Obama Conquers Iowa: Can He Do the Same in NH?

The Iowa caucuses held Thursday night were exciting and full of surprises. Despite spending a ton of money in the state, Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney had disappointing finishes (Romey, however, fared exceptionally well in the largely-ignored Wyoming Republican caucuses on Saturday). Despite starting late, Fred Thompson did relatively well. Despite being outspent, Ron Paul and John Edwards exceeded media expectations (if not their own campaigns’). Despite not campaigning very much, John McCain had a solid showing, which will be helpful to him as Tuesday’s primaries in New Hampshire approach (recall that McCain beat George W. Bush there in 2000).

Among the biggest surprises were Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama. It’s not particularly surprising that each won his respective party’s contest, but the margin by which they won (9% and 8%, respectively) was larger than expected. As always, race matters in an election that features a racial minority candidate. Since Obama got the most attention coming out of Iowa, we wanted to take a moment to examine the racial issues surrounding his “win,” and what that might mean for the forthcoming contests.

First, it’s important to understand how the Democratic Party structures its caucus rules. There are two rounds of “voting” during a caucus. The first is simply to determine “viability.” If a candidate has fewer than 15% of the caucus-goers in his or her corner (often literally), that candidate is not viable. That means that supporters of that candidate can either leave the caucus meeting or support a candidate who is viable in the second round – the round that “counts” toward selecting delegates to the next round of caucuses in the state. As expected, many caucus first rounds resulted in Kucinich, Dodd, Biden and Richardson not being viable. So the question then was: Which of the top three Democratic candidates (Clinton, Edwards and Obama) were second-choices for those who supported one of the four who did not have enough support to be viable? The answer: most for Obama, many for Edwards, and hardly any for Clinton.

Given Americans’ propensity to vote for white men, what can be gleaned from these results in Iowa? First, at least under these circumstances, an answer to the old debate about whether we are more likely to get a black man or a white woman as president first is suggested: the former. If the Democratic caucuses in Iowa are viewed as a contest between racism and patriarchy, it is clear that patriarchy is a more solid American tradition than racism. Of course, it’s not appropriate to extrapolate such a large question from this limited experience. But in the context of Obama v. Clinton, the Obama camp should take some comfort in that Obama was the first or second choice of 38% of Iowa caucus-goers, while Clinton was only able to get support from about 29% of them, even though both spend considerable time and money in the state, and both had extensive grass-roots organizations there.

But there are big differences between caucuses and primaries, and this year, race is an important element in those differences.

There is no secret voting during a caucus. Not only is one’s preference public, but it is cast in front of neighbors. Mendelberg’s “norm of racial equality” is essential to understand here. Americans understand that it is not socially acceptable to discriminate on the basis of race, so we are careful to do what we can to avoid even the appearance of bigotry in our language and actions. If a caucus-goer in Iowa had concerns about having a black man as president (whether he or she was consciously aware of the concerns or not), those concerns were unlikely to surface because of the public nature of making one’s preference known. This will not be the situation in New Hampshire. When the curtain is drawn in the voting booth, concerns about black men’s ability to be trusted, willingness to play by the rules, laziness and/or lack of intellect can surface in ways they will not in a caucus or even in an anonymous public opinion poll.

If Obama conquers New Hampshire in the same way he conquered Iowa, it will be a sign that he has been able to transcend negative racial predispositions (though NOT a sign that such dispositions have dissipated in American culture – see. . . well, see this blog every week for evidence to the contrary). If he stumbles in NH, it will be time to take a hard look at what factors may be at work to allow those predispositions to drive voting preferences. In that case, we will be as far as we have always been from resolving the black man / white woman question about electing a minority president.

See Stephen’s analysis of the Iowa caucuses from CBS2 in Chicago here. Check that site on Wednesday morning for his analysis of Tuesday’s primaries in New Hampshire.