Only a few days remain for Democrats in Iowa to participate in their party’s 2024 presidential caucus. Ballots for the state’s first vote-by-mail caucus must be postmarked by Tuesday, March 5, to be considered valid. The Iowa Democratic Party will announce the results of the vote that same night.
The party began sending out its mail-in presidential preference cards, as the IDP calls its absentee ballots, on Jan. 12, three days before this year’s in-person precinct caucuses. The precinct caucuses only dealt with routine party business, but were held on Jan. 15 to comply with the state law requiring that caucuses in presidential election years be held at least eight days prior to any other state contest in the nomination process. To comply with the presidential primary schedule approved by the Democratic National Committee, which removed Iowa from its first-in-the-county position, the IDP is keeping voting open until March 5.
March 5 is the earliest day state Democratic parties can hold, or conclude, their presidential primaries, if they weren’t selected for one of the four earlier primary dates. States that refuse to comply with the DNC’s rules — this year, there’s just one: New Hampshire — won’t be allowed to participate in the official nominating process at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
March 5 is also Super Tuesday, with Democrats in 13 other states holding their primaries that day. Six of those states will be awarding far more delegates than Iowa’s 46. California has 497 delegates this year, Texas has 272, North Carolina has 132,, Virginia has 118, Massachusetts has 116 and Minnesota will send 92 voting delegates to the convention. All of them will announce the results of their primaries on Tuesday night.
Iowa Democrats have three candidates on the ballot to choose from, but there is no question that Joe Biden will be the winner. The other candidates are Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who is campaigning on the hope his mere 55 years of age will persuade Democrats to abandon the 81-year-old sitting president for him instead, and bestselling self-help book author Marianne Williamson. Williamson announced on Feb. 7 that she was ending her campaign, but changed her mind following Michigan’s primary on Tuesday, tweeting the next day that she was back in the race.
Roughly 100,000, or 13 percent, of voters in Michigan’s Democratic primary chose “Uncommitted” over Biden, a successful movement by supporters of a ceasefire in Gaza to condemn the president’s support of Israeli military actions in Gaza that have claimed the lives of more than 30,000 Palestinians.
This will be Biden’s fourth time competing in the Iowa Caucus. Biden ran for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, but never made it to caucus night, or even 1988. He dropped out of the race in September 1987, after one of his rivals for the nomination circulated a video tape showing Biden plagiarizing a well-known speech by a British politician while he was campaigning at the Iowa State Fair. In 2008, Biden finished a distant fifth in the Iowa Caucus, and then immediately ended his campaign. In 2020, Biden finished fourth, behind Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
According to the IDP, more than 10,000 of the 19,609 presidential preference cards it mailed out had been returned as of 11 a.m. on Wednesday. The party will announce the unofficial results of its 2024 Iowa Caucus at 5 p.m. next Tuesday.
