The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by debco:

I hesitate to point this out because it usually gets roundly ignored, but I (from Iowa--went to the caucuses) haven't talked to one person who found the Dean door-to-door people offensive (other than people who think we might have been offended, but who weren't actually here).

Caucus season is filled with people coming to Iowa who otherwise ignore its very existance. It's winter; it's cold; it makes life more interesting. Sincerity is admired around here (as it is in a lot of places); plus Iowans are pretty dang polite, and sincere people going out in the cold don't usually make us close the door and say--man, the last thing I'm doing is voting for that guy.

So, why didn't Dean do well in Iowa? Kerry and Edwards had a huge advantage in not getting nearly as much negative attention from the press right before the caucuses and I think it made a big difference. Dean got absolutely blasted by Gephardt (daily mailings for one thing) and while it hurt Gephardt a fair amount, it still ended up hurting Dean a lot.

Also, the caucuses are more often attended by people 35 and older and Kerry and Edwards support here (in Iowa) seemed to be very strongly 35 to 50 year olds.

People I know who didn't go for Dean either didn't because he said one thing (or the papers said he said one thing) that they didn't like or they were more comfortable with someone else (Kerry is just like me; Edwards said this thing I liked).

I have to say that I was quite taken with the Perfect Storm people who came to my door. There was a teenaged boy and his mother from Oklahoma and a couple of middle-aged business men from Texas who had never been involved in politics before. They were sincere and low-key and I thought a lot of them for coming to Iowa in the dead of winter.

My small-scale view of the caucuses (my local caucus) is that Kerry and Edwards were both getting the 40/50 year old crowd which is a big turnout for caucuses. Dean and Kuchinch had most of the younger voters with Dean's group having a broad range of people from 18 to 85.

I might also mention that although they allow people to change their registration at the door, it would not be all that easy to send a bunch o' Republican's to skew the results. First, no one knows what the numbers are until everyone's there--how many supporters you need depends on who's there, not the population of your precinct. Second, it's a neighborhood enterprise; you know the people who are there and while it's easy to look a voting machine in the face and swear you really, really mean to be a Democrat, it's a lot harder to do that to your next door neighbor.

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