Elizabeth speaking to the too big for the room crowd in Storm Lake, Iowa today:
This is my seventh Iowa caucus, I remember 2000 when the top candidates of either party would have trouble filling a 20 seat cafe in a county of 20,000. Then Doctor Dean came along and upped our game in 2004, bringing in thousands of volunteers but not so many Iowa democrats to his side of the room on caucus night. But the high water mark was set by Obama campaigning for the 2008 caucus, when he would frequently draw 5% of a county’s population to a campaign event on a weekday. Locals tell me Obama drew 300-400 in Storm Lake which is only 2% of surrounding Buena Vista county’s twenty or so thousand population, but this is in northwestern Iowa where Trump won by double digits.
That’s a good problem to have, if the campaign can figure out that they need to rent bigger rooms. They can well afford small town Iowa’s biggest rooms, given that they had a least two $1000+ a day stage crews leapfrogging to stay ahead of Elizabeth’s schedule. The Obama campaign figured that out quick, renting out the biggest rooms and even chartering not one but two buses for the media scrum. And the media was there in force, as well as the expected IPR there was at least one TV crew from the cities and even WGBH.
The other question is whether Liz is drawing Bernie’s progressive crowd or the mainstream dems and indies more common in rural Iowa? Iowa is nice enough to list your county on your license plate, and most I saw were from Buena Vista or neighboring counties, but I wasn’t the only Minnesotan that’d trekked near a hundred miles into Iowa to catch Elizabeth. That said, you have to give Elizabeth credit for kicking off her (exploratory) campaign in more conservative western Iowa instead of the well worn democratic campaign trail through eastern Iowa.
And finally, what democratic Iowa caucus campaign event would be complete without a Trump thug loosing it… Thanks for the Secret Service and local police for promptly taking him into custody when he got violent before he could assault anything more than our eardrums…