Full Reading: Week 1, Section 3

Journey of Prominent Caucus Winners-The Jimmy Carter and Obama Story

Dr. Steffen Schmidt 

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In the 1976 presidential contest a large field of Democrats presented themselves in Iowa.

Congressman Morris Udall from Arizona was in the lead at the start of this political season with 30% of likely caucus goers expressing support. Then a little-known Governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter appeared on the scene.

Although a nuclear engineer, he was called the peanut farmer, because his family in fact raised peanuts. Carter had attended the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1943 and graduated in the top ten percent of his class.  He became a nuclear engineer before entering Georgia politics.

Carter immersed himself into the Iowa campaign, riding on bicycles with his family and staff throughout the state.

As I’ve told the story before, on a very hot summer afternoon, I was grilling out at a friend’s farm in Story County.  We saw a gaggle of bicycles turn off the paved road and pedal down the long gravel driveway. A gentleman got off his bike, came over and stuck out his hands. “Hi. I’m Jimmy Carter,” he said in that famous southern drawl.

Soon, Udall had dropped to fifth place with 6% of the vote, “Uncommitted” won the caucuses that year with 14,508 votes (37%) but Carter came in with 10,764 votes (27%).  Birch Bayh, a Senator from Indiana got 5,148 (13%).

However, “Jimmy who?!” as he was called, had surprised the media and pundits and the legend of the Iowa caucuses as a place where an unknown and under-funded Presidential contestant could “win”, became the story. Carter went on from Iowa to win the nomination and the general election.

At subsequent Presidential contests, Iowa became “First in the Nation” in showing preference. The Democrats who started this process in 1972 got the Republicans to join them in holding Presidential caucuses on the same night, which made it easy for the news media to follow and tell the story.

Another very interesting caucuses result was the 2008 emergence of a freshman Senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama. Obama gained great visibility with a powerful keynote speech at the democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004, which I attended doing analysis for CNN en Español.  I remember and reported that the crowd of Democrats was galvanized by his speech and I heard every day at the convention and on the street that Obama was Presidential material.

As he campaigned in Iowa the crowds grew larger and the level of enthusiasm intensified. A Des Moines Register poll in December of 2007 showed that Obama had surged. The results were: Barack Obama - 32%, Hillary Rodham Clinton - 25%, John Edwards - 24%, Bill Richardson - 6%, Joe Biden - 4%, Christopher Dodd - 2% and Dennis Kucinich - 1%.

On caucus night, Obama won with 37.6%, John Edwards came in second (29.7%) and Hillary Clinton third (29.4%). Exit polls showed that 93 percent of voters in the Iowa Democratic Caucus were white and 33 percent voted for Obama. Obama also won the minority vote in the state. His strength was in eastern and central Iowa, which is more liberal or moderate. Hillary Clinton won the more conservative western part. The news media and political analysts were surprised that a state with a small minority population would give such a victory to a black candidate. It was said that Obama’s success proved that Iowa is a fair and complex place for the first in the nation presidential preference process.

Both Jimmy Carter’s victory and the surprising success of Obama in Iowa, which ultimately propelled him to success around the nation, got him the nomination of his party, and a victory in the general election are examples of the interesting and important role the Iowa caucuses play in the Presidential nomination process.

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