Iowa Straw Poll

Adam and I traveled to the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames on Saturday. Besides the extreme heat, we had a fantastic time! The Straw Poll is a mixture of a mock election, a giant fund raiser, a good old fashioned political rally, and a carnival. Sponsored by the Republican Party of Iowa and paid for by the campaigns, many of the candidates come together to participate in this mock election. Roughly 30,000 Iowans showed up for the event yesterday.

Besides the voting, there was tons of free (and very good) food, free carnival rides, tons of information and rallies about nearly every political subject imaginable, live concerts, parades, and typical carnival games.



This is a shot from the top of a ferris wheel that Adam and I were riding down on the Romney camp. The blue tent on the left is the band stand where the concerts were happening. On the right are the food tents, and in the rear on the left is the game area for kids. This picture was taken early so there weren't too many people milling about - at the height of the event, the entire area was packed with people. This is just the Romney area - all the others had similar camps set up nearby.



This is a shot facing the opposite direction sitting down near the blue bandstand. I took this picture to show some of the parades that were happening. They were kind of impromptu parades when groups of supporters from one candidate would march through another candidate's camp chanting something in support of their candidate. This is a shot of one of Ron Paul's parades marching through the Romney camp. It was all done in good spirit and I think everyone participating in those marches was having a good time. Ron Paul's supporters were definitely the most vocal of the groups.



After enjoying the party outside, we all went into the basketball arena to listen to the speeches. Each of the candidates spoke for 20 minutes or so about what they stand for and what they intend to do when elected. It was a great opportunity to hear really what each are all about. Adam only lasted through about 4 of the speeches, so we didn't get to hear everyone, but he was interested in what he heard and I think he understood fairly well what they were talking about. There were some candidates that, when they finished, he would lean over and say, "I didn't like that guy." I usually agreed with his assessment, though there were times when the crowd would go wild on some point that I didn't agree with and Adam would join in the cheering and yelling, then look at me, who wasn't cheering, and say, "Oh, that wasn't a good thing?".



There was plenty of time to "mingle" with the candidates and get autographs and shake hands. This is a picture of Adam getting close to shaking hands with Mitt Romney. I didn't get a picture of it, but Adam did eventually get up there to shake his hand. Mitt told Adam that he liked his hat (he was wearing a BYU hat) and thanked him for coming. Adam was very excited to meet someone famous. We spent some time in each of the other camps as well and got to see many of the others.



Since this wasn't an official election, there was no voter registration. Instead, we did like the Iraqi's when they had their election - marking that we had voted by dipping our thumb in permanent ink. This is a shot of my thumb after I voted.



This is at the bandstand while Romney was giving one of his speeches with his five sons standing behind him. I couldn't get him in the picture, but Adam was up at the very front right next to the guy in the white tee-shirt with gray hair. You'll notice on the left the television camera filming. There was tons of media there all day, and CSPAN was airing most of the event live. Right after I took this picture, the guy with the camera on the stage knelt down and pointed the camera right at Adam for about 20 seconds. When the speech was over and Adam came back to me, he said "I think I was on TV". I said, "Yeah, you were probably on National TV, Adam!" He, of course, thought that was pretty cool. If any of you happened to be recording CSPAN yesterday, let us know if you've got Adam!



Here's Adam standing behind the "Mitt Mobile". One of Romney's sons bought this RV and he and his family have been driving it all over Iowa campaigning during the last few months. He managed to visit all 99 counties in Iowa before the straw poll.



Here's Adam on the ferris wheel. That ferris wheel was the oldest most dilapidated machine I've ever seen. I couldn't believe they still let it operate! Yet, I still took my son on it - we were both kind of nervous!

The ferris wheel was sponsored by the "Fair Tax" lobby. It's a group pushing a new tax system called the "fair tax". It's basically the idea that you get rid of income tax and all other taxes and simply create a federal retail sales tax of 23% so that you're taxed not on what you earn or what you save, but on what you spend.

While there is some merit to that - it's certainly "fair" since everyone is paying the same rate, it seems to shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle and lower class (fair, but painful for us middle and lower classers). Also, as Tammy pointed out, it could be rather burdensome to large families (like ours) who currently enjoy a lot of tax exemptions because we're raising a flock of future tax payers. There are provisions to help with some of that (for example, I think things are tax free up to a certain established poverty-line limit, so the poorest of poor don't pay taxes), but I don't know how far they go.

What do you all think of the idea? You can read more at fairtax.org if you're interested. This was one of the biggest lobby groups there and three-fourths of the republican candidates have endorsed this concept (Romney has not).

Next - we have a video of Adam on the climbing wall. He really did awesome for his first time climbing and went up quite a bit higher than I think I could have gotten!



And, last but not least here's a random picture of all the kids completely unrelated to the straw poll, just because they're all so cute.



We had a great time! I've never been to a real old-fashioned political rally before and just had a great time. You could kind of get a sense for how politics was operated in the 1800's before television (although probably on a much larger scale here). As we were leaving, Adam said, "I want to go back next year!" I said, "Sorry Adam, they only do these every four years at most. And, if the Republicans win this election, they won't have another one for eight years." At that, he frowned and said, "Well, I hope the democrats win then!"

Results of the straw poll was Romney winning by a big margin with Huckabee coming in second and Brownback third. A few of the other candidates (Rudy Guiliani and John McCain) didn't participate - probably because they were both losing to Romney in the polls in Iowa and didn't want to suffer an embarrassing loss early in the campaign. The straw poll typically doesn't do much for the front-runners, but it will usually weed out some of those lagging far behind. I think Monday you'll hear of at least one pulling out of the race and potentially others to follow.

So, you've made it through another long political post, Auntie Ann (since she's the only one to comment on my last post I figure she's probably the only one willing to read this far!). I promise we'll drop the politics on the next post and have something more family oriented on our next post (hopefully some news about a new baby)!