It wasn't part of the initial planning for caucuses. As I've noticed, there been caucuses since statehood. Presidential politics, simply were piggybacked onto them. Caucuses still deal with basically internal Iowa republican party business, internal Iowa Democratic Party businesses. So the presidential dimension is an add on piggybacked onto those processes. That being said, a good effect of the caucuses is that they make candidates talk to individual voters as real live human beings. In other words, if we go to a big media states with hundreds and thousands of people in places, oftentimes, real voters were simply there as campaign prompts for photo ops. You'll see supporters standing around or standing behind a candidate giving this speech, but they're just there to suggest big crowds, big enthusiasm and so-forth. In Iowa, candidates have the talk directly to the individual voters, and there are times that reporters aren't supposed to be the story of themselves, and a candidate may say something, and a reporter may challenge a candidate on the accuracy of what he or she said or try to push it a little further, but reporters typically have to be careful about not becoming part of the story themselves. Real voters don't have to do that. So in various forums, that house parties of the soapbox at the Iowa State Fair at a small coffee shop, individual voters can push and challenge candidates regarding their views on things of interest to those individual voters. That's a good thing that the Iowa caucuses do. At the same time because it's such a media events, we have to remember that simply all the caucuses do is give our first indication of what real party activists think about their array of potential nominees. That's all they do, there's no election other than county-level delegates, which nobody cares about outside of Iowa, there's no election of national nominating delegates, it's simply sticking a thermometer into the body politic of each political party and getting a reading of their temperature toward how they feel about what kind of warm they have toward particular candidates for their party's nomination. So we always have to remember that it's not about national delegates, it's a non-null election, it's certainly the first official indication of what real people, not man on the street interviews, not pulling samples, what real party activist think about their array of candidates. People sometimes believe that the Iowa caucuses will determine who will be president or at least who'll be the party's nominees, that's not necessarily the case. In terms of nominees, yes, roughly three-fourths of the time, whoever among the Democrats, when their caucuses, that person tends to get the democratic nomination, but of course, it depends upon how that plays out later in the primary season, but it's a reasonably good predictor. On the republican side, it's only about a third of the time that the person who wins the republican caucus actually becomes the Republican nominee. So there is some success, but it's not ironclad for the caucuses as a predictor of the nominations. At the same time regarding the presidency, since Jimmy Carter, under the radar, won those caucuses in 1976, only twice since then has the winner of a contested caucus gone on to win the presidency. The first was George W Bush in 2000, the second was Barack Obama in 2008, but those three times, Carter, George W Bush, and Barack Obama are the only three people in the modern top caucus periods since there is association with presidential politics. They're the only three cases in which somebody who's won a contested caucus has gone on to win the presidency. What the caucuses do more than determiner who will become presidents or even who will become the nominee, they tend more to determine who will not become the nominee and certainly not become the president. The caucuses' benefit in this regard is that they reveal unexpected strength and unexpected weaknesses in candidates, their campaigns, and their messages. If you think of a campaign as a race car and if you think of a candidate as the driver, what the caucuses do is put the driver in the car out on the track so they can do a test run and see how well they perform. That's what the caucuses do.
