Professor of Political Science, Boston University
March 10, 2016 at 3:15 pm
Because a lot of folks have asked, a blast from the past: an article Dave Canon and I published in 2000: “Race, Gender, and the Clinton Presidency,” in The Clinton Legacy, edited by Colin Campbell and Bert Rockman, New York: Chatham House Press, 2000, pp.169-99. It focuses on Bill Clinton, but also discusses Hillary Clinton. Click here to download: ClintonRaceGender
http://bit.ly/1P2hJfO @VSapiro
March 8, 2016 at 11:36 am
Part II of Gender and the Democratic Primaries and Caucuses
Underneath it all, there is a real debate going on between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton – and probably even more, between their advocates and surrogates. But I am not thinking about the ones most of the blogosphere talks about most. This debate is class and wealth and race and gender.
For some time I wondered why listening to the Democratic debates and campaign exchanges keep taking me back to heated discussions I witnessed (ok, and participated in) back in my graduate student days in the early 1970s. In that era, varieties of Marxist theory framed the thinking and scholarship of many students of social and political theory, social stratification, comparative politics, and other fields. It was, simultaneously, the era of the serious rise of race studies and gender studies. Lots of lively discussion back then.
What keeps coming to mind, like an old and not beloved song that gets stuck in your brain, are the old, even historic debates over whether class and wealth inequality is “primary” in the sense that race and gender inequalities are in some important way driven and determined by class and wealth, or whether race and gender inequalities are also fundamental. If class and wealth are primary, then eliminating unjust class and wealth inequality will ultimately eliminate race ad gender inequality. If not, and if one actually believes that race and gender inequalities are important, then social change requires focusing directly on all these different bases of inequality in more equal measure. This debate has flared up from time to time since the late 19th century.
I believe that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both define the elimination of structural inequalities and lack of opportunity based on class and wealth, gender, and race as fundamental goals, and would make vigorous efforts to act on these commitments if elected. They have both spent their professional careers and adult lives acting on these goals. Yes, differently. And they and their advocates have complaints about how the other one has pursued those goals, and how seriously. But they are headed in the same direction, and a dramatically different one, certainly, than the candidates in the other major party.
My earworm is born of this: For Bernie Sanders, at least as evidenced by his speeches and debate responses, all issues lead back to campaign finance and class and wealth inequality. (Yes, he now spends a lot of time discussing the transcripts of speeches, but that can be coded under campaign finance and class and wealth inequality.) He sounds earnest about gender and race, but not nearly as comfortable, and he quickly returns to class, wealth, and campaign finance at every turn.
There are three ways to understand his constant return to home base.
One, the simplest one, is that sexism and racism are just not as important to him. They matter, but not as much.
The second, an explanation of political expedience, would say that whatever he cares about, he has stirred up the crowds and donations by emphasizing class and wealth because that is what works politically. The public, or his public, cares about and is moved more by class and wealth than gender and race. Given the primary and caucus results, it is reasonable to draw the inference that his supporters are more focused on class and wealth. He is sticking to his message and base.
The third explanation is that as a socialist (or “democratic socialist”) of a certain age, he reflects the traditional Marxist framework he must have heard when a student that defines class is primary, a driver for gender and race inequality. In this framework, gender and race inequalities are important but they are mechanisms for the more fundamental structures of class and wealth inequality.
Hillary Clinton has developed the standard response that she is not a “single issue” candidate, and wants, instead, to overcome all "the barriers that are holding people back." Given Bernie Sanders’ longstanding public advocacy of gender and race equality, the only way to understand her criticism of the “single issue” basis of Senator Sanders’ campaign is that she hears the old primacy of class argument, which is not her take on the mechanisms of inequality.
Of course, equally important, is the way these social categories are woven together in our real lives -- what some people call the intersectionalities. As many folks have discussed, our experience of gender depends on such things as race and class, our experience of race depends on such things as class and gender, and our experience of class depends on such things as race and gender. But that does not mean any of these things boil away to steam.
