Commission on International Religious freedom looks at ways to counter the growing threat of antisemitism around the world. Announcer next, a panel of political analysts on the iowa president ial moines. , held in des i would like to have everybody take their seats, please. And i would also like to reconvene our Panel Discussion on the history and handicap in the 2020 Iowa Caucuses. We had a great discussion in the first hour about the history of these events. We may come back to some of the themes we were talking about there. But in this hour, i want our scholars to focus on the current caucus race. And how they see the race unfolding, who is ahead, who is behind. To aid in that discussion, i report we have breaking news. A cbs poll just out has sanders at 23 , biden at 23 , buttigieg at 23 , warren at 16 , and klobuchar at 7 . So, details at 6 00. [laughs] that is iowa . Cbs news. Yes, in iowa. The race in iowa. Buttigieg also 23 . I was right. It is a battleground tracker. Three white guys. [laughter] yes, you were. All right. I want to start with you. How do you see this race . You watch it from your perch in missouri. How do you see this contest . Watching it from afar, i have no greater insight than if i were immersed in it right now. I had just noticed that cbs poll. It seems consistent with the impression i have, which is we really dont know what will onpen on cauus night caucus night. There are lots of different scenarios, and several candidates who clearly seem to have enough support in the state that it is showing up. But one other thing i would want to caution people, and other people on the panel can talk about this, is that survey work is very difficult these days. It is difficult to get people to respond. It is difficult because of land lines versus cell phones. It is difficult to try to predict who will show up on caucus night. And of course, if you have weather like today, turnout may be great, and if the weather is terrible, which it never seems to be on caucus night, but there is always the potential, particularly in one part of the state rather than another part, that can have a big impact. So i think all we can tell you from the surveys done so far is that its really not at all clear what is going to happen caucus night. And for those of us who are political junkies, that probably adds to the fun. But as scholars, we would like to be able to Say Something with a little bit greater certainty than that we have no better guess than you do. I have all the answers. [laughter] just kidding. Please share. I am keeping those. I will tell you on february 4. No, i completely agree. We are all guessing at this point. And polling, especially when you think of who will show up that night, is pretty important. And that has changed outcomes of both iowa caucus results and general elections, who shows up. Of who shows up. I think it is interesting that diane was exactly right, the three top polling people are white men, and we have two qualified women running. I am curious to see how it shakes out. I am most curious how those second choice picks will come, because there is support for booker, there is support for yang, there is support for klobuchar. They probably will not be viable in a lot of precincts. Where they go can have a big impact. If they all go to warren, this is a fourway tie. If they all go to biden, it is a runaway victory for biden, so that second place will have a big impact on the final results. Explain why the second place showing in a poll is important to what will happen on caucus night . When i say secondplace, i mean their second choice at the precinct. Thats what i mean. So, for those of you on the democratic side who havent done this on the democratic side before, and what will be different this year is that whenever you make your first pick, if you dont have 15 of the people there supporting that candidate, the candidate is considered not viable. So one of two things have to happen. Either you need to get more people to reach that threshold and become viable, or you need to go to your second choice. It used to be there could be multiple alignments and people do more movement. This time, it is one realignment, so that will really limit things. Maybe i really feel good about yang and i go to him. He is not viable, now i have to vote my heart and not my head, now i have to vote biden. That might cause a lot of shifting. What do you say to reporters calling you up saying, how do you see this race . I think the highly contested Republican Donald Trump will win that. [laughter] unless something happens between now and caucus night in iran that really shocks people. You have to look at National Polls as well as iowa. I mean, iowa is influential, but a very, very famous political analyst and journalist once said there were three tickets out of iowa. I think that was you. First class, second class, and the back of the cabin next to the toilets. But if you are seated next to the toilet, and the year is not the right year for the first and second class iowa caucus placers, you might end up getting the nomination. You might even end up winning the election. So in iowa, you dont have to win. You can come in first, second or third and still do very well politically. I wrote an article for the newspaper you formerly and sadly dont work for anymore, the des moines register, which i see has gone into tremendous decline since you left. I blame it all on you. Social media has nothing to do with it. You left, and the thing just collapsed. But i argue this may be one of those wonderful years where we have a brokered convention this summer where nobody has enough delegates and you come in there and youve got biden and sanders and buttigieg and maybe warren as well coming in with a chunk of delegates and fighting it out onhe flo. That would be the greatest thing in my life, is to see that happen because it would be real democracy at work. Not literally fighting . Maybe literally. My money is definitely on buttigieg in that case. The things i hear every four years, it will be the last time iowa will have caucuses and maybe they will be a brokered convention. Well, you heard it