Michael Barone has a thoughtful piece on the Iowa caucus in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. He writes in “As Iowa Goes, So Goes Iowa” that the Iowa caucus often doesn’t decide who wins the primary, let alone the general election.

Iowa Republican caucuses have a poor record in choosing their party’s nominees. In the five presidential nominating cycles with active Iowa Republican caucus competition, the Hawkeye State has voted for the eventual Republican nominee only twice—in 1996 for Bob Dole, in 2000 for George W. Bush—and only once was the Iowa winner elected president.

Part of the issue Barone notes is just how few Republicans actually participate.
In a state of three million people, a bare 119,000 Republicans showed up for the caucuses [in 2008]. Some 60% of them identified as evangelical or born-again Christians—a far higher percentage than in any presidential contest in any large non-Southern state that year.

By contrast, in the 2010, over 600,000 Iowa Republicans voted in the general election and more than 200,000 voted in the gubernatorial primary. This year fewer Republicans will vote in the Iowa caucus, despite a deeply unpopular incumbent Democratic party.

Why are so few Republicans showing up to vote in Iowa? Perhaps it’s because the Iowa Republican caucus is for insiders.

Read the rest at Big Government