ShareThisIowa has long operated on the assumption that if its voters caucus first presidential candidates will come.
But at Saturday's Republican straw poll in Ames, some of the biggest names in GOP politics will be nowhere to be found. Among the no-shows: Presumptive front-runner Mitt Romney, Tea Party movement maven Sarah Palin, and potential powerhouse-in-waiting Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.
This has cleared the field a bit for Minnesota Republicans Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann, who are campaigning hard in the Hawkeye State, but who remain relative upstarts in national politics. Both have raised anew the perennial concerns about why Iowa should play such an outsized role in presidential fortunes. Pawlenty, whose campaign has suffered of late, finds pundits speculating about whether he will wash out based on his performance in a straw poll that measures its attendance at around 10,000. Bachmann's niche appeal among the religious conservatives who dominate GOP politics in the state has also fueled fresh criticism about Iowa's continued influence in the process.
Critics have long argued that Iowa's caucus-goers are too white, old and small-town to fairly represent America. "It's always a question in every cycle," said former Des Moines Register political reporter David Yepsen, now director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University.
Iowa is 91 percent white, according to the U.S. Census. The United States as a whole is 72 percent white, with a robust and growing mix of black, Hispanic, Asian and other ethnicities making up the other 28 percent. Iowa's largest minority group is a 5 percent Hispanic population.
The state's rural character recently prompted another big-name candidate, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, to take himself out of contention. Citing his opposition to ethanol subsidies -- a mainstay in corn-rich Iowa -- Huntsman told the Associated Press, "I'm not competing in Iowa for a reason."
The state got another black eye recently when a conservative religious group got Bachmann to sign a "marriage pledge" with a reference to the strength of black slave families.
Other top candidates, including Pawlenty, declined to sign on, and the slavery reference was dropped. But the episode had some Iowa Republicans wringing their hands about the image of their party.
"It confirms the notion that people in the national media want to write about," said Craig Robinson, political director of the Iowa Republican Party during the 2008 caucuses. Robinson, who edits TheIowaRepublican.com, the state's largest conservative news website, said a recent poll showed that Republican caucus-goers are interested in one thing above all else -- defeating President Barack Obama in November 2012.
Romney won the Ames straw poll in 2007, but placed second to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in the real event, the 2008 Iowa caucuses where national delegates were decided. This year, Romney has not actively campaigned in the state, but Robinson said, "Romney still has a lot of support here. Why? Because we think he might be the one who can beat Obama."
Meanwhile, Bachmann and Pawlenty are putting their all into the Ames straw poll, which both regard as a vital stop in their campaigns for the Republican nomination.
Like it or not, political analysts say Iowa is likely to remain a key presidential proving ground, as it has been since the early 1970s. The Ames straw poll is essentially a GOP fundraiser -- candidates entice supporters with free tickets, food, bus rides and entertainment -- but Iowa remains the place where campaigns go to establish their credibility in the heartland.
In the end, defenders of the Iowa caucuses say their chief argument for being first in the nation is not their demographics, but their size. Like New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state, Iowa is small enough to provide an even playing field for candidates willing to engage in the state's trademark retail politics. The alternative, they say, are the big-buck media blitzes needed to win big states like California, New York and Illinois.
"Any individual state that you pick to be more diverse is going to be so large that small-scale candidates without a lot of financial backing won't be able to compete," said Cary Covington, a political scientist at the University of Iowa. "Or it's going to be a small state, in which case it's going to have its idiosyncrasies."
(Contact Kevin Diaz at kdiaz(at)startribune.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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