President Joe Biden scored an overwhelming victory in the Iowa Democratic Party’s first vote-by-mail presidential caucus on Tuesday night. Biden received 90.9 percent of the votes cast. The two other candidates on the mail-in presidential preference card, as the IDP calls its ballots, were Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, who won 3 percent of the vote, and bestselling self-help book author Marianne Williamson, who got 2.2 percent.
A total of 3.9 percent of the voters who participated in the caucus selected “uncommitted” as their preference, according to the provisional vote totals the IDP posted online. Ten ballots were undervotes, where no option was selected, and four were overvotes, in which the voters marked more than one option resulting in the ballot not being counted.
The IDP said it received 19,609 requests for mail-in ballots from registered Democrats, and 12,207, or 62.3 percent, were returned by Tuesday. According to the most recent voter registration totals published by the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office, there are 466,773 active Democratic voters in Iowa, so the 12,207 who voted in the caucus represent 2.6 percent of the total number of registered Democrats in the state.
In a news release last month, the IDP said it “expect[ed] the number of participants for the 2024 mail-in caucus will exceed our goal of 15,000 — which was the number of 2012 caucus goers the last time we had an incumbent Democratic President.”
Johnson, Linn and Polk were the only counties where Democrats sent in more than 1,000 ballots. Johnson had the highest percentage of voters, with 3.5 percent of its 38,944 registered Democrats casting votes in the caucus, according to the county-by-county breakdown published by the IDP. Just under 3 percent of all registered Democrats voted in both Linn and Polk.
Only 19 of Iowa’s 99 counties had more than 100 people vote in the caucus, and in nine counties, 10 or fewer Democrats voted. Sac and Taylor counties tied for the lowest number of votes cast. In both counties, just four voters returned ballots.
Speaking to reporters at IDP’s offices in Des Moines on Tuesday before the vote totals were released, party chair Rita Hart called the new mail-in caucus “the most accessible caucus in our entire history.”
“People will tell you, I think, that it was easy to fill out these presidential preference cards to have access to the process,” she said. “So we’re pleased with that.”
Hart also said there will be conversation in the party about possible changes to the mail-in format it adopted for this year’s caucus.
“It’s a new process,” she said. “And so, we’ve got to figure out how to create more interest around that, how to get better participation at the in-person caucus, just like looking at the way we tweak the mail-in process.”
