How Iowa Took Command Over Electing The President - East Idaho News
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How Iowa Took Command Over Electing The President

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Getty P 122611 GOPDebate?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1325519286424Scott Olson/Getty Images(DES MOINES, Iowa) — It is a state that holds less than 1 percent of the country’s population, 2 percent of registered Republican voters and has a GOP voter turnout of less than 20 percent. Yet Iowa, as the first state to hold its presidential nominating contest, has taken a commanding hold over the 2012 GOP campaign.

From bus tours to television ads, the six Republican candidates who are vying for the top spot at the Iowa caucuses have poured their time, effort, money and mileage into the Hawkeye State.

Two candidates, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, have visited all 99 of Iowa’s counties. Rick Perry is on track to check off 42 cities. Newt Gingrich is aiming to hit 20 cities. And Mitt Romney has blasted through 10 in the past three days.

Combined, the Republican hopefuls have dumped $2.4 million on advertising in Iowa alone this election cycle.

“It’s all Iowa all the time because, at its simplest, it is the first official recorded vote of the nominating season,” said David Redlawsk, a co-author of Why Iowa and a political science professor at Rutgers University. “We are an impatient people, we Americans. We want to know who’s going to win.”

So what is oh-so-important about Iowa, a state that has more bushels of corn than Republican voters?

“Tradition!” insists Timothy Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa.

The Hawkeye State has held the first votes of the presidential cycle in every contest since 1972, when a change in the Democratic Party rules forced its caucus into January for the first time.

That “historical accident,” as Redlawsk calls it, is the genesis of the now-sanctified presidential-nominee-picking tradition. But it wasn’t until Jimmy Carter successfully used Iowa as a springboard to propel his 1976 campaign from Jimmy who? to President Carter that Iowa solidified its spot at the front of the presidential nominating process.

“Iowa is a small state with small media markets,” Hagle said. “You can run a fairly inexpensive campaign in Iowa. It gives lesser-known candidates an opportunity to get in the contest where they would not otherwise be able to be competitive if, for example, the process started in a big state like California or Texas

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

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