Iowa Caucus Guy’s Presidential Election Blog

This series is about combining my love for politics with my love for music. We may not fully realize it, but we are in the midst of big changes. While the Republican primary seems uneventful, we know that at some point, Donald Trump will cease to be  the party's nominee (either due to the 22nd Amendment or his fast food diet).  This will leave a huge hole for someone to try and pick up and fill.  With Reagan, it took a decade to find anyone even close to living up to that personality.  Sorry, Donald Jr,  I'm not quite convinced. The Democrats initial show of unity has given way to infighting and paranoia.  We can only guess at who the nominee will be and what the after-effects will be. The Libertarian Party is also at an interesting crossroads, which could benefit from some of the fallout from what happens in the other two parties.  The result is a wide list of candidates from across a political spectrum, with varying ideas and experien...

There is (as everyone knows) a Democratic primary.  What gets less attention is that there is also a Republican primary.  While Trump seemingly has large support from his base, there are challengers. If you look online, there are dozens of Presidential candidates, of course, but by my count, there are really only seven serious candidates who are running credible campaigns to challenge Trump, and today, I am featuring one of them- Robert Ardini. Ardini is an award-winning Advertising Executive, Business Owner and Publisher who made news when he ran in the New York House district that Donald Trump is from.  Running as a Republican in a very heavily Democratic district, he still garnered 50,000 votes (Interestingly, he did twice as good as Trump did there).  Ardini wrote a book Running for Congress in Trump's Backyard, which looks like an insightful look into what it must be like to run in New York politics. Ardini is a serious candidate, getting his name on b...

As unpopular as Donald Trump seems, there are only a handful of serious Republican candidates running against him.  One of these is writer Zoltan Istvan. Zoltan is on the ballot in many of the states holding Republican primaries including New Hampshire, California, Colorado, and Texas.  I first heard of Zoltan (his real name) in 2016 when he ran as the Transhumanist Party's candidate for President. As much of a campaign for Transhumanism as for the White House, Zoltan's 2016 write-in campaign was covered in the Guardian , Vice, New Yorker, USA Today. the BBC, Business Insider, Vox, Salon, Huffington Post and many other media outlets. Zoltan made a run for Governor of California as a Libertarian in 2018 and gathered over 14,400 votes.  As featured in the Washington Times, his run in 2020 is as a new type of Republican- a candidate who is fiscally Conservative, appealing to Libertarians and Republicans, but with a focus on Science (a subject that often seems owned...

If you have been following my blog, you know about my project to ask Presidential candidates what kind of music they like.  It goes towards a further conversation about communication, and I have been also able to use it to highlight candidates people might be interested in. I reached out to Keenan Wallace Dunham after I saw some positive buzz about him on social media.  Then, his name kept popping up.  He is one of the major candidates listed on the Torch of Liberty's 2020 Libertarian Party poll.  Dunham is one of 13 candidates that will appear on the California Libertarian primary. and one of 10 on the New Hampshire Libertarian Presidential Preference Primary. Checking out his twitter, I notice he mentions a couple of issues where there should be a big audience, but the Dems and GOP don't seem to be consistent on- privacy issues (Dunham would pardon Assange and Manning) ending war, and applying term limits. I asked Keenan to share a bit about his campaign, and...

Awhile back, I wrote about an October news story in Florida covered by the Free Thought Project, about a High Schooler who had gotten in trouble for handing out flyers and wearing "Taxation is Theft" gear. The IowaCaucusGuy blog was contacted by the Behrman 2020 campaign to share some of Dan's thoughts.  As this blog is set by the tenets of interesting election-related content and having constructive dialogue, we have decided to share that letter here - Iowa Caucus Guy An Open Letter to Schools by Dan "Taxation is Theft" Behrman Dear Public Schools of America, I am running a presidential campaign, focused on freedom from oppression and tyranny. I am promoting the ideas of freedom on which this country was founded. Many young people are reaching out to my campaign and asking if they can help. They are young adults, often 15 to 18 who want to learn more about politics and freedom. They want to be free. They are screaming it, fighting for it - and yet...

