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Reforming The Process In Iowa – For Republicans

When I attended the Iowa State Republican Convention, one thing that I found odd was the district level meetings that were held on Friday night to select district delegates and alternates to the National Convention, electors to go to Washington if our candidate for President wins in Iowa, and representatives to the State Nominating Committee (who select the slate of additional at-large delegates and alternates to the National Convention).  What I could not understand was, why we didn’t do this in April when we had the actual District Convention.

Although I still don’t have the answer to why it works this way, Ted Sporer published some recommendations to reform our process [1], which included centralizing the planning for the State Convention (that is, have the State Central Committee own the planning), and move the Friday night District Level activities to the April District Conventions.

This all makes sense to me.  It’s interesting how many people really didn’t know what Friday night was about (I almost didn’t attend myself because I didn’t really understand the process).  For me, it would have been more sensible to do this work in April.  Nothing happened between April and June that should have had an influence on electing these roles, and it would have given the Nominating Committee more time to work (they were up pretty late Friday night working on the slate).

Ted’s contention, which I think is right on, is that if this work is moved to April, we have a higher likelihood of participation.  Participation is key to the whole process, and anything we can do to motivate people to come to these conventions, the better.

This will be a good topic to address next year.  Right now, we have a number of candidates to get elected.