DES MOINES — The Iowa caucuses Monday night might be the single most important event on the American political calendar so far this year. But for a lot of people here, they’re not even the most important thing happening in Iowa.
In the Fairfield High School gym in southeastern Iowa, the Albia Blue Demons are in town to take on the home team Trojans, first the girls basketball teams, then the boys. The games are expected to pull in a hundred or more people from the two towns—players, families, cheerleaders, and alums—who will spend Monday night cheering in the gym rather than arguing the merits of Trump and Cruz, or Hillary vs. Bernie.
The basketball rivalry is just one of many events across the Hawkeye State that will have a small but not inconsequential part in determining who helps pick the next president of the United States—or rather, who doesn’t. In a state where only about 12 percent of registered voters are expected to participate on Monday, and tiny margins can decide winners, the huge number of scheduling conflicts competing for Iowans’ attention underscores just how challenging the get-out-the-vote effort for presidential campaigns really is.
Unlike the general election, there are no absentee ballots or early voting alternative in a caucus. You can’t hit the polls on the way to work, or during lunch break—you have to show up at the caucus, when it happens, which starts at 7 p.m. sharp and can last for an hour or longer. To increase turnout, some Iowans say they wish the whole day would be declared a state holiday. But that’s not happening anytime soon. So with time and decent weather at a premium, it ultimately means many Iowans are forced to choose between basketball, bingo, beekeeping and Bernie. And for a lot of them, bingo and beekeeping will win.
“Life does go on,” said Mike Dick, the executive director of the Iowa association that organizes girls’ high school sports. He should know: He’s in charge of more than 35 varsity games scheduled for tip-off across the state. Most start around 6 p.m., right as the presidential campaigns are urging their backers to start forming lines at local libraries, churches, country clubs and other caucus sites.
The Iowa caucuses are known for being skewed toward a self-selecting group of political obsessives, and a look at Monday’s event lineup across Iowa helps explain why. To choose the caucus means deciding it’s more important to spend the night bantering about education policy or combating terrorism than to spend it cooking dinner, or helping kids with homework, or participating in the impressively wide roster of counterprogramming across the Hawkeye State.
In Dubuque, about 100 people are expected to turn out for local act Silent Redemption and Michigan-based Wayland, who are scheduled to play a rock concert. There’s a Buddy Holly impersonator performing in Decorah as part of festivities to commemorate the 57th anniversary of the music legend’s death in a plane crash just outside nearby Clear Lake. There’s a bingo game at the veterans’ hall in Mount Pleasant, two Al-Anon meetings in Cedar Falls, a reception to honor a new art exhibit in Ottumwa, and workshops teaching the basics of Adobe Photoshop and beekeeping in Washington.
In interviews, several longtime Iowa caucus goers as well as some first-time attendees said they wondered why so many events had ended up on the same night as the caucus. Their pull is part of the reason turnout is so low, and margins so small. In New Hampshire, it’s common for fully half the state’s registered voters to show up for the primaries. Here in Iowa, in 2012, Rick Santorum beat Mitt Romney by a mere 34 votes out of a total of 121,500 votes cast. At the time, nearly 615,000 Republicans were registered to vote.
“The majority of Iowa folks,” Dick said, “do not attend or get involved in the caucus in the first place.”
It’s not that the state totally ignores its moment of influence. Some of Iowa’s biggest draws will be dark on Monday, some by coincidence and some in deference to caucus night. These include the state’s biggest sports teams, the University of Iowa and Iowa State men’s and women’s basketball teams, as well as the minor league NHL and NBA teams based in Des Moines. Mondays are typically off days for high school wrestling matches.
But thousands of people are expected to choose high-school basketball over presidential politics. On top of the girls’ games, at least 30 boys’ basketball match ups are scheduled for Monday evening.
“It’s as much a tradition to have games on that night as there is political activity,” said Brett Nanninga, an associate director at the Iowa High School Athletic Association. He said there was no discussion about postponing the games: the ever-present threat of bad winter weather already makes it difficult enough to squeeze in all the regular season action before the playoffs start in mid-February.
At the high school level – remember, 17-year olds in Iowa who turn 18 by Election Day can caucus –there are study halls, scholarship meetings and clubs. There’s a major high school Iowa show choir festival Monday at eight sites across the state, with more than 2,800 students and at least 59 teachers participating. Alan Greiner, head of the Iowa High School Music Association, said the event was scheduled five years ago — President Barack Obama hadn’t even won his second term yet — and long before the 2016 Iowa caucus date had been announced.
At Coe College in Cedar Rapids, a free guest lecture about musical copyright and publishing starts at the same time as the caucus. The Luther College Nordic Choir and its symphony orchestra are performing concerts on Monday night in Minnesota. Music coordinator Katherine Haller Ailabouni explained that the symphony—scheduled during a break between semesters—was booked before the caucus date was announced and that “there is no other appropriate time to tour during the academic year.”
At the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, one of two previously scheduled musical events – a mezzo-soprano concert—was moved back a day “so both to allow her audience and supporters to caucus, and so that she could caucus herself,” said Caroline Francis, the communications and operations coordinator at the UNI School of Music. But Francis said a guest flutist didn’t have as flexible a schedule, so a joint recital would go on Monday night as planned—albeit with organizers expecting a smaller crowd than they would have hoped for.
For plenty of Iowans, even those who care about politics, the state’s big night in the spotlight simply gets trumped by work obligations. Nanninga, who runs the state high school boys' basketball program, needs to be courtside Monday evaluating referees for post-season assignments. He’d probably be caucusing for Chris Christie, he said, but this year Christie won’t be getting that vote. “People know there are choices to be made,” he said.