Shop Talk: Revisiting Iowa

For Republican strategists, the caucuses are never far off...


The Iowa-Iowa State game was the hot topic for most people eating at Des Moines’ Raccoon River Brewing Company in September 2009. But Politics asked some in-state leaders of last year’s Republican presidential campaigns to talk about the Iowa caucuses—both past and future. This is an edited transcript of the conversation...

Politics: Where do you see Iowa fitting in the ever-changing primary schedule? The parties are trying out Saturday this year, right?
 
Eric Woolson: I guess it was the state parties looking to head off the other states who complain that we don’t always have a lot of participation in that whole process.

David Kochel: Well, I think that the tradition of a day and a week between Iowa and New Hampshire is important to protect. You can’t stack these contests too closely together or they lose their effect. The ability to go into a state and change the dynamic after you’ve come out of Iowa with a win for instance, it needs time to play out. I think the Monday date is the best one because it’s the tradition, number one, and, number two, if you start playing around with those days then you loosen up the whole schedule, and other people can jump in, and we can’t have that.

David Roederer: In the end you’ve got to look at it from a media perspective. I mean, is Saturday really the best media day? I think you’re asking for trouble there. If you can do it on the Monday—I mean there’s always some complaints that people can’t get off work—but I really don’t think the outcome of the caucus on either side was dependent because people couldn’t get off work.
 
Kochel: Right, there was no evidence in this last caucus that turnout was a big problem. Obviously we had double the turnout on the Democratic side and, what, a factor of 50 percent larger on our side?

Roederer: One thing at least the three of us always keep in perspective—we haven’t always been the greatest at ‘whoever wins Iowa is pre-ordained the nominee.’ I think we look at ourselves as a winnowing out process. I hope the primaries don’t get bunched up so close because in Iowa you still have—whether we like the results or not, and Eric obviously liked the results—you can still do retail politics here and you’ll be OK. I mean if we get thrown in with a super however-many-states-you-want-to- include primary, it’s going to be nothing but an air war and you’re out of there. I still think for better or worse Iowans and candidates have the opportunity to see if they can connect with each other.

Woolson: It did have great value for Gov. Huckabee’s campaign and the idea that we didn’t have the funding, but you really can run it like you’re running for the governor of the state, for instance. You’re out there and you’re going around a lot of small towns and meeting people. I remember early on we would stop someplace in ‘06 and there would be 10 or 12 people there. And I’d say, “Trust me this is how it works.” Early on it takes a while to build up.  But that was the great thing for us. We were able to build that grassroots organization without a lot of money. I don’t know how you do it in a lot of other states, and I think the other advantage that Gov. Huckabee had was that Little Rock reminds me a lot of Des Moines or Des Moines reminds me a lot of Little Rock. It’s the same size, the same sort of population, the same sort of ag base outside of the big city. So he just really played well here.

Kochel: Yeah it’s a great fit culturally.


Politics: What’s it like for other candidates coming to Iowa? Arizona and Massachusetts aren’t exactly like Des Moines in most ways.

Kochel: I think that’s probably one of the things we had to address from the outset with Gov. Romney, because he’s lived in Boston all these years, and he’s been a very successful business executive. Accessibility was a challenge always—to get to know him, to put him into a small living room setting was very hard. We built a good organization, and we turned out more than our goal. But, yeah, it’s a challenge for candidates that come from some place that doesn’t really resemble the type of politicking you do in Iowa. It’s a learning process. And he certainly invested the time, and his family did. I think by the end, he was a good retail candidate and we did well.

Roederer: Every time I talk about this I get into trouble, so I probably shouldn’t, but I think it’s something that we as a state need to be aware of. As people can refine things a lot more, will only certain types of candidates come out here? If you aren’t so far right of center does it make sense for you to come out here? And I don’t know how to answer that question. I hope that we can still do that because if not then I think certain candidates won’t come.

Woolson: But I think you never know who’s going to catch on in some sense either. So, it’s like you said, you have them come out. It’s like football. The game on paper is one thing, but you play the game to see who’s going to win. It’s like the 2000 election and George Bush. My thought at the time, having worked on that campaign, was that he completely changed the caucuses because he’s not doing 10 people or 12 people in Vinton or somewhere. He’s doing three events a day, and he’s running it like a general election campaign where you’ve got 500 people there. And I thought this is the end of the caucuses. Here you come around eight years later, and Huckabee is right back to doing what we saw with Jimmy Carter or Gary Hart or the smaller candidates that find a way to break through.

