Your Iowa Caucus Questions, Answered

It’s the December before a presidential election, which means that Iowa is overflowing with candidates and reporters for its quadrennial caucuses.

This year looks different, though — because Democrats have moved their first votes to other states, and because a single candidate so dominates the Republican field.

Here’s what to know.

What are the Iowa caucuses and how do they work?

Though “primaries and caucuses” are often lumped together, they are not the same. Primaries operate the way most elections do: Voters cast ballots privately through early-voting or mail-in options, or at a polling site on Election Day. Caucuses, by contrast, require voters to attend at a specific hour and discuss their preferences publicly.

At each local caucus in Iowa — in school gymnasiums, community centers and even churches — Republicans will make speeches in favor of their preferred candidates. Then caucusgoers will take a vote, and candidates’ delegates to the county convention will be nominated based on that vote. No remote participation, such as by mail or phone, will be allowed.

You may have heard terms like “viability” and “realignment” in relation to the Iowa caucuses. Those refer to the Democrats’ traditional process, in which caucusgoers sorted themselves physically according to which candidate they supported. Candidates whose support was below a viability threshold were eliminated, and their supporters were able to realign with a viable candidate. Republicans do not have those procedures, and Democrats have dropped them.

Caucuses have many critics because they are less accessible than primaries. There is no flexibility — people have to arrive on time and stay until the end — which means those who have to work or are otherwise unavailable at that hour are out of luck. People with disabilities often struggle to participate. So do people who feel unsafe, or simply uncomfortable, disclosing their political preferences.

Most states that once held caucuses have switched to primaries, but Iowa is an exception.

When are the caucuses?

The Republican caucuses will be held on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m. local time.

The Democratic caucuses will be held by mail. The first ballots — technically “preference cards” — will be mailed out on Jan. 12, and voters can request one until Feb. 19. Though Iowa Democrats can attend in-person gatherings on Jan. 15 to conduct other party business, they will not choose a presidential candidate then.

Why are the Republican and Democratic caucuses different?

The Iowa Republican Party and the Iowa Democratic Party control their own caucus procedures, and they have long chosen different ones. But the procedures are especially different this cycle because the Democratic National Committee changed its primary calendar at President Biden’s urging, while the Republican National Committee stuck to its old one.

The Democrats’ rationale was to prioritize states more racially diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire, which are overwhelmingly white. Their first two states are now South Carolina, on Feb. 3, and Nevada, on Feb. 6, and Iowa is out of the early lineup. (By the D.N.C.’s schedule, New Hampshire would have voted on the same day as Nevada. But it refused to cede its first-in-the-nation primary status, which is enshrined in state law, and scheduled an unsanctioned primary for Jan. 23.)

Why does Iowa go first (for Republicans)?

Today, the answer is, “Because it always has.” A common argument is that, since Iowans have spent decades shouldering the responsibility of being first, they are uniquely well informed and engaged. They know how much power they hold to winnow presidential fields, this argument goes, and they take that responsibility more seriously than voters elsewhere would.

Initially, though, Iowa got its spot by historical accident.

After the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, Democrats changed their nominating process to give voters more say than party insiders. Until 1968, the party held popular votes in just a handful of states, while the rest chose a candidate at conventions; after 1968, the balance shifted strongly to popular votes in the form of primaries or caucuses.

Iowa Democrats happened to schedule the earliest vote in 1972. Iowa Republicans, realizing the timing could work to the state’s benefit, followed suit in 1976 — and, on the Democratic side, Jimmy Carter took advantage of the Iowa caucuses that year to propel himself from relative obscurity to the front of the presidential pack.

The power of going first thus clearly demonstrated, the Iowa Legislature passed a law requiring the state to continue scheduling its caucuses before any others.

How do the delegates work?

Each precinct will be assigned a number of delegates to elect to a county convention based on the results of the caucus vote in that precinct.

Over the ensuing months, the county and state conventions will confirm Iowa’s 40 delegates to the Republican National Convention, where the party’s presidential nominee will be officially chosen based on who wins a majority of the more than 2,000 delegates available nationwide.

When do we typically have results?

The leaders of each local Republican caucus will report results to the state party, which will tabulate and release the statewide results. This usually happens pretty quickly, within a few hours.

Since Democrats are voting by mail this year, and Iowa is no longer first for them, their results won’t come until March 5.

Why were there so many delays and problems in 2020?

The Iowa Democrats’ reporting process collapsed in 2020, preventing them from releasing any significant results on the night of the caucuses and the full results for days.

The caucusing itself went fairly smoothly, but a new app through which precincts were supposed to report their results failed and backup phone lines were jammed, so the state party couldn’t obtain the numbers. When the results were finally tabulated, they were full of errors and inconsistencies — products of manual calculations by precinct officials — and the party conducted a partial recanvass followed by a partial recount.

A complicating factor was that the Iowa Democratic Party had promised to release multiple sets of results — not only the number of state-convention delegates each candidate had earned, which would determine the caucuses’ winner, but also how many supporters each candidate had in the first and second rounds of voting.

That promise stemmed from 2016, when Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in the caucuses by the tiniest of margins, and Mr. Sanders fought for an audit and accused the state party of a lack of transparency because it had not released the first- and second-round totals.

Producing multiple tallies provided a more comprehensive picture and allowed for errors to be identified, but it worsened the delays when the systems failed.

What is Iowa’s importance to the rest of the race?

Iowa is all about momentum — the nebulous idea of who is rising and who is dead in the water, which can affect voters’ choices in other states.

In terms of actual numbers, Iowa doesn’t matter much. It accounts for a tiny fraction of the delegates awarded nationwide. But its ability to set perceptions is so strong that candidates often drop out after doing poorly there, unless they have reason to believe they will do significantly better in New Hampshire.