The drawbacks of Iowa's caucuses

My crew, Sam Gittelman, Julia Shepard and Will Kaback, were given a sheaf of papers identifying target households, a set of Sanders campaign material, and scant instructions about what to say. The voters they would be contacting, Simon Bracey-Lane, a volunteer field organizer from Britain, told them, would likely be Sanders supporters or leaning toward him.

It didn't turn out that way, underscoring that targeting is an inherently messy operation, especially in a caucus state, and reaffirming the degree to which individual voter identification and persuasion is a gritty, game-of-inches operation.

In three hours and twenty minutes, the students knocked on the doors of 42 homes in a working-class section of this city, leaving reminder cards with the time and location of the caucus at the homes of 20 where no one was home.

Of the others, 11 said they wouldn't be voting, either because of disinterest or difficulty. Four said they backed Sanders, three leaned in his direction, three were inclined toward Clinton, and three were undecided or wouldn't say. One door-knock produced a Republican voter. (The numbers don't total exactly because some locations included more than one voter.)

Two others, who said they didn't plan to caucus, included one voter who said of Sanders, "That guy makes my blood boil" and another who described himself as "a Second Amendment follower."

So much for micro-targeting. In one driveway identified on the canvassers' sheet, a man was working on his car. "Not interested in it," he told them. "Don't even know what the hell it is." Which is a rather impressive feat of ignorance in an environment drenched with campaign advertising and non-stop robocalls, not to mention chastening for those who think every Iowan, if not every American, is consumed with Monday nightÂ¹s outcome.

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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.