By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Former Hillsborough resident David Redlawsk is back in Iowa watching politicians. That’s a little bit of home and heaven for him.
The director of polling at the Eagleton Institute for Politics at Rutgers University since 2009 arrived in the Hawkeye State in August, just in time for the 11-day political cattle show that is the Iowa State Fair. He was anticipating the last wave of nearly two dozen presidential candidates coming through, including New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
Mr. Redlawsk is spending the fall academic semester as a Fellow at the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. At Drake he will focus on the presidential nomination process during the run-up to the Feb. 1 caucuses.
Mr. Redlawsk is 57 now, but 20 years ago, after two unsuccessful tries, he won his own election in 1995 in Hillsborough and was voted twice to the Township Committee. (His wife, Aletia Morgan, was elected to the Board of Education, in the ’90s, too.)
Development and related issues (affordable housing, sewer expansion) were the top issues of the day, including an major proposal to build thousands of units of housing on the 700 acres or so of land off Mill Lane, he said.
He ran against it, arguing for keeping the nature of the township and against suburban sprawl, he said.
He resigned after winning re-election to make the move to Iowa.
He grew up on the East Coast and earned a Ph.D. at Rutgers, then left in 1999 for a job on the professorship track at the University of Iowa. He was enticed back to Rutgers in 2009.
His job at Eagleton has been to produce and interpret polls that tell us what New Jerseyans are thinking.
Now he’s back in Iowa doing a similar thing on a national scale.
Mr. Redlawsk is lead author of the 2011 book “Why Iowa?” which examines the outsized role the Iowa caucuses play in the presidential nomination process. According to one newspaper report, during the 2008 elections, Mr. Redlawsk carried three cell phones to stay in touch with a dozen major media outlets seeking his perspective. He served as chairman of his caucus precinct and the county and a delegate at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
In the sequential state-by-state process of coming to a nominee and president, Iowa plays an outsized influence simply by being first in line, but Mr. Redlawsk’s book came to conclusion “that despite its problems and limitations, the Iowa caucuses provide significant benefits in the existing presidential nominating system,” his website says.
Iowa is important, he said in August, because the “media wants some kind of signal” to what the electorate is thinking about who could be the next president.
As such, Iowa’s influence is primarily a creation of the media, which sets up expectations and then gauges and interprets how the pack meets or fails them, he said.
But as soon as you think you have Iowa and the nominating system figured out, there’s a wrinkle. Like this year.
At the moment with 17 candidates we’re treading new ground, Mr. Redlawsk said. It’s extraordinarily difficult for the media to play its role, he said, because it has to figure out how to deploy its coverage resources across such a wide field — in an era of ever-shrinking industry budgets.
The phenomenon that is Donald Trump complicates matters as press attention gravitates to him by nature of his celebrity, he said.
It’s still early in determining frontrunners in Iowa, Mr. Redlawsk cautions. The make-or-break time will come in October or November, he said. Iowa’s caucuses are Feb. 1, followed a week later by New Hampshire and the first primary election.
Iowa is physically a big place, he said. It has one-third the population of New Jersey in nine times the space, he said. Yet it has elements of an urban state, with population clustered in medium-sized cities. Rural areas are depopulating and there are fewer farmers than there used to be, he said.
It’s socially conservative and evangelical voters possibly could make up one-half of the GOP caucus-goers — which is why Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum won in previous presidential years, he said.
Both attracting 29,800-plus caucusgoes, Mr. Santorum only prevailed by 34 votes over Mitt Romney, who was an exemplar of the business-based conservatism of the other half of the party, said Mr. Redlawsk.
Mr. Santorum — and Barack Obama, whose 2008 victory in Iowa propelled his then-longshot campaign — effectively assembled door-knocking, phone-calling ground operations, which Mr. Redlawsk says are essential to doing well.
Mr. Santorum went to all 99 counties in the state, and used networks of groups like home-school families to work on his behalf, Mr. Redlawsk said.
The nominating process has to start somewhere and it has fallen to Iowa; no one state is representative of the country as a whole, Mr. Redlawsk said. Taken together, the first four states to choose delegates (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada) do represent a cross-section of the demographics in the country, he said.
Early small states force the candidates into retail politicking — talking to real people, Mr. Redlawsk said. Later, in larger states, the race turns more into a media campaign, he said.
“Why Iowa?” was mostly based on data collection and survey research, he said. This time he’s in Iowa “soaking and poking” and thinking more like a journalist than a political scientist in trying to spot story lines, candidates’ tactics and voters’ reactions that makes this election-year cycle distinctive.
“What’s interesting to me is this idea of economic populism,” he said, “how the little guy is getting screwed by the larger guy. It’s not just a Democratic message, or the Occupy movement. The Republican candidates are focusing on the same thing. You can take many of the same words and give them to a Democrat and you wouldn’t blink an eye.”
Of course, candidates in the two parties have different solutions, he said.
Mr. Redlawsk listened as candidates took to the Des Moines Register newspaper soapbox at the state fair. He said he was following Hillary Clinton when Mr. Trump’s helicopter buzzed over the grounds.
It’s almost absurd in some sense, but the system forces candidates to get out of their helicopter and SUVs and talk to people, he said.
On the Democratic side, Mr. Redlawsk said he didn’t ever think Ms. Clinton would waltz to the nomination without challenges, but she’s still a better as a candidate than 2008, he said. He said he thought in any other election cycle former Maryland governor Michael O’Malley would be “catching fire.”
The retail politics demanded by Iowa and other early states will also counterbalance the effect of PACs, another wild card in the 2016 political equation. The legalization of such committees to raise large sums of money anonymously and spend it on behalf of a candidate is new following the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010. With super PACs, “You no longer have to raise money or your own as long as you have a billionaire or two behind you,” he said.
Traditionally, Iowa and New Hampshire are known as two states you can’t buy, he said, as seen by publishing honcho Steve Forbes run in the Republican primary in 2000. (He spent $37 million of his own money, according to campaignmoney.com.).
Mr. Redlawsk spent a lot of time analyzing data about Governor Christie for the Eagleton Poll. Mr. Redlawsk has found Iowans aren’t particularly talking about the governor, he said, but Mr. Christie hasn’t spent much money and time in there, preferring to focus on the primary election in Hew Hampshire.
“Conservatives don’t trust his conservatism, and moderates don’t trust his moderation,” is how Mr. Redlawsk characterized Mr. Christie’s political plight.
