Just found this thread. I'm in Cedar Rapids. The efforts here are pretty subdued. We have 100-150 people in meetups between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, but they aren't very active.
I apologize for not reading all 80 pages of posts on this thread, but does the caucus system in IA affect our strategy, or should it? If I understand right, it's NOT statewide popular vote, so we need to get the word out to the small towns if we want to win here. Am I correct? How are delegates assigned across the state?
I'm wondering if the meetups should specifically target smaller towns around the state, either with direct canvassing or direct mail. In Linn county, you can buy addresses from the auditor. The whole county costs $65. I haven't gotten much interest from other meetup people here, so I was thinking of just buying the addresses for my city for $10 and mailing out tri-folds.
Some higher level organization would be great to distribute mailing addresses and maintain a common message. A dedicated postcard for direct mail would be good to save postage.
for the republicans IT IS a statewide popular vote i've investigated this....its a private straw vote and than each precinct calls in the results to some statewide coordinator and they add the votes up...bush won iowa in 2000 with 30,000 or so votes state wide the turnout is low....and will be low as its now going to be jan 3rd or 5th with people having holiday hangover, college football on tv, cold, and its the winter break for students in the state (this is gonna be a major headache for my area)....
the democrats do the messed up stuff.....huddle in groups and all that crap and in your small towns the people have much more power in the system than say someone in johnson county (the liberal capital of iowa)
i saw in 2000 for the democrats in johnson county 80 some people were needed for each delegate while in your rural towns its more on the order of 20 some people....anyway this is of no interest or worry to us....when i first saw this i freaked but than i realized the republicans don't do it this way....
Also from my analysis i think iowa will end up being a non-story in general....nobody is going to have an overwhelming victory other than possibly romney because he's hitting the state so hard and has ads running 24/7 so he has the name recognition in the state
my general feel is romney, rudy, fred, huckabee (he'll have a good showing with the chrisitian conservative base), paul will chop up the vote and nothing will really be learned from it.....the campaign is doing the right thing and focusing on NH IMO....too many resources and groundwork at the campaign level are generally needed to win iowa and now with the bunched up primary schedule it holds much less clout....and romney has already dumped so much into it at this point....
that said in the recent des moines register poll released where paul came in at 4% and 9% undecided they said 75% of those that chose a particular candidate aren't dead-set and could possibly switch to a different candidate so we have an opening there for sure
so basically 84% of republican iowans are open to possibly switching sides by caucus night.