To some people, this discussion would all be left-wing claptrap. To others, too cynical and tied to a candidate to listen really closely to both sides, it would be irrelevant. Maybe it sounds too “deep” to reflect the real thinking of real candidates, but these are both smart and well-educated people who have been thinking about equality and inequality throughout their long adult lives.
Reading the comments sections after news articles on the Democratic race, the sparring that is now taking place on social media, and the results of the primaries and caucuses and the exit and entrance polls, it is clear that a lot of people are hearing dog whistles about gender and race and how much they are fundamental in the political and policy thinking of the two Democratic candidates.
No doubt, the vast majority of people who care about eliminating structural racism and sexism would prefer either Democratic candidate to any of the Republicans. But this political scientist can’t help mulling over these questions.
Now be gone, my earworm. And Happy International Women’s Day.
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March 6, 2016 at 3:08 pm
For the moment, I'm trying not to think about gender dynamics in the Republican campaigns, primaries, and caucuses. Once it sunk to the level of seeing the relevance of the size of a man's body bits - his hands and, well, you know -- I want to think about more subtle gender matters. Suffice it to say it should not be surprising that women have not been as supportive of Donald Trump as men have, although he's plenty popular in many circles with them, too.
Consider the simple gender differences in support for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the exit and entrance polls displayed on the CNN website. Click on the chart to see a readable version.
Some provisos in reading. These are exit and entrance polls. They should be pretty good for parsing out who did what in the primaries and caucuses, but certainly not perfect. Not every state with primaries and caucuses had polling. These polls were (obviously) not taken simultaneously, so they capture different moments. Anyway:
There is a very consistent result: Men are more supportive of Bernie Sanders than women are (or women are less supportive than men are). Women are more supportive of Hillary Clinton than men are (or men are less supportive than women are). The differences are not huge (or yuge)*. There is more overlap between women and men than difference. That is usually the case in public opinion. But the differences are pretty consistently worth noting and in many cases over 10 percentage points different, which is something campaigns should find notable. In 4 cases -- Iowa, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Oklahoma -- women and men gave the nod to a different candidate. If only women voted, Hillary Clinton would have won all of those states (she lost Oklahoma). If only men voted, Bernie Sanders would have won all of those states (he lost Iowa, Massachusetts, and Nevada).
But it's not just about winning and losing; it's also about what we can learn about the election dynamics and, in this case, the preferences of men and women who vote in Democratic primaries and caucuses. The existence, if not size, of gender differences in preferences for the two candidates is so consistent across the races where we have data. In some cases where men and women tipped to the same candidate, there is, nevertheless, a notable* gender difference, for example, arguably in Arkansas, Georgia, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.
What's up? It is easy enough to imagine that Hillary Clinton gets a boost from women who, other things equal, want to support a woman and help create the historic first female presidency. There is probably some of that, and this is probably how much of the press and pundit world would call it. But there are other possibilities and it is unwise and, many of us have argued, plain wrong to look at gender differences and assume men's preferences are the norm and the explanation lies simply in how women are "different," or that only women are responding to gender.
We might also hypothesize that if we consider the well-known negatives about Hillary Clinton and the residual sexism in the public (and plenty of experimental work continues to show that sexist prejudice and stereotype are still with us), that part of what is going on is that men are, at the margins, more antagonistic to Hillary Clinton the female candidate. (Yes, we know: women can be sexist, too.) It's not so far fetched. Reading the scrolling comments after articles on the Democratic race, there are plenty of examples out there.
There could also be gender differences in reactions to the policy statements of the two candidates. It's been a long time since anyone has found systematic evidence of men being more liberal or progressive than men, so it's difficult to believe the difference has to do with the perceptions of Sanders as more left wing or liberal. There are differences in their rhetoric about inequality and taking care of vulnerable people. Many people have noted that although Senator Sanders stands in support of gender and race equality, as he develops these themes he usually returns quickly to class and wealth equality. Secretary Clinton frames the problems differently, listing each of these more coequally as goals. She also has a well-known history a work on women's issues and family and child policy. So these two candidates stand on the same side of equality issues -- certainly, in a different universe from most of the candidates fighting for the Republican nomination, but the framing is different, and might strike women and men differently. More about this in a later post.
