Castro critique of Iowa and NH both brave and beside the point
Julián Castro made some headlines in Iowa and New Hampshire this past weekend.
I was asked today in Iowa about the order of our primaries. I appreciate how seriously Iowa & New Hampshire take their role as first-in-the-nation.
But we’ve changed in the 50 years since order was established—and I believe it’s time our primaries reflect our nation’s diversity. pic.twitter.com/mY0EvnhXNr
— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) November 11, 2019
Here's our Sunday report on @JulianCastro saying NH & IA should lose their leadoff positions, due to lack of diversity, #fitn #nhpolitics https://t.co/pP9sL1TeJM via @jdistaso
— WMUR TV (@WMUR9) November 12, 2019
In Cedar Rapids, @JulianCastro tells @CBSNews "we can't say to black women oh thank you, thank you, you are the ones empowering our victories," and "then turn around and start our nominating contests in the two states that have barely any black people in them." pic.twitter.com/HH1qDiXyP3
— Musadiq Bidar (@Bidar411) November 11, 2019
Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire take their first-in-the-nation status seriously, but even they recognize it’s time for change.
We need a primary calendar that reflects our nation and party’s diversity—and Iowans agree.https://t.co/5UaEoPK5mn
— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) November 12, 2019
Castro's full answer: pic.twitter.com/rGj5lgl8CR
— Patrick Svitek (@PatrickSvitek) November 11, 2019
"If I'm the only candidate that's going to tell the truth on that in this cycle," @JulianCastro told Vogue, "then so be it." https://t.co/lhxInnmuQm
— Vogue Magazine (@voguemagazine) November 12, 2019
From Michelle Ruiz’s story:
Castro raised the point thoughtfully, almost methodically, as if he knew he was wading into prickly territory. After all, he was, and still is, currently campaigning in Iowa himself. (When recently asked about Iowa and New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation positioning, Warren said, “Are you actually going...to ask me to sit here and criticize Iowa and New Hampshire?”) But when Vogue reached Castro by phone on Monday afternoon, he went further on his comments, calling out the hypocrisy of giving a comparatively small cluster of white Democrats the privilege of picking the presidential favorite.
“We can’t go around thanking black women for powering Democrats to victory all over the country and then at the same time, hold our first caucus and our first primary in states that have almost no African-Americans,” Secretary Castro told Vogue. “We’re right to call Republicans out when they suppress the votes of African-Americans or Latinos, but we’ve also got to recognize that this 50-year-old process was created during a time when minority voices had zero power in the party.” (Iowa initially began going first in 1972.)
Castro concedes that the third and fourth primary states, Nevada and South Carolina, which come almost a month later, are more racially diverse. But he also says that the first states of primary season can make or break a candidate’s momentum. “Nobody can pretend that the first one or two states don’t have an oversized influence on what happens in the whole process,” he said. “If you can’t do well in Iowa or New Hampshire, then the chances of doing well in Nevada or South Carolina are much slimmer.”
The inevitable personal questions come up in our interview: What compelled Castro to take the calculated risk of speaking out about Iowa while still in Iowa? And, is the issue personal? Does he believe the mostly white bellwether states have overlooked him as a Latino candidate, one who is polling at a reported 1% and reportedly laid off campaign staff in New Hampshire and South Carolina?
Julián Castro isn’t one to hold back. The former Housing and Urban Development secretary under President Obama was the first 2020 candidate to propose decriminalizing border crossing; other hopefuls, like Elizabeth Warren, followed suit. On the popularity of Pete Buttigieg, another young mayor turned 2020 hopeful, Castro recently quipped on The Daily Show: “I was mayor of a city that’s 14 times larger than South Bend. In fact, we could almost fit South Bend in our Alamodome in San Antonio.”
This week Castro is doing what few candidates laser-focused on winning would dare to do: question the fairness of the presidential primary system itself. Specifically, he is noting that Iowa and New Hampshire, the two big, bellwether states whose voters largely determine who has the White House goods, are lacking in racial and ethnic diversity. Iowa, which famously holds the first caucus of the primary season, is about 91% white while New Hampshire is 94% white.
“I actually do believe that we do need to change the order of the states,” Castro said in an interview with MSNBC on Sunday from, yes, Iowa. “Demographically, it’s not reflective of the U.S. as a whole, certainly not reflective of the Democratic Party, and I believe other states should have their chance.
xxxxxx
As for the risk of calling out the party machine, “If I’m the only candidate that’s going to tell the truth on that in this cycle,” Castro said, “then so be it.”
