Politics & Government

Who is the Tea Party's Favored Candidate? Cedar Falls Straw Poll Aims to Find Out

The Cedar Valley Tea Party will hold a straw poll tonight at the Pipac Center.


The Cedar Valley Tea Party will host its first Presidential Straw Poll tonight, and just like in the actual caucus, it's anybody's guess who will win.

Organizer Judd Saul said local Tea Party members are divided on who to support. Among regular attendees of monthly group meetings, there are a few Michele Bachmann supporters, some are in favor of Rick Santorum, others prefer Ron Paul, and a few like Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, he said.

"It's probably an even keel, with a little more in Ron Paul's favor," he said.

Find out what's happening in Cedar Fallswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Saul said the Cedar Valley group will not endorse any candidate; they just want to have the straw poll, "To get people to participate, have fun and partake in politics," he said.

Are you a Tea Party member? Who will you be voting for? Tell us in the comments section below.

Find out what's happening in Cedar Fallswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The event will be held from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the . The night will start with a chance for a representative from each campaign to make a speech, followed by voting, much as will happen at the actual caucus. Rod Blum, a first district Iowa Congressional candidate, will be the guest speaker, follwed by an announcement of the results.

"I put this together to have something interesting and try to make a statement and see where things stand in Black Hawk County," Saul said.

He said he had no idea how many people to expect, but had heard from various campaigns saying they would be sending supporters. Ron Paul's campaign, in particular, has promised a solid 100 of them, he said. He's also been told a Japanese public television station will cover the event.

The interest - from international media and from the campaigns - speaks to the potential power the Tea Party could have in the Jan. 3 caucus.

In a , Patch reported that Ryan Rhodes, founder of the Iowa Tea Party, which works to facilitate  grassroots Tea Party meetings, said his organization has 15,000 people on its e-mail list. He said he would place the numbers of active Tea Party members in Iowa in the thousands, while members of the public who are sympathetic to at least some Tea Party views could number in the hundreds of thousands.

And the winner of the Jan. 3 caucus may be decided not by who has the most broad-based support, but by whose supporters are the most motivated to venture from their homes on a freezing night to participate in grassroots politics at it's most basic level.

Caucus participants are required to gather with their fellow constituents and listen to speeches before declaring their choices, rather than simply stopping at a voting both for five minutes at any convenient time during the day. So groups that are good at energizing their members can have a disproportionate effect on the results.

The Tea Party could be one of those groups.

And wanting to avoid letting their group be "hijacked" by any one campaign means that whoever wins tonight's straw poll won't necessarily win the Tea Party vote.

"If you're trying to use the Tea Party to predict election night, the way people used the Christian Conservatives to predict turnout for Pat Robertson and Mike Huckabee, that same yardstick won't work in this case," Craig Bergman, executive director of Tea Party of America, a relatively new organization that is seeking to become a communication hub for Tea Party groups, told Patch for the previous article. "The Tea Party is a totally different dynamic. It is a collection of people who do not trust any of their elected officials."

The Iowa caucuses are January 3. Patch will provide live coverage of the results as they come in.


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