Of course, then there are the Bernie Bros and the Old Feminists, neither of which have worked as well as surrogates as they might hope. A lot of women (and their supporters) don't want to be told (whether "mansplained" or not) that they should not be voting for a candidate only because she's a woman. Until it is normal for women to make serious runs at the presidency, and sometimes win, that line is a flop. (Former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin has pointed out that Bernie Sanders made the same argument when he ran against her, when she became the first female governor of Vermont, the 8th in the nation to be sworn in, and the 4th who was not the wife or widow of a governor.) On the other side, lecturing young women on their lack of historical memory of the struggles of women, or the places in hell reserved for those who don't support women, does little but create anger and backlash.
But gender is an issue in the Democratic race. There have been some interesting flare-ups between the supporters of the two candidates on gender issues in the comments sections that follow news articles on the race.
We can't know more without better data and more in-depth analysis. It will certainly be worth the effort.
*(a footnote): The methodology I use here is simple interocular examination. No significance testing, not attempt to be fancy.
P.S. After I wrote this, I ran across Kelly Ditmar and Glynda Carr's Black Women Voters: By the Numbers. Worth reading and very related.
bit.ly/1Sspqmi @VSapiro
March 2, 2016 at 11:53 am
Here's my initial, quick take on Super Tuesday, introduced and in dialogue with Margaret Waterman in the BU Professor Voices series:
Super Tuesday has come and gone, and Massachusetts voters (as well as voters from 11 other states and American Samoa) have spoken their minds. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton came out largely victorious, but Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders notched some victories as well. What does this mean for Massachusetts, and for the election going forward?
Virginia Sapiro is a Boston University professor of political science and an expert on public opinion, political behavior and electoral politics. She is also a former director of the American National Election Studies, the major scholarly survey of American voters that has been in operation since 1948. She broke down the results of Super Tuesday for us in the following Q&A:
Q: Let’s talk about local issues for a moment: Massachusetts had its primary today, and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton won. Vermont did too, where Trump and Bernie Sanders won. Was this a surprise or an expected result, given local pre-primary polling data?
VS: Let’s start with the Democrats, who will no doubt take both states in the general election. Senator Sanders’ home state went fully as expected — he is a very popular figure there. We have known for some time Massachusetts would be a highly contested state, and it clearly was at the photo-finish line. Clinton’s close win gives her 2 more delegates than Sanders gets from Massachusetts. The town-by-town results are very interesting (people can see for themselves in The Boston Globe). Clinton took most of the Boston area, Worcester area, the Fall River-New Bedford-Falmouth area, and the Lowell-Lawrence area. Sanders took many more towns, but his strength was in the smaller towns and more rural areas. Clinton’s strength was in the larger cities, the industrial areas and more racially diverse places including Springfield and Pittsfield. They split the Cape, but Clinton took Provincetown in a big way.
Q: On the Republican side, we expected Donald Trump to walk away with a large majority of delegates, and he did. Did we see anything new or surprising going on in the GOP primaries and caucuses?
VS: In a world framed by surprise, or perhaps shock, it is difficult to tell these days what a real surprise that is bigger than other surprises would look like. Trump’s win was not as great among late deciders as those who decided earlier, which shows the impact of the organized movement to opposition. Marco Rubio certainly hoped to do a lot better than he did, and must be disappointed that he took only Minnesota. He lost Virginia, but he took much of the Washington, DC suburbs where DC professionals and government employees live. It’s a directional sign, but it is very late in the game for directional signs. Ted Cruz took his home state of Texas, but would have been dead in the water if he hadn’t done so. Trump captured a few counties along the Rio Grande River, perhaps because of his promise to build a wall at the expense of Mexico. Cruz also took the neighboring state of Oklahoma and also Alaska. But he originally hoped to capture the Evangelical vote across the country, but despite Donald Trump’s dubious relationship with religion, the Evangelical vote still is a source of strength for Trump.
