You found Roy riding his bike around Ames. Were you just like sprinting after this dude on a bike? How's that happen? I so now that we hired on more organizers and my turf has sort of narrowed, I kind of see the same people around quite often. And he has this huge beard and he always rides his bike around. And I was like, this guy, I feel like I know he's liberal.

Like I just had this sense. And so one time I yelled out to him at a stoplight and I was like, do you like Elizabeth Warren? He was like, gave me a thumbs up. So then I followed him to his destination. Sorry, Roy. I followed him to his destination. And this was about the time of the second debate. So I invited him to a debate watch party. He kind of showed up and we hit it off. And he became a pretty consistent volunteer, very bought into Noctober, I will say. And yeah, I recently made him my precinct captain for caucus night, all because I found him riding his bike around Ames. So yeah. What is a precinct captain and why do they matter? So we have roughly 1,700 precincts in Iowa, and we have to have leadership in each of those

corners on caucus night because we don't have 1,700 field organizers. And so the people we meet and the relationships we form, these are the people that are going to be representing Elizabeth in our campaign on caucus night and persuading their neighbors to come over to our corner. So it's your unpaid army? Yeah. I mean, yeah. paid army. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So when I was there in August, everybody I talked to was focused on electability, even though none of them really know what it means. Are you still hearing a lot of that? Like what I care about first, second and third is beating Trump and then issues or how is that breakdown these days? Yeah. I mean, I will say people are really concerned with beating Trump and they want a candidate who's able to do it.

And for some reason, they think that the only person who can go up against a straight white man is a straight white man. And it's about convincing them that Elizabeth is the woman for the job. And there's a huge percentage of the population that is not politically engaged, specifically students who I organize. And the candidates that I see exciting them are the progressive candidates like Elizabeth. And I think those are the pockets of the electorate that are going to change things. But I think people are really, really scared. And they really want a candidate who's going to who's gonna beat Trump. Yeah. So last time we talked, you know, this is a big election, it's weighty stuff.

You told us there were times you felt like the weight of the world was on your shoulders. Do you still feel that way? Like, how are you doing personally? And as this thing heats up? I mean, it's hard, like we, we all come at this for deeply personal reasons. And I feel like I am in a unique position where, you know, I was able to take a year off of college and move out to Iowa to, to fight for this. And I have a responsibility to leverage my privilege to provide opportunities for, for people who grew up in, in similar situations as me. And, you know, so yeah, no, I still feel like that. I still feel, you know, like the weight of the world is kind of on our shoulders.

And a lot of America is relying on us. Olivia is 20 years old. Mitch Smith on the Booker campaign is 24. They're working seven days a week. And these are long days because what happens in Iowa could determine who wins the 2020 election. This marathon primary has turned into a sprint until the February 3rd caucuses. And then, hopefully for all these campaigns, beyond that.

Every time I talk with a field organizer, whether it's Mitch or Olivia or the folks I've met on the Harris campaign or Mayor Pete's campaign or Biden's or anyone else, I just keep feeling like I want them all to win, which I said to Norm Sturzenbach, who is Beto O'Rourke's state director in Iowa. Yeah. And knock on wood, at the end of the day, they all will because it's about where we end up next year. Yeah. I mean, one of these candidates is going to be our nominee. And that candidate is going to be stronger because they've gone through all of this. And then when all of these kids then go work for that candidate in whatever state or whatever capacity, it's going to be an army of amazing people. Next time, we're going to join that army. We'll keep hanging out with these field organizers, and we'll get a better understanding of what it really takes to get Iowans to commit to a candidate. And we'll talk about why Iowa going first might actually be a

terrible idea. I'm Tommy Vitor. This series is produced by Kat Aaron. Production help from Justine Daum and Agarenesh Ashagre. Joel Lovell is our editor. Music and mixing by Hannes Brown. The executive producers at Pineapple Street Studios are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky. Thanks to Elena Schwartz and Nancy Rosenbaum. The audio of the 2016 caucus in Polk County, Iowa is courtesy of C-SPAN. 2016 caucus in Polk County, Iowa is courtesy of C-SPAN. A special thank you to Tanya Sominator, Sarah Wick, Michael Martinez, Kyle Seglin, Brian Semel, Nikki Fancy, and Jordan Silver from the Crooked Media team. Tune in next week. We'll be back in Iowa.