Kochel: I think the best way I can describe this is in both of those instances—in ‘08 and 2000—candidates were running against their own expectations almost as much as they were against other candidates. So these gifted tacticians sitting across from me set it up so that Mitt had to win by a landslide. You don’t have to skip Iowa, you don’t have to cherry pick these states as much as you have to set your expectations in such a way that you can be considered successful against those expectations. And we failed to do that. Candidates that are able to do that—whether they come in first, second or third in Iowa—are going to get the bounce or they’re going to run into a speed bump. You don’t have to go full out. Not everybody has to run the same campaign here in Iowa; each candidate has to run a campaign that fits to what their expectations are. And so, as strategists, we have to do a good job of setting up expectations, and I did not do a good job of that; or these guys did a better job.

Woolson: It got scary for us, David, because in March of ‘07, Huckabee was still at zero in the polls and I was telling the reporters, “We just have to be in the top three.” And they would laugh at us, and say, “There’s no way you’re going to be in the top three.” Well by late ‘07, when all of a sudden it looks like he’s in the lead, and I keep saying, “We can’t be in the lead, we just need to finish in the top three.” And they’re laughing at me and saying, “You’re downplaying your expectations and you’ve got to win Iowa.”
And I thought, how could it go from the point where we couldn’t make it in the top three to where we had to win Iowa? That got to be, for us down the homestretch, really dicey.

Politics: What does a candidate have to do to be successful in Iowa in 2012?

Kochel: Well, Mike Huckabee has to win Iowa with over 50 percent. [laughter] He is the reigning president of Iowa on the Republican side there is no doubt about that.
 
Roederer: He’s going down just like President Bob Dole.

Kochel: He’s just like Bob Dole was in 1996, cause he’d done so well in ’88.

Woolson: Dave raises a point; it’s a tough job to repeat. It is hard, as these guys know, keeping any organization together for over two years or fours years, whatever.  It’s very hard to do.

Kochel: Or a Sarah Palin run.

Woolson: Or if Sarah Palin runs. So there are always challenges to keeping an organization together. The question I think first with Gov. Huckabee, is he going to run? I don’t know the answer to that, but again, Iowa two and a half years from now is going to be different then the Iowa from a year and a half ago.

Roederer: We have no idea how things are going to play out at the national level. That’s going to make a big, big difference. I would not speculate on anybody right now, and I am not doing that just to hedge. My sense is that Gov. Huckabee will not be running again, but I don’t have any insight. It appears to me he likes the gig he’s got.

Woolson: He’s doing what he’s doing.

Roederer: I think Gov. Romney is doing all the things he needs to do if, in fact, he decides to make another run.  But if he makes another run, does he decide to do it here in Iowa? Don’t know.

Woolson: I think it will be someone we don’t know or somebody we’re not thinking of right now. You’re going to see more then a few people who are kind of that next generation for us, just as Obama was for them.  

Kochel: I think you see [Sen. John] Thune play well here. He understands the state, has some friends. [Minnesota Gov. Tim] Pawlenty absolutely is thinking about Iowa.

Roederer: Pawlenty is a decent, decent person. I don’t know whether you guys have spent any time with him.

Kochel: I think you can’t discount the impact Sarah Palin would have if she decides to run.  She could come into Iowa and splash the pot.

Roederer: I agree with David on that one.

Kochel: Would any of you guys want to go against her on a straw poll? She can put 15,000 people in a room and not really have to work at it. So I mean I would never want to go against her in a straw poll.
She could come in and change the dynamic [snaps] like that. Cause when you’re out reporting crowd sizes for Huckabee of thirty last time, for instance, and then you report a crowd size for Sarah Palin of you know 6,000 in Cedar Rapids or you know 4,000 in Sioux City. I mean how do you even compete?

Woolson: Well that’s certainly true for anyone who was in the field last time around. Even at the end—Obama’s filling the Hilton Coliseum aside—anybody on either side even if you’ve got 500 people or 1,000 people it doesn’t compare to that appeal that she seems to have right now.  And again that can change. A year from now we may be saying, “Gosh, too bad she can’t draw a crowd anymore.”
 