Kasich has been running to be the reasonable, normal candidate, but only gave the frontrunner a run for his money in Vermont. And Ben Carson is out there, bringing up the rear.
Perhaps the most surprising — or most remarkable — part of the evening was the Trump press conference, because of the way he has already set up his Florida White House at Mar-a-Lago and due to the unforgettable image of Chris Christie standing behind him during his whole long speech looking quietly panicked. The Twitter-sphere was worth the price of entry during that speech, with many people speculating that Christie had been taken hostage. Someone called for him to hold up a daily newspaper to prove that the picture of him was current. It is worth checking out #FreeChrisChristie.
Q: How about the Democratic side? What is most notable about the results there?
VS: The candidates did pretty much as expected in recent days. Bernie Sanders took his home state of Vermont, as well as Oklahoma, Colorado, and Minnesota. Vermont, of course, was a rout. Hillary Clinton took the rest, including American Samoa, which can’t vote in the General but does have one more delegate than Vermont does at the Convention. The race in Massachusetts was very close, but everywhere else where she won, she won big. As all the commentators have been saying her strength has been in the bigger, more populous states, and she is especially popular in African American communities. Their votes are very important for Hillary Clinton. Both Clinton and Sanders have long histories of support for African American rights, but Bernie Sanders’ strength is among whites on the left, and young people and first-time voters. I haven’t yet seen an analysis of the impact of Independent voters, which is likely to be large where that can happen, or of cross-over voters from the Republican ranks (see Jeff Jacoby’s column in The Boston Globe on why he voted for Bernie Sanders). But, given the excitement on the Republican side, I don’t expect that impact is much in the mix.
Q: There were so many different states involved today: is there anything we can learn from paying attention to the differences among them?
VS: Yes. This country is a very diverse place in all sorts of ways, so it is critical to examine the composition of the different states and regions of those states to understand not just what the outcome is likely to be in the nominating process and the fall election, but how this critical instrument of democracy works. It is one of the few times when we are — or should be — forced to consider the different peoples and areas of this country seriously, as part of “the people” who get to speak out and make a decision. It is too easy to label others as “fly-overs” or “red-necks” or “eastern elites” or any of the other terms that some Americans use to describe and dismiss others.
Q: Given Super Tuesday’s results, are we sure that in November we’ll be looking at a contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton? What will that race look like? What happens between now and Election Day in November?
VS: If I were a betting person, I would put money on it. But there is still a long way to go on both sides. Bernie Sanders has been able to generate enough donations to keep himself going for some time, but if Hillary Clinton continues to do best in the large, diverse, populous, and industrial areas, she can look forward to some wins that will seal her dominance. As for Donald Trump, his popularity among the voters seems to defy the party leaders and the more traditional Republicans, who are clearly deeply worried about a Trump win. His hesitation this past week to condemn David Duke and the KKK didn’t help.
Let’s assume for the moment the race will be between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. On the basis of what we see now, the Trump campaign, and his surrogates, will single-mindedly focus on throwing dirt, and likely in truly filthy ways. As he said today, he will run a campaign against Hillary Clinton (“if she is allowed to run”) that will focus on what he calls her lying. One would think a candidate who has regularly been caught in such obvious and major lies (not knowing who David Duke is?) would be careful of throwing stones in glass houses, but that hasn’t stopped him yet. Some portion of Republican voters will not be able to vote for him. Whether they will stay home or not is an interesting question. Hillary Clinton, of course, has high negatives with a lot of people, but when it comes to an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, I’m inclined to believe that Nate Silver’s (@NateSilver538) tweet of last night was correct: “Super Tuesday winners: Democratic Race: Hillary Clinton. Republican Race: Hillary Clinton.”
http://bit.ly/1VQFTj9 @VSapiro
February 10, 2016 at 9:51 am
An interview with Margaret Waterman posted this morning on the BU Experts site:
Q: This was the first primary of the season. How can we explain the results in New Hampshire?