This video now has more than one million views. Seems people agree. https://t.co/4YI2pzRlTq
— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) November 12, 2019
In other words, if one wanted to find two states thoroughly unrepresentative of America’s minority populations and growing diversity, you could hardly do better than New Hampshire and Iowa _ the two states now vested by the presidential nominating system with power wildly out of proportion to their size.
It is an artifact of American democracy that undermines, in ways large and small, the ability of minorities to influence the selection of a president and to determine which issues will come to the fore. It is with perhaps fitting symbolism that the zenith of quadrennial political activity here comes just as New Hampshire this Jan. 17 for the first time joins the other 49 states in officially observing Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a holiday. It has been a long struggle that in its thwarting undermined, fairly or unfairly, the state’s reputation for racial sensitivity.
“The candidates spend an extraordinary amount of time campaigning in these two states … talking to real voters, finding out what’s on their minds,” says Northeastern University political scientist William G. Mayer, editor of a new collection of essays on the nominating process. “But there are all kinds of major problems that you will not learn about by going to Iowa and New Hampshire, and one of them is race.”
In a nation where minorities’ share of the population is close to 30 percent and climbing, it is the citizenry of these two racial-demographic throwbacks that get by far the most quality time with the candidates, taking their measure while the rest of the nation and its news media watch and wait. Before any sizable number of minority voters can cast a single ballot, white folks in New Hampshire and Iowa will have sorted the field into Big Mo, Slow Mo and No Mo.
And yet, unfair as this bleaching of the crucial early stages of the nominating process may be, it is difficult to devise an alternative arrangement that would maintain the very real virtues of grass-roots democracy that the Jan. 24 Iowa caucuses and Feb. 1 New Hampshire primary embody.
Precisely because Iowa is so white, it was Barack Obama’s indispensable proving ground.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Volunteers for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign fanned out into black neighborhoods over the weekend with new instructions: Tell undecided voters that Obama “proved the cynics wrong in the Iowa caucuses.”
The message about Obama’s decisive Iowa victory Thursday is familiar to those who have heard his theme of transcending old-style politics. But for many black voters, the warning against cynicism carries a special and somewhat different meaning: Let go of old fears that white America will never elect a black man to the presidency; Iowa has proven doubters in the black community wrong.
The fear that Americans will not accept a black president has loomed as a persistent obstacle to Obama’s chances in South Carolina, where blacks are expected to account for at least half of the voters in a crucial Jan. 26 Democratic primary, and in other states with large black populations.
A survey taken late last month for CBS found that nearly 40% of black voters in South Carolina believed the country was not “ready to elect a black president,” compared with 34% of whites -- a sentiment that Obama aides viewed as a far greater impediment to his election than flat-out racism among those who would never vote for him anyway.
In 2016, another Texas Hispanic - U.S. Sen Ted Cruz - was the Republican winner in Iowa. (And yes that’s quasi-white nationalist U.S. Rep. Steve King, who co-chaired Cruz’s Iowa and national campaigns, standing behind Cruz along with Cruz’s Cuban-born father, Rafael.)
And then there was the sensational Iowa welcome the very same weekend Castro issued his critique for a gifted young Puerto Rican congresswoman from New York City.
Rep. @AOC took her first trip to Iowa to campaign for @BernieSanders — here’s how it went pic.twitter.com/MXbPaBJ2F2
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 12, 2019
From Pat Rynard, founder and managaing editor of the Iowa Starting Line, writing on Tuesday.
This past weekend saw what will likely be the largest caucus events for an individual candidate until the last several weeks before February 3. Bernie Sanders turned out crowds of over 2,000 at each of his events with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Council Bluffs, Des Moines and Iowa City.
As Ocasio-Cortez noted at the Council Bluffs rally, this was her first-ever visit to Iowa.
She should come back. Often.
Some may argue (and a few local party folks already have) that the Bronx congresswoman isn’t the best fit to win over middle-of-the-country caucus-goers. They’re wrong.
Sanders events in Iowa always have a certain boisterous life to them, filled with die-hard supporters, but the addition of Ocasio-Cortez brought something extra, and not just in the novelty that she was there.
The freshman congresswoman fired up the crowd in a way few politicians have in Iowa this year.
“When it comes to the Green New Deal, people say … how are we going to pay for it?” she said near the end of her introduction of Sanders in Des Moines on Saturday. “As though we’re not paying for it now. As though the Midwest wasn’t underwater this year! As though 3,000 Americans didn’t die in Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico! As though Hurricane Katrina didn’t happen! As though sea levels aren’t rising! As though California isn’t on fire! How do we pay for that?”
Most of the 2,000-person crowd leapt to their feet to cheer.
