Joshua Doležal writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education and produces a Substack newsletter, The Recovering Academic. He is also the author of a memoir, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging.

President Biden made headlines in November for his proposal to replace Iowa with South Carolina as the first state in the Democratic primary calendar. The Democratic National Committee voted in early February to approve proposed changes to the presidential primary, and while some obstacles to implementing those changes remain, Iowa’s fate is effectively sealed.

As a former Iowa resident whose views changed substantially after participating in three caucuses, I applaud these changes. 

THE VIEW OF A CAUCUS-GOER

The 2008 Iowa caucus was my first. I was single, able-bodied, and free to participate within the strict time constraints on a weeknight. The public voting reminded me of how every school cafeteria segregates into insiders and outsiders. But I’d been sold on the Iowa tradition, and I had a front seat to Barack Obama’s historic victory, so I largely kept my reservations to myself. 

President Obama ran unopposed in 2012, and like many Iowans I sat that caucus out. The stakes felt low, and my wife was pregnant with our first child, so we stayed in on that cold January night. 

THE VIEW OF A CAMPAIGN VOLUNTEER

Our daughter was three years old in January 2016, and we brought her with us. I was serving for the first time as a volunteer, for Bernie Sanders, and after knocking on doors for several months, my view of the caucuses had changed considerably.

Some people told me they couldn’t participate because they couldn’t find child care. Others worked the night shift, and some knew they would be out of town on business. Since there was no absentee voting, those people were effectively disenfranchised. We did our best to provide transportation for all who needed it in our precinct, but Iowa winters are harsh. Venturing out in early January to sit in a crowded room for up to two hours is a daunting commitment for the elderly and for people with disabilities. For some, it might even pose a serious health risk. 

But the final straw for me was the kind of personal moment that the Iowa caucuses are meant to foster. I was standing at the door welcoming voters alongside other volunteers, when my next-door neighbors, who I’ll call Tim and Sue, walked in. They had become close friends, surrogate grandparents to our daughter, and I had understood from our backyard conversations that they’d be joining me in the Sanders camp. But when I greeted them, Sue looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It means something to me that Hillary is a woman.” And she walked across the room to join the Clinton supporters. 

I’ll never forget the swirl of shame that followed. Sue felt that by exercising her right to vote, she had let me down. I wondered if other Iowans felt that they had to choose between their consciences and pleasing their spouses, neighbors, or family members. If public pressure influences even one conciliatory caucus vote, that is one too many. 

Our family had grown to four by January 2020, and we asked our part-time nanny if she could babysit so we could attend the caucus. She claimed she wouldn’t have been going anyway, and she was a Republican, so we joked about my plan to suppress GOP votes. But she worked for us during the week. Maybe she felt that she couldn’t say no. Iowans should not have to choose between paying for child care and exercising their right to vote.

I was a volunteer again in 2020, this time for Amy Klobuchar, but instead of knocking on doors I sent a letter to voters in my precinct. Many of them told me on caucus night that my letter had brought them into the Klobuchar camp, which was gratifying.

But as I greeted voters at the door, two of my colleagues arrived, both recent hires, both strong supporters of Elizabeth Warren. I was their department chair. We had spoken freely about our choices in the hallway for weeks, and neither of them would have voted differently out of fear that I might torpedo their tenure review. But the public nature of caucusing only emphasizes these power dynamics. If we’d had a different relationship, they might have felt that publicly voting against my candidate posed a risk. 

INTRACTABLE PROBLEMS

The Iowa Democratic Party attempted to broaden access in 2020 by allowing satellite voting, but this only compounded the chaos following the infamous app malfunction. As Faiz Shakir has recently argued in the New York Times, there ought to be accountability for incompetence. And many have claimed for years that Iowa’s predominantly white population stifles diversity among presidential candidates.

Others make the opposite case: that the lack of diversity in Iowa is strategically advantageous in honing messages that will resonate in other red and purple states with large rural populations. But the fact remains that just two non-incumbent candidates—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—have won both the Iowa caucuses and the presidency. Anomalies are a poor basis for policy.

I now live in Pennsylvania, and I thought about Iowa as I voted in the midterm election last fall. A large man wearing a MAGA hat stared me down while I stood in line. He had no idea how I voted, in the end, but I thought of him afterward as a different kind of argument against the Iowa caucuses. I’ve never seen any overt intimidation on caucus night, but there’s no prohibition against observers watching from the back of the room. The MAGA man I saw could, if he wished, drive to Iowa, wander into a caucus gathering, and match votes to faces and names. If he had help, he could do worse than that.

When the Iowa caucuses were established as first in the nation in 1972, it took some courage for Democrats to gather together publicly. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy had both been assassinated just four years earlier. Thousands of Americans were still voting no confidence in their government by protesting the Vietnam War. It was a good idea, maybe even an audacious one, to focus on community building during such a divisive time. 

But from their inception, the caucuses have been just as exclusionary as they have been inclusive. Even a private ballot can’t fix that. I think of the caregivers, ER surgeons whose shifts fall on caucus night, patients who are conscious but bedridden, long-haul truckers, military personnel serving out of state or overseas, gas station clerks, Walmart employees, police officers on duty, and many more who can vote absentee in the general election but are silenced on caucus night. Democracy demands that they be heard, too.

Iowa had a good run. It’s time to try a different experiment. 

Top photo of Joshua Dolezal provided by the author and published with permission.