again. [laughter] to play on it again, i did predict earlier without hearing from cbs news that the three top vote getters in iowa at this point in time were the three white guys. Getting back to what i said earlier, one thing i worry about with the Iowa Caucuses is that it diminishes choices for other states. But i think kelly made a good point. When i talked about caucus math earlier and how candidates have been able to use it, thats not as possible this year. Because when you go in, you have to put down your second choice and stick with it. I have seen some recent data on sanders supporters, basically on their donation giving. For example, earlier in this campaign, you might give to biden, but also to warren and you might have given to buttigieg. With sanders supporters, they typically dont have a second choice. So i think so what could happen, as kelly said, with the second choice on these candidates who are not going to be viable, who do they flock to . I think we will see some flocking basically to biden, buttigieg, and warren. So, i think there is a couple things to keep in mind here. One, this race is incredibly fluid. I think there are people who have talked about it. Thats a good way to characterize it. It is fluid. Theres a lot of people, a wealth of candidates for the democrats. A lot of people have a first choice, but also a second choice. Their polling shows they are relatively open to changing their mind. And the dynamics of caucus night could do that. Id like to push back about what was said about brokered conventions. I think thats a thing to talk about, but probably is rarely going to happen because it is not in a partys interest to get to that point. So even in 2008 when you had Hillary Clinton and barack obama going into june, really late, it they didnt go into the convention. Especially if you are going to be running against an incumbent president , it is not in the partys interest to do that, so the party will do the things they need to do. To do to try to eliminate that. Now, talking about the rule changes in the earlier part of the session here, one of the other things the democrats have done is changed how super delegates factor in. That could be an issue later on as well. But the third thing i would like to mention here is to not forget the gop has caucuses also. You could learn really interesting things by looking at the gop caucus. The diehard gop people are the ones who in years when they have incumbents tend to go, but there might also be people who want to show dissatisfaction. It is notable the iowa gop has not canceled caucuses. States in many other have canceled primaries and caucuses because they dont want to publicize any kind of opposition within the party. These are party events. The gop, in order to help them maintain first in the nation status, didnt want to do that, they didnt want to see the process as being rigged for the incumbent, so there will be gop caucuses. And also note, for both the democrats and the gop, at a caucus, it is more than saying here are the candidates i like, its also about elevating platform planks, governance within the party, electing people to central committees and those kinds of things. And these are important factors that the National Media never really reports on at all. But these are important in the Party Building aspect of what caucuses are, and the democratic nature of them as well. I wanted to share with our audience, you have been spending time since august doing field research, going from event to event watching the candidates at work, so what is your sense of who is ahead and who is behind . I have been here since the head of the state fair and have been tweeting as i go, mainly to keep notes for myself. It is an effective way to do that at the events. So, ive probably been to 85 or 90 candidate events at this point. And im no more certain about the outcome than anybody else, as we are looking at this. The poll that was just reported makes sense to me. It kind of tracks with what i think were seeing. Weve been doing some survey Research Work as well and just did a second wave on that, and its very similar. But whats really, really important here, people have been mentioning the second choice piece, there are key changes to the democratic rules that are going to change the nature of the caucus and what can actually happen on caucus night. Earlier in the first half, there was a comment about how barack obama in 2008 sent voters to john edwards groups when they had more than they needed to be viable in a precinct, at least 15 to get a delegate. That can no longer be done. When people come into the Democratic Caucus and express their first preference, they will be locked into that first preference if their candidate is viable. There will be no more moving around for those people. The only people who will be allowed to move are those whose candidates dont get at least 15 in the precinct. That really does change the dynamic of what happens on caucus night, which has a lot to do again with how the delegate counts are reported. But the democrats are going to tell us the actual vote counts for the first time, both the initial vote count and what they call the realigned vote count after every candidate who doesnt reach 15 is dropped. So, the media is going to have three different numbers to work with. Im not quite sure where they are going to go with it. I was looking at the cbs poll, where they were emphasizing the number of delegates each candidate would win if poll numbers hold. But i would suspect on caucus night, the fallback will be what the vote looks like, but the question will be is it the initial vote or the final vote . That means a lot for a candidate like Amy Klobuchar, who is unlikely at the moment, although everything can change in the next few weeks, to be viable in many precincts, meaning she will get zero in those precincts on the realigned vote, but she will have had votes in the initial alignment. I am saying all this, a, it will a, to say it will be a lot more complicated to even know who the winner is, and b, to simply talk, because even after 85plus events, its just not clear to me where iowans are going. I will make one more point about that. In our most recent data, 62 of sanders voters say they are unlikely to change their minds. 