Influential West Des Moines Republicans Say Snafu Exposes Caucus Flaws

The snafu over which GOP presidential candidate – Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney – won the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses is an embarrassment, a handful of influential West Des Moines Republican said, but it shouldn’t cost the Hawkeye State its prized first-in-the-nation role in winnowing the presidential field.

The Republican Party of Iowa said Thursday morning that Santorum garnered 34 more votes than Romney to finish first in the Iowa Caucuses, but missing results from several precincts apparently means that nobody will know who truly won the Jan. 3 vote. In perhaps the biggest debacle in Iowa's Caucus history, an unknown number of votes will never be counted.

Do you think Iowa should lose its first-in-the-nation bragging rights because of the debacle? Tell us in comments.

The reason: The caucuses aren’t official elections, but events that the state Republican and Democratic parties put on that rely heavily on volunteers, said Republican political strategist Eric Woolson of West Des Moines.

“It’s a little like the newspaper business used to be years ago: You could have had the best journalists, the best printing press and the best ad sales, but in the end, you were depending on a 10-year-old kid to get the product to the door,” said Woolson, who most recently served as Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s Iowa campaign manager.

Woolson says that’s something party officials will have to reckon with, especially as other states eye with a sort of political envy Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status — and all of the national attention, advertising dollars and other economic benefits the caucuses deliver.

“It’s a party-run process that relies heavily on volunteers and it’s prone to errors,” he said. “It typically doesn’t matter because there’s a clear winner. A close race reveals all the flaws in the process.”

Woolson thinks the ding Iowa is getting over what is perhaps the worst debacle in caucus history has some staying power.

“I think the party is either going to have to address these flaws promptly and effectively,” he said. “Questions will linger.”

Businessman Jim Aipperspach agrees.

Critics of Iowa’s lead-off status in the nominating process will be able to use the snafu to illustrate their belief that “the process is so out of touch, you can’t even accurately count the ballots; why should we get all excited about what happens in Iowa?”

“It can diminish the impact of the Iowa caucuses,” he said.

West Des Moines businessman Gary Kirke agrees that the vote-counting issue is “an internal problem that doesn’t make Iowa look very good.

“The country’s out to get Iowa knocked out as No. 1, and this gives them a little fuel,” he said.

Aipperspach said that while the controversy may hurt Iowa’s ability to hold onto first-in-the-nation bragging rights, it doesn’t mean much for Romney or Santorum.

Romney was able to ride the momentum of what looked like an Iowa caucus win into New Hampshire – a claim Santorum would have liked to have made – but “it’s old news,” Aipperspach said. “Iowa’s off the radar screen.

“I don’t think people are interested in looking back at Iowa,” he said.

Kirke isn’t so sure.

“This looks a lot more serious than it is,” he said, “because it involves the momentum you get out of Iowa. It hurts Iowa’s reputation, and I hope it’s something we can overcome because the caucuses have value.

“I look at the Iowa caucuses as a training camp,” Kirke said. “Candidates come out here to get in the swim of things. They have to go through this before the primaries, and it’s going to get tougher and tougher each day after they leave here.

“It’s a good workout,” Kirke said. “It’s important, and we ought to keepit.”

That candidates have to make their case to Iowans one at a time is precisely the value of the caucuses, said Libby Jacobs, a former Republican state legislator from West Des Moines and now the head of the Iowa Utilities Board.

“Both parties still do a great service, allowing anyone who wants to run to come in and make their pitch,” Jacobs said. “You don’t need a ton of money, it’s retail politics at its finest and that’s kind of a lost art.”

Jacobs said she didn’t think Thursday’s announcement came as much of a surprise because “everybody knows going in” that caucuses aren’t official elections, as they are in other early voting states like New Hampshire and South Carolina, and that the margin between Romney and Santorum was razor thin.

“I don’t think the results are a whole lot surprising ot people,” she said. “It means they both did very well in Iowa.”