Republicans taking a bye on Iowa

By Charlie Mahtesian

updated 2:43 p.m. ET Nov. 16, 2007

WASHINGTON - On Saturday, November 10, there was no mistaking the center of the political universe. It was Veterans Memorial Hall in Des Moines, where the Democratic presidential field joined the 9,000 energetic partisans gathered for the Iowa Democratic Party's annual Jefferson-Jackson Day fundraising dinner.

This was no ordinary rubber-chicken-circuit event. It attracted every important Democratic politician in Iowa, not to mention House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and was preceded by tailgate-style rallies and boisterous marches through the streets of the state capital.

The spectacle surely would have overshadowed any Republican campaign events in Iowa that day, except that there weren't any. None of the Republican candidates, it turns out, was anywhere near Iowa. Instead, they were scattered across the country. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was fundraising in Colorado. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas was doing the same in Philadelphia. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee were crisscrossing New Hampshire. The others weren't on the campaign trail at all.

With less than two months to go before Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses, it might seem odd that not a single Republican presidential contender was pressing the flesh in Iowa that day. But their absence was in keeping with the widely divergent paths the two parties' 2008 nomination fights have followed in Iowa.

For Democrats, the run-up to the January 3 Iowa caucuses is generating full-throttle, leave-no-county-behind campaigns within the Hawkeye State, where polls indicate that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois are locked in a tight race.

Republicans, on the other hand, have taken a far more ambivalent approach, one that reflects a reality that none of the campaigns will acknowledge openly: Iowa simply isn't expected to matter that much in the 2008 Republican nomination calculus. That's partly because Romney built up such a head of steam in the state that as early as last August several key rivals decided to make their stands elsewhere. And it's partly because of doubts that Romney can translate his popularity in Iowa into strength elsewhere.

The differences between the Democratic and Republican approaches to Iowa are striking. Combined, the six Democratic campaigns that are active in the state have more than 500 paid staffers; Republicans have fewer than 100. Even the smallest Democratic campaigns have more than a dozen field offices scattered across the state in such key places as Davenport and Iowa City; Republicans generally rely on volunteers and staffers dispatched from headquarters in Des Moines.

The Republican caucuses operate under slightly different rules -- the GOP process is essentially a straw poll, which means that Republican candidates don't face the same precinct-by-precinct organizing and volunteer recruiting imperatives that confront Democrats. But even so, the Democratic candidates themselves have spent more time on the ground in Iowa: According to figures compiled by The Hotline, Democratic candidates made 185 visits to Iowa through November 14. Over the same period, Republicans registered 137 visits.

On the Democratic side, the Edwards campaign recently trumpeted what it called a "critical milestone." The candidate had visited and held campaign events in all 99 counties. On the Republican side, by contrast, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee had made just four visits to the state through early November.

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