Iowa GOP cancels straw poll

Jennifer Jacobs | The Des Moines Register

DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa Straw Poll is dead, leaving a heavier burden on winnowing an oversized GOP presidential field on Iowans who will cast the nation's first votes in the caucuses in February.

The governing board for the Republican Party of Iowa voted unanimously Friday to cancel the straw poll, a milestone on the path to the White House that had passed the strategic tipping point. It was no longer a political risk for presidential campaigns to walk away from the straw poll, and too many of the 2016 contenders had opted to skip it for it to survive.

"We set the table and they didn't come to dinner," Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann told The Des Moines Register and Radio Iowa on Friday morning.

There were three reasons the Iowa GOP board voted 17-0 not to go forward with the Aug. 8 event in Boone, Kaufmann said. There was too little interest from the presidential contenders; the fundraiser likely wouldn't have been a moneymaker; and there were concerns about jeopardizing Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses — Iowa party officials were getting blowback from national influencers for appearing to be bullying contenders to compete.

"Am I disappointed? Yes," Kaufmann said. "But I don't say this really with any animus toward the candidates. They made decisions that were good for their campaign. I would much rather spend my time highlighting Hillary's dysfunctionality as a potential president than trying to gain a particular candidate by backing them into a corner and forcing them into Boone."

For GOP activists in Iowa, the summertime political festival was a beloved tradition that dated to 1979, but its fate rested in the hands of the presidential campaigns, who drove attendance by spending resources to haul in their supporters.

Several key contenders — Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee — had decided against dishing out the big bucks that it can take to win. Party officials needed at least one legitimate player to participate, but the Iowa front-runner, Scott Walker, declined to commit.

Ample cover for ditching the straw poll was delivered by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who had declared at the end of the 2012 presidential election that it had "outlived its usefulness." And a recent Iowa Poll showed that while a slight majority of likely GOP caucus-goers thought it was important for presidential candidates to participate in the straw poll, almost as many dismissed it as unimportant.

Back in January, the Iowa GOP board unanimously to proceed with the event, a daylong political festival meant to showcase the party's presidential candidates and to bring Iowa Republicans together for food, music and field-winnowing. They had scheduled it to take place not in Ames, its historic home, but at the Central Iowa Expo in rural Boone.

Some candidates had said they might show up to give a speech but wouldn't spend money trying to win the straw poll. That meant the fundraiser would likely have struggled to break even, much less garnered hundreds of thousands for the party as it has in the past.