It seems that last weekend a few folks associated with the Clinton campaign made some public comments about the potential invalidity of maintaining Iowa voter's importance in the overall National election picture.
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa (CNN) – Just days before the Iowa caucuses, a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter criticized the state’s privileged role in the presidential nominating process, forcing her campaign to declare that she did not agree with the assessment.
Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland was quoted in Sunday’s edition of The Columbus Dispatch as saying that it “makes no sense” to grant Iowa the right to hold the first contest of the 2008 race for the White House.
"I'd like to see both parties say, 'We're going to bring this to an end,'" Strickland told the newspaper.
Competing campaigns seized on the article and emailed it around to reporters to highlight Strickland’s comments late Sunday night. The Clinton campaign moved quickly, and issued a statement shortly after midnight distancing the New York senator from the governor’s remarks.
“Senator Clinton has worked her heart out campaigning in Iowa because she knows it plays a unique and special role in the nominating process and that process must be protected,” read the statement. “As she has said many times she is glad Iowans are entrusted with this responsibility because they take it so seriously. On this issue Hillary and Gov. Strickland strongly disagree.”
Now wait just a darn minute Folks...I think that the good Governor might be on to something here, because I've wondered that exact same thing myself in the past election years and again in the past few weeks heading into January.
Bringing the subject up again, I did a little Googling and found this information about the state of Iowa here and here.
When thinking about the validity of kicking off something as important as the process of choosing the president of the most powerful nation on the planet, wouldn't you expect to base the first results on an "average" sampling of people representing the country's "Average" population, right?
Well, if that were the case than you'd be WRONG, because the population of Iowa is far, far from a representation of the true average American mainstream. For instance:
Iowa's population is only 2,982,000--less than 1% of the nation's total (by the way, being an Agricultural state, there are 16.6 million Hogs living in Iowa...do they get to "caucus" also?)
The population of Iowa's largest city, Des Moines, is only 194,311.
Unfortunately, something which I couldn't find valadation of was the true count of the number of people expected to actually show up at the polls for the Democratic and Republican primaries on January 3rd. Based on averages, it's probably less than 50% of registered voters--many times somewhere in the 20% or 30% range.
That means you can knock the Iowa Caucus down to being the opinion of somewhere in the area of less than a million people out of 300 million Americans...1/3 of 1%.
I'm sure that you will excuse me if I admit that for some reason I personally am not impressed.
That said, now I have to ask how in the heck the media and the political elite can place so much emphasis on what Iowa "Caucusers" think this week, when most of the time they could care less what the farmers and "hayseed" residents of our country believe and about which issues they worry about on a daily basis?
After all, there is no major metropolitan area in the state of Iowa and, with so few people living within its external borders, what's the big deal with what this little 1% of Amercans think?
And another interesting thing I found when looking at the demographic data on the Great State of Iowa--something that should piss off Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in the process...
Iowa's population is 95% white/Caucasian, with African Americans and Hispanics making up only 2.3% and 3.7 % of the citizenry respectively.
I thought that those numbers were somewhere around 12% and 14% nationally.
How can they let that happen?
Yeah...I thought so...
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