The Iowa caucuses are Monday, and questions are being raised about how much of a "surge" will occur on both the Democratic and Republican sides.
While Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are counting on a whole slew of virgin voters to help put them over the top, The New York Times is reporting that the numbers aren't bearing them out. "The pace of new voter registration in the Iowa caucuses is reason to question whether a huge turnout is really in the offing," the newspaper said. (You can almost see the Gray Lady's eyebrow raise.)
This is not necessarily surprising to us cats. While we'll be biting our nails (see above) along with everybody else, we've been aware for awhile of a few things that could support the Times's observations.
As observed before, Trump's Iowa organization is kind of, um, wanting. They're not doing voter registration, and who knows whom the folks they turn out to the caucuses will actually end up supporting? Although Rafael Cruz, Jr. has a merry little band of imported worker bees who are pounding the pavement and staying in rented dorms, the campaign's focus on evangelicals leads us to believe that they're leaving their registration chores to the churches. Jeb!, who has the next-best organization in Iowa, is focused on long-established voters, not newbies.
On the Democratic side, were there enough grownups in the Sanders campaign who, over the summer and fall, figured out the voter registration piece of this puzzle? Or were they too occupied building 15,000-person crowds for their rallies? Meanwhile, Hillary's "establishment" backers — unions, teachers, Planned Parenthood, EMILY's List — have long focused on registration. Their efforts could explain the modest uptick in the Democratic sign-ups.
We cats are making no predictions here. We're only saying that it's a possible explanation for a set of Iowa facts that don't appear to match the enthusiasm that people are seeing on the ground. So we'll just sit switching our tails, and we'll wait.
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