VS: Tonight was a big win for the “outsiders.” Donald Trump had a clear plurality, and showed continuing strength in his “in your face” campaign. Unlike Trump, Bernie Sanders is a life-long politician and public official, so he is not as far an “outsider,” but throughout his career he has refused to attach himself to the Democratic party until now. He calls himself a socialist, and he devoted his campaign to a single-minded attack on economic power centers and their role in politics. Above all, the leaders in both races have picked up on anger and frustration with the way the systems has worked. New Hampshire voters declared themselves independent of the two major parties.
Daily Kos Elections give us some very interesting data on the NH Democratic primary. Among voters registered as Democrats (54% of the voters), the race between Hillary Clinton and Sanders was dead even – 49-49. Among those registered as Undeclared/Independent (41% of the voters), Sanders was favored in a landslide: 72-27. So given the high turnout yesterday (although not quite as high as in 2008), we see a major source of that large gap. It’s an interesting problem, because this was a Democratic primary, but those not affiliated with a party really determined its outcome.
On the Democratic side, it is also important to remember that in the closing period of the campaign the Sanders campaign outspent the Clinton campaign 3-1 in media buys. That’s not because they had more money, but because he really invested in the media campaign to get the final push, even while most of the campaign workers probably assumed it was all the face to face encounters. If media didn’t matter, they wouldn’t have made that investment. It is also true that there were many campaign problems among the other candidates’ organizations. Clinton allowed herself to be put on the defensive throughout this campaign. Rather than emphasizing the specifics of what she has done and what she stands for, she had to spend her time on matters like email, speeches, and whether campaign contributions bought her. She is thought to be reshuffling her campaign to get back to her message.
On the Republican side, the very crowded race means the last couple of weeks in particular often looked like a playground brawl. As more candidates drop out, there should be more clarity in distinguishing the candidates and what they stand for.
Q: Did anything seem especially surprising? What happened?
VS: The biggest surprise of the night was John Kasich’s second place showing. It’s also clear that during Saturday night’s debate, Chris Christie knocked Marco Rubio out without making gains himself. With the crowded field, the results for Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio are virtually indistinguishable. I assume this was the end of the road for Christie, and it is time for both Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson to leave the race. It is important to remember that after Trump the next three candidates, all of whom could move up, together had more support than Donald Trump, and it will be interesting to see what happens as the race slims down.
Q: You’re a New Hampshire voter, aren’t you? What was that like?
VS: It was a glorious morning — crisp blue skies, glistening white snow, and a huge turnout of voters. No matter whom they were for, and how they voted, people chose to participate in this exercise of democracy. It was very moving to be a part of it.
I bumped into a friend in the NH village where I vote early primary morning while I was shoveling and he was walking the dog. We talked about the primary, and he said he was an independent and still undecided. He was leaning toward Clinton and Kasich, and didn’t know which way he would go. It seems the votes were all about the feel of the candidates, what feelings they evoked in people much more than what they decided based on a careful examination of issues and platforms. Trump and Sanders stimulated and picked up on important feelings in the population.
Q: We have a few more decision points in February — the Nevada caucuses, the South Carolina primaries. Then comes the hectic month of March, which includes “Super Tuesday” on March 1. Do we now know more about what will happen then?
VS: We know that the race is far from over. That may not sound like a big statement, but it is. The next states are very different from the ones we have seen thus far, especially in terms of the Democratic base. The longer the races run, the more the financial resources of the campaigns will become an issue. The long distance race is very difficult and expensive, especially as they have to handle multiple states at once and cannot depend as much on the retail politics of Iowa and New Hampshire.
There’s also still another monkey wrench in the works, and that is the news that Michael Bloomberg is still considering entering the race, which he apparently would be especially likely to do if we seem to be moving toward a Sanders/Trump race. And who knows where that would end up?
@BUexperts
bit.ly/1LgWlmQ
@VSapiro
February 9, 2016 at 1:17 pm
Who knows what we will know by tomorrow, but there's one thing we know today: New Hampshire can be stunning!
