OSCEOLA, Iowa — Of the hundred people at a campaign town hall event one recent afternoon, two stuck out. All of the other Iowans on hand to see the latest presidential candidate to come through Osceola, a town of about 4,800 south of Des Moines, were white.
“It is Osceola,” shrugged Diane Bland, 56, a caregiver and native Iowan. “It’s 25% Latino but there are very few African Americans. Maybe 20.” Including her family.
“We’re more representative of this place” than of any ethnic group, said her daughter, Kennedy, a 16-year-old high school junior. “We don’t really care that we’re the only nonwhite people in the room.”
Political activists in 48 states have long bristled at the outsize influence enjoyed by Iowa and New Hampshire, two of the nation’s least diverse states, and complaints have escalated about entrusting so much clout to such homogeneous places.
Iowans who turn out Monday night for the caucuses — the first presidential contest every four years for generations — will overwhelmingly be white, because Iowa is overwhelmingly white.
Some candidates grumble, mostly to themselves, lest they alienate the voters who jealously guard their role as gatekeepers to the White House.
Julián Castro, the former housing secretary and San Antonio mayor whose campaign never gained steam, has pointedly questioned the status quo, citing the nation’s demographic transformation in recent decades and the Democratic Party’s reliance on blocs that are, to put it mildly, underrepresented in Iowa.
“I understand we have a process in place for 2020. My hope is that after this primary is over, the DNC will evaluate how it can improve the process in the years to come,” Castro said last week while stumping for Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Give someone else a chance, say critics of Iowa always being first. Compared to other states, Iowa is too white, too rural, too prosperous and too educated to deserve such attention and power. On the other hand, what’s a better alternative?
“It's got to start somewhere. And it probably is a good idea to start in a place that's experienced at doing this,” said Tom Vilsack, a former Democratic governor of Iowa. “It's not easy. And it's a responsibility that Iowans are trained and experienced to do. They know how to ask the questions. They know how to show up at events. They know how to press the envelope and they also know how to weed out the field.”
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That said, the overwhelming pallor at campaign events in Iowa is impossible to miss, whether it’s for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden or, on the GOP side, at President Donald Trump’s rally Thursday night in Des Moines.
The Osceola event happened to be a town hall with Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who has struggled to make inroads with nonwhites, though Bland has backed him for months.
“He is who he is. He speaks his mind. He’s a strong candidate,” she said.
In Pella, where Castro was stumping for Warren during the impeachment trial, he was the only person of color in the room.
Warren hasn’t echoed his critique, and Castro didn’t mention it to the couple dozen voters on hand, which was probably for the best.
Iowans don’t like the idea of losing their prized role.
“Of course we don’t. We like to see our candidates,” said Jackie Kildy, 68, a retired middle school science teacher. “But you do wonder if some of our minority candidates had been to other places first that maybe they wouldn’t have had such a hard time.”
She was referring to Castro and Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. At its peak, the field of Democrats in the hunt for 2020 was more diverse than any in history.
But it’s hard to blame white Iowans for the near extinction of the nonwhite candidate. Plenty of white rivals also fell flat.
Every four years, in fact, most contenders fail regardless of race, gender, wealth or ideology.
Still, the fact that the winnowing occurs well before the caucuses night shows just how influential Iowa is. Some candidates start testing the waters two years before the caucuses. Those who catch on move up in polls. Donations flow, providing the resources to travel and hire staff. For those who don’t, it’s over.
Iowans like to cite Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 — a stamp of approval that erased doubts among African American voters across the country about his crossover appeal, and potential to break the color barrier.
“Listen, I can't change the demographics in the state of Iowa,” said Troy Price, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party.
“We have a robust African American community. We have a growing Latinx community. We have a strong Asian American community. We have refugee populations” from Sudan, the Balkans and other regions, he said. “We do have diversity here in this state.”
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More to the point, he argued, the Iowa gauntlet has proved its value for decades.
It’s not that winning Iowa provides a springboard to the nomination. It’s that the survivors hone skills needed to win in other states and win the White House.
“You have to start early,” Price said. “You have to go out and build an organization in 1,678 precincts all across the state. You can’t come in and do a bunch of big rallies. You can’t put a bunch of money on TV and expect that it’s all just going to be hunky-dory on caucus day.”
Candidates have to listen to voters and submit to their grilling.