Roederer: To quote Roger Ailes—remember when he was in the political consulting business, he did several races with us—he said, “I don’t care how brilliant someone is or what the best ideas they may have no matter how good they’re going to be, if people don’t like you they’re not going to vote for you.” That’s something she’s got. Obviously Obama’s got it or had it. Whether or not they lose that, I don’t know.

Woolson: That was one of the strengths I saw early on with Gov. Huckabee, you meet him, you like him.

Politics: On the money subject, for whoever runs the next time around, does the price tag just keep going up?

Kochel: I don’t think you need the kind of budget that we had last time to do well in Iowa. It’s very hard in the heat of the campaign to start saying no to things that you are capable of doing since you have the re- sources. So, you know, it takes a lot of staff to move a family of 5 brothers around, and a lot of events and turn out phone calls and postcards and all of that. Number one, we always felt we had an opportunity in Iowa, but then at a certain point we really felt we needed to win. And you’re not going to start trimming the sails just because you don’t want it to look like you’ve spent too much money at a certain point. You’ve built an organization that has to deliver a certain product in terms of votes and phone calls.

Woolson: That becomes a problem if you spent this much up to now. They’re expecting you to spend more going forward.

Roederer: I think in all candor on a dollar for dollar basis and a return on investment, we did much better in the McCain campaign. First they started out with the invincibility, not that they thought they were invincible, but you had to show, “By golly, we’re going to do this...”

Politics: For Gov. Huckabee, if he were to run again, he probably couldn’t run the same campaign because the expectations are so different.

Woolson: Two and a half years from now it would have to be different than today—it would have to be different, he would have to—his message would be different. He’d obviously appeal to the same people, but he would have to broaden that base.

Roederer: I think one thing that plays into Gov. Romney this second time around is that for a long period of time, even coming out of Iowa, most Republicans still thought we were going to be going up against Hillary and not Obama. I still think that had something to do with things. If you go up against Obama, I just can’t imagine somebody who isn’t extremely articulate getting through our primary. I think we know we’re going to have to have somebody match him word for word—and you know of those type of people, I think, are rare.

Kochel: That’s not a long list.

Roederer: Mitt Romney was right at the top of the list. We saw that in all of the debates.
 
Politics: Could there be a primary on the Democrats’ side in two and a half years?
 
Roederer: In my opinion and it’s a biased one, in the end the Democrats will do whatever they have to do to unite. Unless things are just horrible, nobody’s going to challenge Barack Obama.
 
Kochel: There is no way you would be able to raise the kind of money you need to raise. There’s no way. Under what condition other than a total economic collapse and the war in Afghanistan becoming almost nuclear?
 
Roederer: I don’t hear any disgruntlement among my Democratic friends here in Iowa with Obama. Do you?

Kochel: No.

Woolson: And the ones that go to the caucuses aren’t exactly the rank and file Democrats anyway. The caucus-goers aren’t going to complain all that much either.
 
Roederer: And they are still trying to keep their organization alive. I don’t really know whether it is or it isn’t.

Politics: If there’s not a Democratic primary in 2012, will the Iowa caucuses be as much of a focus?
 
Kochel: In terms of the narrative for the Republican nomination, absolutely it will be huge. Will it get as much coverage as Clinton-Obama? No, of course not. There’s so much fame going on in that process, we may not see anything like it again. But in terms of its relative impact on the process, it will be the same for us, could even be more important. Depends, we might see a lot of front- loading again. A lot of these other states say, “Well, we’re going to elbow our way to the front so that we have more impact.” But the truth is that they water down their impact and heightened ours and New Hampshire’s.
 
Roederer: I hope other states keep this in mind: First of all, caucuses don’t happen on their own. There is a lot of hard work and frankly a lot of heartache that goes into it. It pits neighbor against neighbor sometimes and spouse against spouse.

Woolson: Especially because it’s such a long process. You have people involved for months and months, if not a year or two.

Kochel: It can be very draining. I see it more on our side this last time than on the Democratic side. I thought their caucus motivated them, and ours took a lot out of us. It could be that in Iowa McCain had a smaller footprint. So the people that were all ginned up by the caucuses were not the same people revved up by the general election. On the Democratic side, the very same people who went to the caucuses were the same people who were revved up by the general election, and they stayed mobilized and organized and
I think they used it as more of a liftoff. Maybe the example of 2000 with Bush having such a good and well-run effort here helped him win the election—even though he didn’t win here in Iowa in 2000. They came darn close, and he came back and won it in 2004.

