Iowa GOP chair: State should hold first caucuses for both parties in 2024

Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann on Sunday said the Iowa caucuses should remain the first nominating contest in the nation for both parties in the next presidential election.

“I can report back from Memphis, Tennessee, that the Republican Party of Iowa will once again kick off the nomination calendar with our Iowa Caucus,” Kauffman said in an opinion column published in the Des Moines Register.

“Now that Republicans have set their calendar and the Democrats near setting theirs, the time for sitting on the sideline is over,” he wrote. 

Kauffman criticized claims that Iowa was not a reflection of the rest of the country, arguing that “coastal progressives” ignore issues important to a wide swath of the country.

“They say we are ‘not representative enough,’ ‘not competitive enough,’ and not important enough to hold such an honor. Everything they have said is wrong,” Kauffman said.

He added that it was “not at all surprising that they want to skip over middle America when it comes to vital, important contests that start the nomination for who will be the next President of the United States.”

“I believe that Ross Wilburn, Scott Brennan, and other Iowa Democratic Party leaders will prevail. Iowa, and America, are stronger when Iowa goes first, and goes together,” he also said. 

While the nominating calendar on the Republican side will start in Iowa in 2024, Iowa Democrats’ future as the first-in-the-nation caucus is less certain.

Apart from concerns that Iowa, which is largely white and rural, does not represent the rest of the nation, a highly public technology failure on the Democratic side sparked widespread confusion at the 2020 Iowa caucuses. 

That led the Democratic National Committee to open up an application process for the early voting calendar and sent states jockeying for the coveted slots before Super Tuesday — meaning that there is no guarantee Iowa will be among the first four. Democrats have also considered adding a fifth state to the early lineup, which has traditionally consisted of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.