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USA NewsIowa: The accidental starting block | 
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Washington - The Iowa caucuses are an exercise in democracy that has more in common with the Roman Senate of antiquity than a modern election.
In the first milepost of the quadrennial US presidential elections, neighbours will brave the January chill of the rural, Midwestern state to assemble in nearly 1,800 voting precincts to discuss the merits of their favourite candidates.
Fewer than 10 per cent of eligible voters are expected to take part Thursday night when party loyalists gather in school cafeterias, church basements and even private living rooms across the state.
The two major parties caucus on the same night, but in different places under different rules. In the centre-left Democratic Party, caucus-goers will actually huddle in groups in a public stand for their preferred candidates, with no secret vote or ballot box.
Any candidates who fail to meet a threshold, usually 15 per cent of the people in the room, are declared unviable in the precinct, and their supporters are free to switch to another candidate.
If the debate stays amiable, the process can resemble a parlour game. In other cases, it's more like choosing sides in the Roman Senate, without the swords and poison. Every veteran of Iowa politics tells stories of neighbours estranged for decades after a fiercely fought caucus.
Outright bribes are forbidden, but caucus inducements are legendary - perhaps a promise of shovelling snow - and having a snack-laden table to lure supporters never hurts.
Eventually, the precinct distributes its delegates among the surviving candidates to finish the complex process.
For the centre-right Republican Party, the caucuses start with a discussion of the candidates, followed by a non-binding vote released at the state level and reported as the caucus result.
Both parties later hold county meetings that lead to district- level and state meetings where the actual delegates to the national conventions are chosen with little fanfare.
With an area equal to Bangladesh and 2.9 million people, Iowa is a heavily agricultural state in the Midwestern heartland. The population is 91 per cent white with 4 per cent Latinos and 2 per cent African Americans, far fewer minorities than the United States as a whole.
Candidates who practically take up residence for months in Iowa and the media hordes who cover them insist that the small-town atmosphere allows a form of door-to-door, hand-shake campaigning that is no longer possible at the national level.
Some Iowans are described as so spoiled by the attention as to keep count of the candidates' appearances so they can support the presidential hopeful who has personally greeted them the most often. But why does Iowa have such prominence in the presidential nominating process?
'It really was coincidence and circumstance,' said Arthur Sanders, a political scientist specializing in US elections at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
Contrary to the caucus myth of a deeply rooted, homespun tradition, Iowa's role is not a relic of Iowa pioneer culture but instead the accidental result of political reforms spawned in part by the hippie movement.
In 1968 in Chicago, students protesting the Vietnam War rioted with police outside the Democratic convention while the party's establishment and labour unions pushed through Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the nominee.
Without contesting the intra-party primary elections in even a single state, Humphrey was chosen because most of the power to nominate remained with party insiders. The convention chaos and perception of an undemocratic process crippled Humphrey's campaign, and his loss to Republican Richard Nixon prodded the Democrats to open up future presidential nominations.
A few states - most famously New Hampshire - had long chosen some of their delegates to the national party conventions through either primaries or assemblies of local party faithful, so-called caucus meetings, probably derived from cau-cau-asu, a Native American word for a counsellor. Now, the national Democratic Party requires its state affiliates to allow party voters to directly elect more of the convention delegates.
Iowa Democrats established multistage caucuses in 1972 with a starting date that happened to be earlier than any other state.
Senator George McGovern, an upstart candidate from neighbouring South Dakota, decided to try to make a splash in the early Iowa event. He actually finished second to a rival with better name recognition, thereby gaining national exposure, and went on to win the Democratic nomination, though he was crushed by Nixon in the general election.
Iowa Republicans noticed that the early caucus gave the state influence and scheduled their own caucus for 1976 on the same winter night as the Democrats.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter, the little-known governor of Georgia, was watching, too. 'Four years later, he decided that he would try to do the same thing,' Sanders said.
Carter finished second - behind a slate of uncommitted delegates - but turned his 1976 Iowa breakthrough into a springboard to the nomination and the White House.
'All of a sudden,' Sanders said, 'Iowa discovered that they had a big thing.'
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