Woolson: The question I had: We see so much more of the candidates than in any other state except for New Hampshire, do we build these stronger affections for candidates when they aren’t in the race? We don’t necessarily want to work for the guy that ends up winning.

Politics: Does what’s happening now—between healthcare, cap and trade and a lot of the townhall stuff that has been going on all summer—define the issues for what will happen in a couple years? Or is it still too early?

Roederer:  Still too early. If in fact they were in the next two years able to get a cap and trade implemented, maybe. But even their own healthcare thing doesn’t go into effect until 2013. That’s what was so ironic—or disingenuous, call it whatever you want—about the president saying how many people are hurt every year that we wait. If some of those things like cap and trade, if those started, if that did go into effect. It will adversely affect the Midwest. Then you could see a major backlash.

Kochel: Cap and trade could drive the local narrative more than the national narrative. Who talks about ethanol in New Hampshire? Well, Sen. McCain does because he has an opportunity to every time he was at a microphone. I think it is going to come down to a referendum on the economy and what is going on in Afghanistan. Those two things are pretty much a bet to be a part of the conversation.

Woolson: Would you throw health- care into that, the economy part of it?

Kochel: We’ll have no idea what the actual impact is going to be and by then the partisan rancor of the whole fight now is gone and we’ve moved on to something else. But cap and trade could be a big part of it.

Roederer: Internally, I think Afghanistan is probably Obama’s biggest issue. I was talking to a military person who I have quite a bit of respect for, and he was indicating that Iowa is probably going to see its biggest call up that we’ve had yet. I asked how long he thought we’d be over there at the level that we’re at. He said 14 years. I think that’s a real problem for the president.

Politics: Because politics here is a little different, it seems like it would be hard for out-of-state consultants to come into Iowa and be successful.

Kochel: I think you can do it. I think there’s a lot of institutional knowledge around the caucuses—how they work, what the history is in terms of how an organization is built. It is a very Iowa-centric process—you’ve got to understand that the Farm Bureau meetings are going on now. We all have antenna for how important the milestones are and it doesn’t apply everywhere. But Washington, D.C. is filled with advisers who have done a couple of laps around this track.

Woolson: Part of it may be role specific. I may have to kill you after I tell you this, but my first presidential campaign was with Joe Biden back in 1987. The reason I ended up there is that I got a call from Arthur Davis—a Des Moines attorney and former Des Moines mayor, who was really well liked. He said, “Look, we’ve got this press secretary from New York and he’s just not getting along with the Des Moines press corps. He’s just not clicking with them stylistically, and we need an Iowa guy that can talk to Iowans and speak Iowan.” So, it may be that stylistically that we’re a little different than some folks. But I think from a field staffer standpoint, and even people coming in and managing campaigns at some point, they’ve fit in very well here.

Roederer: To me it depends. Could you bring a group of consultants in here and just plain put the thing together from scratch? No, you couldn’t do that. Because the caucuses still are less about media and more an organization effort. It’s hard, unless someone is going to spend a few years here to put together an organizational effort if you don’t know the territory. I always like to see a combination.

Politics: So you would encourage people to come for the experience?

Roederer: They should. If you want to learn grassroots campaigning from a national level and be involved in that, I would certainly encourage people to come to Iowa to try it out. I think everyone would learn.

Kochel: I think it’s hard to duplicate. I think there are people who do presidential campaigns—maybe in South Carolina where it’s a little more bare-knuckled, but it’s a similar thing—people can go in there and really get immersed in something different. New Hampshire tends to be more New Hampshire-centric. I don’t think you see as many people flying into New Hampshire to learn how to do campaigns as you do here.
 
Roederer: Probably a self-serving statement, but I think people who come from out of state and who come to work in Iowa and the caucuses leave with a very good feeling that they were treated well.

Woolson: Treated well, and I think they see a different Iowa than what they see on the news. I remember when Gov. Bush in ‘99 came into the state and—names will not be named—one of the first things one of the national TV reporters said was “Where can we find a rusty tractor for our backdrop?” That’s what they wanted.

Kochel: Did you guys have one flown in?

Woolson: We had a couple of them that we had on standby on a flatbed trailer that we could move out to wherever we needed.