It’s not like Sanders himself doesn’t garner plenty of applause lines during his speeches, nor does the 78-year-old senator often lack in terms of energy or enthusiasm. But most Iowans have been listening to his stump speech for over five years now. A new take on the progressive movement from a speaker everyone wants to hear certainly helps.
“She’s young, she’s fresh,” said Rebecca Burgess, 46, of Des Moines, about Ocasio-Cortez. “She really resonates with the younger generation. They can relate to her. She’s not an older, white guy politician.”
Neither, of course, is Castro.
He is smart, attractive and experienced with an admirable and compelling life story.
He generally acquitted himself quite well at the first four debates - with the exception of his overreach at the third debate, in Houston, when he aggressively challenged former Vice President Joe Biden’s memory: “Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago?”
Tonight at midnight, the window will close to meet the polling threshold to participate in the fifth Democratic debate next week in Atlanta.
Politically, Castro will turn into a pumpkin.
He simply has not been able to nudge the polls, not nationally, and not in any of the four early states.
New Monmouth poll of Iowa, trend since August:
Buttigieg: 22% (+14)
Biden: 19% (-7)
Warren: 18% (-2)
Sanders: 13% (+5)
Klobuchar: 5% (+2)
Harris: 3% (-9)
Steyer: 3% (-)
Yang: 3% (+2)
Booker: 2% (+1)
Gabbard: 2% (+1)
Bullock: 1% (-)
Castro: 1% (+1)
Klobuchar closer to Dec debate
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) November 12, 2019
A new Quinnipiac University poll in New Hampshire shows former VP Joe Biden holding a narrow edge.
• Biden: 20%
• Warren: 16%
• Buttigieg: 15%
• Sanders: 14%
• Gabbard: 6%
• Yang: 4%
• Klobuchar: 3%
• Steyer: 3%
No other candidate tops 1%.https://t.co/uUAKTPkN6V
— CNN (@CNN) November 11, 2019
And, most surprisingly, not in his home state, where according to the recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll, he is locked in a tie for eighth place with U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.
ICYMI: we've posted the October 2019 @UTAustin/@TexasTribune Poll data file, codebook, & hundreds of downloadable graphics in multiple formats for teaching, presentations, web pages, handouts, research, etc. https://t.co/FL75wLTfpI #Txlege #Tx2020 #highered pic.twitter.com/hoRVGLhb17
— The Texas Politics Project (@TxPolProject) November 11, 2019
At 2%.
Join Tulsi today for a Veterans Day workout at Crossfit Santa Monica! Doors open @ 1pm. Be there! -V.
RSVP: https://t.co/vpGZrO3LYL
All proceeds go to @TeamRWB and @ReconSniperFoun
Donate here: https://t.co/STyxlFoJajhttps://t.co/vskNfKaEu7 pic.twitter.com/5G0kkyBawx
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) November 10, 2019
In other words, if the voting began not in little white Iowa and New Hampshire but in big, diverse Texas, native son Julián Castro would find himself in equally desperate straits.
Castro’s failure to make greater headway with Hispanic voters is a perplexing one.
Julian Castro – the sole Latino presidential candidate – lags in Latino support as Democratic primaries loom https://t.co/YAyhNqr3KS via @usatoday
— Ray Long (@RayLong) November 11, 2019
Interesting deep dive from @toddgillman on the front page of today's @dallasnews:
"Why is Julián Castro, the only Latino candidate for president, struggling to catch on, even with Latinos?"https://t.co/hDzg4HL4eS pic.twitter.com/NGZnYyKfeB
— Tom Benning (@tombenning) November 11, 2019
Yet, despite his failure to catch on, at least so far, I think he emerges from the presidential campaign as a more formidable figure then he entered the race.
The last cycle, he was among those considered by Hillary Clinton as a running mate, but it never seemed a completely serious possibility This time, he would be due serious consideration, though the mutual admiration and best, and maybe only really complementary fit, is with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Even as he is denied a place on the debate stage and is laying off staff in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Castro has said he will remain in the race.
Last week, Castro was interviewed by Trevor Noah on The Daily Show.
Noah:Welcome back to the show ... I just want to say this upfront. Beto O’Rourke was just on the show. Said to my face that he was not going to drop out of the race. Then he dropped out of the race four days later. He lied to my face. Beto was like, I'm not going anywhere, then he's like, yeah I'm going somewhere.“
Castro:I’m not going anywhere.
Noah:You’re not going anywhere?
Castro:I’m not going anywhere
We just met our fundraising goal that we said we needed to meet by the end of October to stay in the race, and so we're working hard on the race.
Noah: Okay. I’m going to hold you to it.
Castro:Either that or I’m going to say you were the curse if I do drop out.
