Week 1: History of Caucuses, Section 2

Brief snapshot of Origin and History of Caucuses

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In his short essay,  Professor Richard Seagrave, who was instrumental in the creation of the modern Iowa caucus process describes how it came to be.

The Iowa caucuses were born out of unrest in the United States over the Vietnam war and racial tensions. However it was the 1968 Democratic National Convention that triggered the Democratic Party reform movement because the delegates at the convention were mostly hand picked by party leaders in each state and not by “the people.”

Seagrave outlines how Iowa Democrats drafted the caucus reforms and then scheduled the caucuses very early in the year in order to complete all the manual paperwork necessary to process delegate selection from precincts to county conventions, then on to the district and finally the party’s state convention. It’s one of the best short summaries of the history of the creation of the caucuses.

Therefore, almost accidentally, the Iowa Democratic caucuses came to be the earliest of any state, which made them “first in the nation.”

 When the national and then international news media flocked to Iowa to cover the caucus presidential candidate preferences on caucus night Iowa became THE first concrete test of candidate popularity.  

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Videos

• Interview with Richard Seagrave and Richard Bender, founding fathers of the Caucuses
• History of Caucuses, Iowa Public Television