Snowy #NHPrimary day in #Gilmanton at my voting place.
February 3, 2016 at 11:55 am
The New York Times published an article-length obituary of Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz on January 30, who died at the age of 91. He was a scholar and teacher whose thoughtful and distinguished work is among the best of modern Jewish philosophy and ethics in the Reform Jewish tradition. For a person of “a certain age,” his name conjures up the little book, Choosing a Sex Ethic (1969), which must have saved many progressive parents of that era from having to start the discussion themselves.
Rabbi Borowitz’s obituary gave me pause because in a very personal way he represented a Jewish tradition that shaped many of us growing up in the 1960s. He probed the notion of an ethical covenant of responsibility, dedicated himself to thought and action, thoughtful and ethical action, thought that engaged action. His was a theology that put one’s values on the line. Thinking about that took me back 50 years....
Truthfully, my deep education in these matters of ethics, thought, and action was launched not by reading his books, or anyone else’s for that matter. It came during my adolescence, on Thursday, June 18 and Friday, June 19, 1964, when Rabbi Borowitz and 15 other rabbis from across the country plus the Director of the Commission on Social Action of the umbrella organization of American Reform Judaism traveled to St. Augustine, Florida to join Martin Luther King and other civil rights movement activists in integration action organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That Thursday they demonstrated at a segregated motel restaurant, and while that was happening, African American participants jumped in the whites-only swimming pool.
As the New York Times described it, on Thursday, the manager of the motel “met the demonstrators outside the restaurant, a few feet from the swimming pool. ‘This is private property and I will have to ask you to leave,’ [he] said. When the demonstrators refused to do so, he began pushing. First he pushed the leaders and one by one he pushed the rabbis. As one rabbi was pushed aside another would step forward to take his place.” White onlookers shouted, already angry because the demonstrators had conducted a prayer service the night before. Martin Luther King, watching from across the street, described “raw police brutality,” including beatings and the use of cattle prods.
One of those rabbis was mine, Rabbi Byron T. Rubenstein, of Temple Israel in Westport, Connecticut. My family was very involved in the congregation, and when Rabbi Rubenstein set off for Florida, knowing he might not be back for Shabbat services, he asked some members of the congregation, including my father, to fill in for him, which my dad was glad to do. It seemed obvious to us that the religious and spiritual convictions we talked about so often were not just consistent with the resistance to segregation, but demanded that those who could summon the bravery to act must do so. It was slightly less than 20 years since the liberation of the concentration camps.
Those of us born after World War II were raised from the start with the questions about why more people who might have been able to do so did not resist. How did people live with watching their neighbors oppressed by the Nuremberg Laws and other anti-Jewish legislation? How did they live with watching them taken away on the Holocaust trains? For many of us, those questions translated easily into social commitment and even a worry that one might not have the character to be brave enough to resist injustice. Almost as much as I remember hearing the Declaration of Independence as a child, I remember hearing many sayings of Hillel HaGadol, but especially, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn;” and Pastor Martin Niemöller’s confession and admonition: “First they came for the Socialists….” The rabbis made this connection in their letter from jail, “Why We Went.”
The death of Rabbi Borowitz conjures up the memory of those few summer days of my early adolescence. We were proud of our rabbi, and worried on his behalf. It made us feel connected to what felt like the most important winds of change of the day. And the next day, on Friday evening as we gathered for services in his absence, the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed the Senate by a vote of 73-24. I remember standing with one of the Rabbi’s sons, about my age, both of us excited by the news, and I childishly (I suppose) told him, “Your Dad helped do this!”
On Saturday the papers report that a march by St. Augustine African Americans celebrating this landmark legislation was greeted by an angry mob of whites fired up by Ku Klux Klan speakers.