56 of biden. But 39 of buttigieg, 33 of warren, and 33 of klobuchar voters say they are certain about who they are voting for. A lot of Movement Still possible here. As the reporter on this stage, i can tell you what number is going to be reported, and that is the one we have first. I think the intention is to release it all at the same time. Whether they will be able to or not, i dont know. This gets into our discussion earlier about not turning it into a primary with New Hampshires concerns. Will the Iowa Democratic party have this information, but sit on it until they have the delegate equivalent number and release it all at the same time . The problem with that is that the caucuses are open events. Reporters can go to caucuses and watch the count themselves and have anecdotally some idea of what that initial body count is. But reporters are going to be standing on deadlines, editors, producers, news directors, will be screaming at them, whats going on . And you go with the first information you get, and that shapes the narrative the rest of the evening. That has happened with every caucus i have covered. The republican story in 2012 is a great example. Because they went with romney because that is what the party told them, but that is not actually what happened. In 2016, i sat in the dia center watching the frustration as midnight came and the democrats had not reported results yet. The party ntendo ito report all of the numbers at the same time. But we will see if that actually happens. This whole issue of this count is one of the biggest criticisms that is made and has been made of these caucuses from the very beginning. The counts are spotty, sporadic, they are not like a primary that is run by government, they are run by parties. And s one of the big criticisms. And it is one of the big criticisms. Dennis, i didnt mean to leave you out of the conversation. It is quite fine. Sometime this past fall, a reporter asked me, what surprises do you expect . And i said, listen to what you just asked me. [laughter] if it is a surprise, you cant expect it. If we expect it, it is not a surprise. I love what journalists do. I wish we still had newspapers, but i am not interested in the journalistic prediction of who will come in where. I have a broader interest. I dont want to hijack your question, but i am more interested in the water than the fish swimming in it. I think what we see right now with the democrats is a continuation of the problem, for democrats of the problem for democrats, is they still have not figured out who they are in a postreagan era. In the 1990s, i went back and looked at National Party platforms. I looked at the 1992 democratic platform, clinton, republican platform for george h. W. I didnt look at ross perot. I always thought of him a sort of a historical speedbump. But i went back then and i looked back at the 1968 platforms, humphrey, nixon and george wallace, whom some see President Trump as the latest iteration after pat buchanan in between. If you exclude Foreign Affairs, it was all about vietnam. If you look at social and domestic policy from 1968 and look at 1992, when Foreign Affairs at that point were not a big issue, we didnt have 9 11 yet, the soviet union was going. Was gone. The 1992 democratic platform looked very much like the 1968 republican platform in terms of social and domestic policy. And the 1992 republican platform looked very much like the 1968 wallace platform. And democrats are still trying to figure out who they are and how to talk about politics beyond just laundry lists of policies. And i think that we see that right now in this argument. There is a mirror image going on in the democratic side as we did with ted cruz and republicans in 2016. You have the warrens and the for as arguing basically kind of base election, that we need to win the election by turning out progressives. I hate the terms left and right, but the more progressive kind of liberal. Whereas youve got the bidens, the buttigieges, and the klobuchars saying that there is still a kind of centrist liberalism that will win the election. I think thats the big argument right now that we see between those two sets of candidates, and we see that playing out to some extent here in iowa. How that will play out on election night, i dont know more than anyone else. I just want to say one brief thing. One other thing i think it could that could impact this race is what is going on in the middle east. It impacted the 2004 race with john kerry. And so, if there is an International Crisis and that is still looming above us and if that ratchetes up, that could help joe biden because hes typically perceived as the person with the most international experience. I see heads nodding. You agree with that. Venezuela now has finally admitted that maduro is a dictator, because they just shut down the legislature. No more opposition elections. And mr. Guaido, who is the president of venezuela of the democratic constituency of venezuela, is now finished. I work with a lot of my former venezuelan students on the venezuela democracy project, and this is the end of that. Especially since the Trump Administration will concentrate on the middle east now. You know, venezuela is too much struggle. Those are all Foreign Policy challenges. Is there agreement here that the foreignpolicy crisis kelly, what do you think, doesnt work does it work to bidens benefit . I think it works to bidens benefit and perhaps buttigiegs benefit as well. In there he it should work to some of the others as well. Why buttigieg . Because of his military experience, and a fair amount of his stump speech is related to being a leader in the world and kind of that moral american authority. But i think that americans have a short Attention Span for things that arent in the united states. So i think some of the economic arguments that are appealing warren sideders and of the party will continue to be important. It really depends. If the situation with iran escalates to the point of we are in a war, that is an