"In its bid to regain a toehold in early days of the presidential nominating calendar, Iowa Democrats are arguing that the national party cannot build sustainable national majorities without reconnecting to rural America.
"To help the party accomplish that, Iowa Democrats are touting the flexibility they can provide with their caucuses. Faced with several years of upheaval and experimentation, state Democratic Party leaders say they can create a system that is more inclusive and transparent and eliminates many of the pitfalls that bedeviled it in 2020.
“'No other state has the knowledge, infrastructure and history of giving long-shot presidential candidates a fair chance,' party leaders wrote in an application to a panel of the Democratic National Committee that sets the presidential nominating calendar. 'When Iowa is included among the early states, we complement and represent an intentionally well-designed balance of our party’s values and priorities.'"
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Noteworthy: Iowa Democrats are treading a very fine line. The party obviously wants the caucuses back in the early window (if not to be first again) and are clearly bending over backwards to appear flexible in their application to the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC). However, that flexibility in method -- in-person caucusing, voting electronically, voting via telephone, vote-by-mail, etc. -- runs the risk of coming across as less flexible than a muddled a la carte menu of options from which the state party cannot choose (or appears unable to choose).
Why does that distinction matter? It matters because the members of the RBC were adamant in their discussions of what they were after in these applications at their October 2025 meeting. They wanted not only clarity of method, but a demonstration of what worked in the past, what did not and how a state party would mitigate any lingering issues from the past implementation in 2028.
All is not lost for Iowa Democrats. FHQ finds it hard to imagine the state party not being invited to make a presentation to the RBC for inclusion of its caucuses in the 2028 early window. [More on why soon at FHQ Plus.] So they will have a chance clean up any perception that this is a muddled mess by focusing on what the party could do to enhance what went right with the vote-by-mail party-run primary from 2024.
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