“That’s why people who do well here in Iowa typically do well after Iowa,” Price said. “It’s not because they got the most delegates on caucus night.”
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Cynthia Peacock, a University of Alabama communications professor who brought a group of students to Iowa to observe, said the idea that Iowa and New Hampshire voters are particularly well-prepared to screen would-be presidents is circular reasoning.
“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you pay attention to people, they will be informed and engaged,” she said in Indianola, where Sen. Bernie Sanders stumped at Simpson College on Saturday afternoon. “I can’t speak for all people in Alabama, but … we’re pretty jealous of this type of attention.”
She noted how Iowans have developed a sense of entitlement about being able to meet candidates and press their personal concerns with them.
“More states deserve this type of attention and retail politics,” Peacock said. “Iowans have it good.”
Iowa is not all white. Just mostly — nearly 91%, according to the latest census data.
Iowans are definitely not all farmers, either, even if campaign ads lean heavily on hay bales, cornfields and tractors. In Des Moines, residents are more likely to work in the insurance industry than in agribusiness.
In some ways, Iowa’s metrics do track those of the nation. On household income and poverty, it’s not far from the average, according to data crunched by WalletHub, a financial advice website. But on racial and religious makeup, Iowa is nowhere close.
Latinos make up about 6% of the populace and 3% of the electorate.
According to the League of United Latin American Citizens, 1 in 8 caucus-goers were Latino in 2016. LULAC national president Domingo Garcia, the former Dallas City council member and state lawmaker, has said that this year, as many as 1 in 4 Iowans who caucus this time will be Latino.
Candidates do target certain groups. Those events are more likely to attract a diverse crowd.
One recent evening, for instance, businessman Tom Steyer stumped in Des Moines at an event hosted by Urban Dreams, a community services center, and the NAACP. He touted his support for reparations and for pumping $125 billion into historically black colleges and universities. He emphasized a focus on the environment through the lens of racial justice.
Will Sims, 39, a Des Moines political consultant who worked for Harris doing outreach to black churches, said he was “very disappointed” she didn’t go further.
“But I don’t blame the caucus process,” he said. “Castro is crying over spilled milk. He’s trying to blame the process instead of blaming himself. … It’s kind of an insult to the people of color that live here.”
Besides, he added: “Iowa sent Obama to the White House.”
One reason Iowa and New Hampshire have kept their spots as the first contests: utter lack of consensus about a better alternative.
Other small states lack a tradition of grilling presidential candidates. In big states, candidates have little direct contact with voters.
“In a big state like New York or Illinois, it’s going to be rallies and ads. Ads, ads, ads,” Sims said. “It’s inexpensive to campaign here. I’ve been able to meet all of them, pretty much.”
Tanya Keith, 48, a white Des Moines resident who moved to Iowa from New Jersey nearly 30 years ago, has been attending campaign events since Bill Bradley was running. She’s been amazed at the diligence Iowans bring to the task: months of homework, biding their time to see who cracks under pressure.
“There’s an institutional memory here that matters,” said Keith, who preserves historic houses. “Iowans are like political pundits on TV, but with more depth.”
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After Obama won the caucuses in 2008 and then the presidency, he tapped Vilsack to serve as secretary of agriculture, a post he held for eight years. President Donald Trump’s ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, a Republican, was governor during the 2016 caucuses.
By population, residents of Iowa and New Hampshire are vastly overrepresented on lists of Cabinet and diplomatic nominations, especially the plum postings in Western Europe and the Caribbean.
That’s not to say these appointees aren’t qualified. But they’re far more likely to have signed on early with a future president than activists in the other 48 states.
Party leaders may address the issue once a nominee is picked, but as much resentment as Iowa and New Hampshire draw, whatever states hope to dislodge and replace them would also face pushback.
No one, including Castro, has offered an alternative that’s widely acceptable.
Vilsack, for one, thinks the current system works well. The seasoned voters of Iowa narrow the field. The race shifts to New Hampshire for another culling by voters raised for generations to put powerful politicians under a microscope. Then South Carolina and Nevada, with more diverse populations, and then Super Tuesday.
“Pretty good formula,” Vilsack said.
Steve Romein, 70, a retired architect who came to Iowa to register voters with hundreds of other activists from a Seattle group called Common Purpose, has no objection.
“Until they design a better system, it’s working. The people in Iowa are very responsible,” he said.
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