DENVER — Voters in Colorado will decide the winner of the Republican presidential primary. Unlike in Iowa, where caucus goers get the pick.
Colorado voters ended the caucus process ahead of the 2020 presidential primary. The 2024 presidential primary will be on March 5.
Students from the University of Denver (DU) are in Iowa to see a caucus happen in person, and they learned that saying they’re from Colorado is a bit of a dirty word.
“Going up to people and mentioning that we are from the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado is at times difficult because Colorado, especially right now, is on the main stage with the 14th Amendment case,” DU sophomore Dylan Lindsey said.
Lindsey is one of 13 students in Iowa with Political Science Professor Seth Masket’s class.
“These students are part of a class I'm teaching at DU that's on presidential nominations,” Masket said. “We're learning different theories about how presidential nominations work. How parties go about picking people. How voters make decisions.”
Being away from Colorado in negative degree weather would normally be a huge benefit, if not for the negative degree weather in Iowa.
“Wind chill of -16, I think. But the base temperature is what? Negative two?” Masket said.
“Yeah, a balmy negative two,” DU senior Laura Dufresne said.
The cold has not stopped the students from seeing as many candidates as possible.
“First day, we went, and we saw Asa Hutchinson, after we sat on the on the tarmac for longer than our whole entire flight was because Des Moines was backed up,” Dufresne said. “We saw Nikki Haley. We saw DeSantis. And we did Trump. And those were interesting, very distinct events.”
It is more than just observing. They have projects due for the class.
“I'm studying strategic communications political science. So, me and my partner decided to look into how events are advertised and how that really plays out in the demographics, and the kind of people that you're attracting to these sorts of events,” Lindsey said.
The demographics is one reason the Democratic Party moved Iowa out of the first caucus slot and moved up South Carolina.
“Democrats had a lot of concerns that Iowa’s electorate was not very representative of the rest of the Democratic Party, which I think was a legitimate point. Republicans have a little less of a concern about that,” Masket said.
“For me, it's connecting with people, so that I can better understand my own ideology, better understand where they're coming from, and hopefully be able to bridge some of the gaps that we've been seeing in some of the division that we've been seeing in our political culture,” Dufresne said.
Winning Iowa does not necessarily mean winning the presidential nominee. For the Democrats in 2020, President Biden finished fourth.
“One thing that the Iowa caucuses really do, they don't necessarily pick the nominee, but they pick who's not the nominee. It's good at screening out a lot of candidates,” Masket said.
And for this class, it is good at providing warm and fuzzy feelings, minus the warm part.
“I like talking to the moms and the dads and the grandmas, and dance with the grandmas,” Dufresne said.
“She danced with a grandma,” Lindsey said.
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