Students travel to Iowa caucus

Fifteen students from the group IU Students for Howard Dean will be driving to Iowa today to campaign during the Iowa caucuses Monday. The group plans to go door to door to registered Democrats and undecided voters to encourage them to vote for the former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean. \nNone of the students will vote in Iowa, since the entire group is made up of non-Iowa residents. Cody Williams, president of IU Students for Howard Dean, is organizing the trip. \n"This is the very first vote being cast for the 2004 elections, and we feel this is the best way to make an impact," he said. "We are going to be involved and be right in the middle of everything."\nCaucuses provide an opportunity for local members of the Democratic and Republican state parties to discuss and select their parties' nominee for the presidential general election. Iowa is by law always the first state to hold a caucus during a presidential election year. \nPolitical Science Professor Marjorie Hershey said the Iowa caucus is extremely important because it is the first time delegates of the presidential election compete and because the event traditionally draws a tremendous amount of media attention. \n"The precinct caucuses all over the state of Iowa are going to choose delegates to the next higher level of the caucus, which is the country level, and those delegates will be committed to vote for a particular presidential candidate," she said. \nShe said Iowa's vote for the Democratic and Republican nominees will not actually be decided until the state convention is held in the spring. But this is the first step in the process.\n"In a caucus, meetings are held, that's what the word caucus means. People get together, face to face to talk about who they want to represent them," she said.\nCandidates competing in the caucus are measured against how well the media predicts they will do.\n"The media in advance of the caucus tends to come to some conclusion in advance about how certain candidates will do and if a candidate is expected to win," Hershey said. "These expectations stick in readers' minds, and they are bound to condition how it is that people interpret the actual results."\nPolitical Science Professor Gerald Wright believes the method of evaluating a candidate's performance against media expectations is misleading. \n"If the media do a bad job of predicting how a candidate was expected to do, it is the expector's fault, not the candidate's fault," he said.\nDemocratic candidates Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman have chosen not to participate in the Iowa caucus. Carol Moseley Braun withdrew from the presidential race yesterday and officially endorsed Dean. \nProfessor Edward Carmines does not believe the Iowa caucus is an accurate indicator of a candidate's chance at the national level. \n"Iowa is a small Midwestern state," he said. "Ethnically and racially it is very homogeneous. It does not have any really metropolitan areas. So in many ways, it is not very representative of the country at large." \nCarmines said the caucuses provide an opportunity to narrow down the number of candidates running. \n"So its real importance is not that it necessarily picks the nominee of the party when there is a competitive race, but that it winnows out some of the candidates for the future races."\n-- Contact staff writer Rami Chami at rchami@indiana.edu.