Per the wikipedia article on the 2020 Primaries, there are 19 Democrats who are running for President and are on at least one State Ballot. Today's post features one of those- Robby Wells. Wells is a name recognizable in Election circles. In 2012, he ran for the nomination of the Constitution Party, and 2016 as an Independent in the General Election. For 2020, he has ramped up his campaign. He was actually the first Democrat to announce his candidacy, announcing even before John Delaney. He will be on the ballot for the early primaries (New Hampshire, South Carolina, Colorado, California, Texas).  He was at the Jim Clyburn Fish Fry in June (where the Washington Post reported "Robby Wells who has appeared at some state party functions, was given the same time onstage as Biden, Sanders and the rest" and as part of The University of South Carolina's Presidential Town Hall series (appearing the same weekend as Bill DiBlasio, Julian Castro, and Pete Buttigie...

In my last post, I talked about my #VoteYerMusic project. I have been lucky to have heard from many Libertarian Presidential candidates- Dan Taxation is Theft Behrman, Ken Armstrong, and Max Abramson, as well as former candidate,  Democrat,  Joe Sestak. Today, we feature another Libertarian, Sam Robb. In an April posting on  Pittsburgh News Wire , Robb, a former naval officer and software developer for several Pittsburgh-area start-up companies said " “My intent is to seek the Libertarian Party nomination for President in 2020. We have two major parties that each want to increase government control. Both consider personal liberty a secondary issue – if they consider it at all. In contrast, The Libertarian Party embodies the freedom-loving, independent spirit of our Founders. If we are to succeed as a nation, we must once again embrace these core ideas of freedom and liberty.” Robb participated in the Olean, NY Debate in November and is starting to make inroads towar...

I do a thing here that I came up with many years ago, and I call it "voteyermusic". You can read about it more in some earlier posts, but the main gist is that I ask Presidential candidates what music they like. The answer isn't important. It's the question, and there are two reasons why.  First, it is about how accessible the candidate is, and if they really care about the public they will be serving. Over time, I have noticed that division between candidate and public has widened. Go to Cory Booker's site and see if you can even find a way to get that question to him. You can't; and it's the easiest question a candidate will ever be able to answer. The other is that music is a great uniter. Some of my best, longest lasting friendships started with conversations about music. If you know me, you just know that is how I am. In fact, I had ten minutes one-on-one this summer with a (now former) Democratic candidate here in Iowa. I knew his policy plan...

For so many years, I have been interested in the people who run for President. The News Media inevitably love these stories as well.  You get the same articles every four years, and they will write about Jeff Boss and Jonathan Sharkey, and maybe if you wear a yellow hat , they will put you in their article too. Now over a decade ago, I started reaching out to some of the lesser known Presidential candidates via email, and what I found was that these were men and women with great ideas who love their country. It makes you question why we do what we do, meaning, why is someone a candidate only if the media says so.  For example, why are Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson and Wayne Messam (and for that matter, Pete Buttigieg) consider a media-worthy candidate, but Robbie Wells, Richard Ojeda and Rosalind Greene aren't?   Why were John Cox and Michael Charles Smith not considered media-worthy candidates for the 2008 Republican primary?  Because a businessman w...

I sat down on a Sunday afternoon to talk about Steve Bullock with Organizer Jacob Appel. Bullock is on my short list and I looked forward to talking about him and find out more about the Bullock campaign. The opinions here are all my own, and hope that I do not misrepresent Mr. Appel or the Bullock campaign in any way. Gov Bullock had just recently undertaken a tour of Iowa with a focus on the counties that had voted for Obama but then voted for Trump. Over a year ago, I posted about a article from Nate Silver’s 538 that I thought was the key to the election. A year later, I still firmly believe 2020 will be about the voters who switched to Trump. I suspect that some are voters who bought the rhetoric about Hillary being too far to the left. More accurately, I suspect these voters felt that Trump did a better job of understanding them and that he would focus on jobs and the economy. I posit that if you can truly understand the needs of these voters, then you win the White House. ...