I have never done anything that demanded as much physical bravery as the thousands of African Americans in that era who were constantly involved in direct ways in resisting apartheid. And those rabbis certainly could have stayed home and spoken loudly from the safety of the liberal Jewish congregations of Connecticut and New York and Seattle and St. Paul and the other cities from which they came – although I daresay it is hard to believe that all of their congregants were pleased with their actions. But the likes of those community leaders who raised us with an ethic of responsibility, of not staying silent, of rational thought and action mixed together, of asking difficult questions and confronting evil: I am grateful for them.
Few of these rabbis are still with us. Rabbi Rubenstein died years ago. For those who are gone, may their names be for a blessing.
bit.ly/1TDVYtv
January 30, 2016 at 3:13 pm
Having just reviewed how the Iowa Caucuses work to prepare for this week's Big Event, I bet there are few folks out there outside of Iowa (and maybe inside Iowa) who are not total elections nerds who understand the process. So before the press and pundits focus only on "Who Won," I decided to share my work.
There are a lot of places to get good info, but I think a really good one is the NPR Briefing Book, guide to the primaries and caucuses. It is here: http://www.npr.org/2016/01/29/464910375/download-nprs-2016-election-briefing-book. That's what I relied on. A funnier version is here: http://trib.in/20zNWUD, by Rex Huppke in the Chicago Tribune.
In brief, this is what folks have to know:
(1) There are two separate caucuses going on: The Republican and the Democratic ones and they work differently. But in both cases, the caucuses ultimately will determine ONLY how many delegates from Iowa will be assigned to vote for which candidates on the first round at the national nominating convention.
(2) Caucuses are precinct meetings that begin at 8 p.m. EST/ 7 p.m. CST and they have a set process and order. You have to be there on time to participate. There is no such thing as “absentee voting."
(3) The Republican Caucuses. These are simpler in process, although they are dealing with more candidates. In about 700 locations throughout Iowa, the caucuses frame the process to decide who Iowa’s 30 delegates will be to the Republican National Convention on July 18-21.
(4) The Democratic Caucuses. (Or, “Hold onto your Hats). This process begins now, but doesn’t end until for a long, long time. At about 1,000 locations throughout Iowa, the caucuses frame the process to decide who Iowa’s 52 delegates are to the Democratic National Convention on July 25-28. Actually, Monday's caucuses only decide 44 of these seats, because 8 seats are occupied by “super-delegates,” who get to go because they hold important political or governmental positions.
If more than 17% of eligible voters take part in the Iowa caucuses, they will beat their previous record of participation.
Aren't you glad they don't do this later in the process when we're all already tired?
January 27, 2016 at 11:18 am
In the course of doing research on the cost and price of higher education, I ran across a couple of tables that are very interesting in light of the debate between Democratic nomination candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Both want college education to be more accessible and affordable, but their assumptions and routes are different. Most pointedly, Sanders says he wants public higher education to be tuition free, and Clinton says she wants it debt free. (There are lots of other differences, but lets just focus on this.)
So, here are two interesting tables published by The College Board.
First, 2015-16 In-District Tuition and Fees at Public 2-Year Institutions by State. My transplant is fuzzy, so find the whole thing here:
What that chart says is that the highest tuition and fees in the country by far for public 2-year colleges are in Vermont, the second highest in NH.
Then, let's look at 2015-16 In-State Tuition & Fees at Public 4-Year Institutions by State. Again, you can look at the full information is here:
What the chart says is that the highest tuition and fees in the country for public 4-year colleges are in NH, followed very closely by Vermont, with all other state significantly behind them.
I would be fascinated to find out how Senator or Mayor Sanders tried to deal with this situation in his home state, and what effect he had. One might argue that public state tuition and budgets are under the control of the state and not the federal government or the city in which the university resides, so he was powerless to affect this unfortunate situation. But then we have to consider what are the implications for his higher education platform and anticipation of the leverage he would have as President to deal with tuition at public institutions. The federal government certain has had an impact on higher ed finances in many ways over time, but the fact of federalism in a country that rejected the idea of a national university system numerous times over the past 200 years makes the politics and logistics of control of tuition (for example, as compared with debt) very difficult indeed.
http://bit.ly/1KFr64C
