The 2016 presidential campaign has been going on for so long that it's easy to forget that not a single primary vote has been cast—until now, the race has been purely hypothetical, played out in polls and pundit arguments. That changes, finally, with the Iowa Caucuses on Monday.Maybe after that, things will calm down. So far, the campaign has been a funhouse reflection of politics, with Donald Trump proving that Republican voters don't like Republicans all that much and a self-described socialist challenging Democratic heir apparent Hillary Clinton. The absurdity is only amplified by the inherent weirdness of the Iowa Caucuses themselves.
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Most Americans accept that the presidential race begins in a otherwise forgettable state with more pigs than people, and a voting system culled from the opium-addled brain of Lewis Carroll. But the reasons for this—and what it means for the presidential election—tend to be less understood. Below, we've broken down some of the things you should know about the caucus before it's all over Monday night.
White People
Democrats seem reluctant to admit that the votes they're competing for here are so lily-white, given how important winning minority voters will become more important in future primaries. Still, you can't help but cock your head in amusement when aClinton ally accused Bernie Sanders of putting too many white people in his Iowa campaign ads.
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For Republicans, the effect of all these white Iowans has been more sinister, providing a subtext for the endless campaign speeches and ads mythologizing Iowa as the last bastion of Agrarian Democracy and Family Values. At the same time, conservative flashpoints like mass deportation and Muslim immigration bans remain mostly abstract concepts in Iowa, allowing the candidates to ramp up their nativist rhetoric in front of an audience that's likely had limited interaction with the real-life people those policies might affect.
Caucus "Voting"
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The Democratic caucus system is much more chaotic, with a lot of standing, and even walking around, involved. After some attendees give speeches on behalf of their favored candidates, the participants congregate into human blobs that represent support for a particular candidate. It's not over then though: After the initial blobs are counted, any candidate who gets less than 15 percent of the vote basically ceases to exist as an option, and the voters in that blob suddenly become free agents, with a chance to join another, more successful, blob. So begins the fun and tedious democratic process by which supporters of the bigger campaigns try to physically absorb the newly available voters.In an election with a large Democratic field, this process can go on for hours. But it's not likely to last too long this year—the Martin O'Malley blobs will form, then dissipate, and be absorbed, and fought over, by the Sanders and Clinton teams. Then the final votes are tallied and sent to party officials via the Democrats' own custom app. Democratic delegates are also assigned to multiple winners, but how exactly these numbers are tallied, though, is too complex of a process for any living human to understand.
The Media
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As a result, the caucuses have become an infotainment circus, turning the hordes of cable news pundits and embedded reporters into political monsters in their own right, drunk off their power to determine the "narrative" of the presidential race. Democracy!
"Ground Game"
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