Why the Iowa caucuses may elevate an underdog

Reporters for the Politico website recently suggested that the Iowa caucuses on Monday will be a "hot mess" as Democratic candidates compete amid razor-thin margins for votes through a newly reformed process designed to increase transparency.

"In theory," as state party leaders suggest, the four-step process has not changed. But, according to some political consultants, the introduction of voter-preference cards and the disclosure of two vote tallies and one delegate count has the potential to muddle, or even distort, the crucial role Iowa has played in the electoral process since the 1970s. In these conditions, the battle is not just over who receives the most votes. It's also over who can control the media narrative that comes out of Iowa.

But we've been here before. In fact, Iowa owes its prominence to two dark-horse campaigns from the 1970s that used grass-roots organizing and local media In Iowa to harness national media-fueled momentum that helped pave the path to their nominations. They exploited recent reforms designed to create a more transparent, inclusive electoral process, and in the process reinvented the presidential campaign.

The decades-long push for transparency in the nomination process culminated with reforms brought about by the contentious nomination of Hubert H. Humphrey, who did not enter a single Democratic Party nominating contest in 1968, instead relying on the support of political bosses. In the aftermath of the party's deeply damaging convention in Chicago, the Democratic National Committee understood that it needed to make changes to avoid a repeat.

Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., Humphrey's main opponent at that convention, became one of the key architects of the McGovern-Fraser Commission (1969-72) reforms. These required, among other measures, that state parties develop written rules for the delegate selection process to ensure transparency and to promote a more inclusive process that might end domination by middle-aged, middle-class white men.

Not long after McGovern resigned from the commission in January 1971 to announce his second bid for president, his wunderkind campaign director Gary Hart began "searching for a game-changer" that might catapult McGovern to a victory over Sen. Edmund "Big Ed" Muskie of Maine, the 1968 Democratic vice presidential nominee. Muskie was the heavily favored front-runner in February's New Hampshire primary, the national starting gate for the party's nomination since mid-century.

In tune with the new rules of U.S. politics, Hart located a difference-maker in Iowa, the site of the party's first nominating contest in 1972 - and thereafter considering "the state insists on remaining first." He focused on establishing grass-roots support in the state that, according to party reforms, had instituted proportional representation in its delegate selection contests.

It worked. Despite still polling only in the single digits nationally as late as Jan. 10, 1972, within Iowa the relatively unknown underdog with little financial backing billed himself as "the courageous prairie statesman" from a neighboring state. He built upon ally Robert Kennedy's campaign, which was cut tragically short in 1968. That meant building a "new politics" grass-roots coalition of college-age youth, minorities and activists - people like 22-year-old Jim Dougall, who cheered on his candidate at one of McGovern's "people's dinners" that fall.

As Hart predicted, prominent national reporters paid attention to this building movement in Iowa. The New York Times called the contest "the first direct confrontation between presidential candidates." Under pressure to make sense of a muddled picture, in which most voters remained uncommitted to any single candidate, the media recognized that whether they were covering "a race for mayor of Dubuque or president of the United States," readers were interested in who was going to win.

The paper's influential national political reporter deemed McGovern's second-place finish to "Big Ed" a "moral victory" that pierced Muskie's front-runner status and contributed to increased media anticipation of New Hampshire.

McGovern's campaign exploited the ripple media coverage triggered by the Times piece, which placed their candidate in the middle of the national conversation for the party nomination. Although prominent consensus-minded national news reporters expected establishment candidates to win, Iowa prompted them to question that logic. Moreover, although many trace Muskie's downfall to claims that he cried after media attacks on his wife in New Hampshire, in reality the seeds of increased media expectations for the establishment front-runner and McGovern's path to the nomination were sown in Iowa.

After his careful study of the 1972 presidential campaign, including reading Hart's book "Right From the Start," Jimmy Carter's campaign director, Hamilton Jordan, recognized an important truth: "A crowded field enhances the possibility of several inconclusive [contests] . . . such a muddled picture will not continue long, as the press will begin to make 'winners' of some and 'losers' of others." With this logic in mind, Carter's closest advisers established a post-reform blueprint for a marathon campaign, which Carter once referred to as a "timeless user's guide for anyone with political aspirations."

Carter's campaign established grass-roots support, banked contributions fueled by regional fundraisers and celebrity endorsements from hip, anti-establishment acts such as the Allman Brothers Band. This decentralized strategy generated positive local coverage of the anti-establishment, noncelebrity campaign. Such coverage forced prominent national news reporters who favored covering the campaign like a horse race between the establishment front-runners to pay attention to the little known, one-term Georgia governor.

Iowa was central to this strategy. Carter's team saturated locals with his innovative personal campaign designed to convince uncommitted voters, once again the largest majority of voters in the Iowa precinct caucuses, that he could restore credibility to American government, crucially important in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. Moreover, as Jordan predicted, prominent national reporters searching for "any straw in the wind," trained their eyes on the earliest visible indicators of candidate strength and amplified a simple narrative based on the muddled outcome in Iowa - the resonant story of the victorious underdog.

Uncommitted actually won the caucus with 37 percent of the vote, but Carter trounced front-runner Birch Bayh, 2 to 1, with 27 percent of the vote. And this unexpected "victory" enabled Carter to win the battle to control the primary media narrative. Although fewer than 14,000 Iowans had trudged to their local precinct caucuses to support him, powerful political reporters, such as trusted CBS correspondent Roger Mudd, contended that Carter "was the clear leader in this psychologically important test."

Candidates have subsequently tried to replicate Carter's model. They have sought to define media expectations and, as George H.W. Bush put it four years later, to claim "the big mo'" - momentum - Iowa promised.

Although much has changed in presidential politics and campaign journalism since the 1970s, this much remains true: Momentum-craving candidates continue to exploit the favorite modes and frames of news reporters, defining news media expectations and projecting themselves as underdog victors. Moreover, amid muddled pictures, horse-race-focused media officials hastily declare victors in contests with thin margins (just consider the 2016 Iowa caucuses), and they often return to a favorite frame, a narrative that audiences seem to favor - the underdog victor.

So while we might not know how the candidates or the news media will score Monday's caucuses, we should remember to take the still-poignant advice of Godfrey Sperling Jr., the Christian Science Monitor's Washington bureau chief. Recognizing that "on-the-scene interpretations of election results" tend to become political reality, we should avoid being overly influenced by candidate tweets and news headlines declaring definitive results in these messy but relatively influential caucuses. Instead, it might behoove us to examine the raw data from the Iowa Democratic Party and to recognize the caucuses for what they are - a test of organizational strength in one small state.

Roessner is an associate professor in the University of Tennessee's School of Journalism & Electronic Media and author of "Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign," forthcoming from LSU Press in spring 2020.