712 Digital Group - top

Iowa GOP chair reflects on 2024 Iowa Caucuses

News

January 18th, 2024 by Ric Hanson

(Radio Iowa)  – Iowa Republican Party officials say just over 110-thousand Iowans participated in Monday night’s Caucuses. Party chairman Jeff Kaufmann says it happened when some areas of the state had a wind chill of negative 30 degrees. “We’ve shown the world we can have a personalized grassroots event and we can have absolute election integrity and we can do it all in wind chills that would probably send a whole lot of citizens in a whole lot of states under the covers,” Kaufmann says.

About 15 percent of registered Republicans voted — the lowest turn-out for the Iowa Caucuses in 24 years. “Before the 186,000 record that was set in 2016 on a, well, it would be a balmy evening compared to Monday, we were looking at numbers in 2012 and 2008 that were very similar to this,” Kaufmann says. About 120-thousand people voted in the 2008 Iowa Republican Party Caucuses. which Mike Huckabee won. In 2012, when Rick Santorum won, there were about 122-thousand participants.

Kaufmann says it was a breach of faith for major media outlets to announce Trump was the projected winner of THIS YEAR’S Caucuses before the vast majority of participants had cast their straw poll vote.  “We are certainly showing our displeasure. I’m certainly cautioning the Nevada chair because they’ve got a caucus coming and that’s something that should not occur,” Kaufmann says. “That’s something that should not happen again.”

The Iowa Caucuses are run by the party, not state or county government officials. Kaufmann and other Iowa G-O-P officials raised more than 800-thousand dollars for the operation of this year’s Caucuses.