MinnPost/Jana Freiband

Chuck Slocum

It was over three decades ago that the phone rang at Republican headquarters in St. Paul. The Iowa caller asked if I, the Minnesota party chair at the time, would be interested in discussing some kind of a regional, multi-state presidential preference caucus to be held on the same day, beginning in early 1976.

Other Midwestern state party leaders were being surveyed, I was told.

The logic was simple. Why not design a lower-cost way for self-selected voters to get themselves informed and offer their considered opinions about the top candidates within the politically important Midwest region of the country? The alternative to this was expanding the costly and confrontational state primary elections that offered party-affiliated voters a sound bite and a single up or down, one-time, vote.

At the time, Minnesota's own precinct caucuses were held in February of every election year and were set by a state law that minority Republicans were unlikely to be able to change.

The upshot
While I was intrigued by the regional caucus notion, the upshot of that discussion was that Iowa alone set up its first presidential caucus in January 1976. Gerald R. Ford, the nation's first un-elected president as a result of the Watergate scandal, won that caucus on the Republican side. Jimmy Carter was the Democratic Party pick, and the Georgia peanut farmer went on to win the presidency in a very close election.

Since that time, 13 party nominees have won in Iowa; six of them, including President Barack Obama in 2008, went on to win the nation's highest elective office.

Though projected to be a so-called battleground state in November, Republican Iowa caucus goers this year were very conservative on both economic and social issues.

On Jan. 4 about 120,000 Republicans convened in nearly 1,800 individual caucus sites located in 99 Iowa counties. Mitt Romney held the 25 percent support he'd earned in 2008, besting one-time long shot Rick Santorum by only eight votes. Libertarian-leaning Ron Paul finished with 21 percent. Obama, unopposed this time, won the Democratic caucuses.

Adams and Jefferson's shared vision
The presidential candidate endorsement system could be improved, no doubt, as our partisan processes used to select candidates for president — whether through caucuses, endorsing conventions or primaries — hone the electioneering skills necessary to win but do not always help shape the broad-based leadership envisioned when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson first conceived of the two-party system to help us govern America.

I think the long-ago expressed idea of regional presidential primaries or caucuses — set a couple of weeks apart in the election year and allowing states to either opt in or opt out on that date certain — would improve the selection process for both Democrats and Republicans.

Chuck Slocum (Chuck@WillistonGroup.Com) is president of the Williston Group, a management consulting firm.