Democratic Caucus In The United States

In the United States of America, the form of government is a democratic republic. The nation is much too large to be entirely democratic. However, every four years a grassroots democratic approach is taken, in some states, to narrow down candidates for the next presidential election. These are called caucuses. Iowa is the first state to hold the democratic and republican caucuses. This year it was held on February 1st 2016 (Collinson, 2016; Berg-Andersson, Roza, 2016).

The Democratic Caucus is done differently than the Republican Caucus. In the Democratic Caucus when a person arrives they sign in, and if they are not a member of the democratic party yet, then they can register. A person must be a registered democrat to participate in the caucus.

Instead of showing people who a person is voting for by standing in the candidate 's designated area, people vote on a ballot. This can be as formal as made up ahead of time and look professional. Or can be names written on a piece of paper. Before submitting the vote, however, people can go around and say a short speech about why they are voting for a certain candidate to try and sway people to vote the same way. Then the votes are collected and counted. None of this is done by state officials (for either party caucus). Instead the Republican party of Iowa selects temporary chairs for the caucuses, and sometimes a secretary will count the ballots. After being counted in the smaller groups, the numbers are sent to the state party, not run by the state but by people, and all votes are added up. The Republican Caucus has thirty delegates. The top three candidates were: Ted Cruz who had eight delegates, and 27.6 percent of the vote, Donald Trump who had seven delegates and 24.3 percent of the vote, and Marco Rubio who also had seven delegates, and then had 23.1 percent of the vote (Collinson, 2016; Republican Party of Iowa, n.d.). Other candidates had delegates, however it dropped down to three and a few ones so they will most likely not turn into top

The Iowa Caucuses can majorly affect politics. The first look of what candidates, real Americans are backing plays a major role in how the rest of America sees the candidates. The media attention Iowa gets also influences the rest of America. After the 2016 Iowa Caucuses the tops candidates are now what names are shown in news articles to catch people’s attention, since those candidates are now seen as the leaders even though it is still early in the election (Clark, 2007; Andrews, Bloch…, 2016; Collinson, 2016; Naft,