If you don’t know what to expect at your neighborhood voter caucus meetings, you’re not alone.
On a recent Saturday morning, the sunrise had barely hit the top of Dixie High School in St. George as a few dozen teenagers filed through the door. Rather than sleeping in, these high schoolers woke up bright and early to learn about the caucus system.
Over several hours, students from across southwest Utah role-played in a mock caucus boot camp, simulating the local in-person meetings that help shape Utah politics. The joint idea from Washington County’s Republican and Democratic parties sought to get more young people familiar with the meetings before voters gather to select local party leaders and delegates on March 5.
More of Dixie High senior Charlie Matheson’s peers are interested in politics than the public might give them credit for, he said, but engaging as a new voter isn’t always easy.
“I would like to be able to be more involved in local politics and actually have some say in how things go,” he said. “I wish there were more things like this that made it transparent.”
Many of the students who showed up already care about politics, and they each have their top issues — from water conservation to campaign spending to drug use prevention. But like a lot of Utahns, that doesn’t mean they know how the state’s caucus works.
“Caucus is a word that most people don't even know,” county GOP Chair Lesa Sandberg said. “I fear that we're losing the younger generation in participating in elections because they don't understand the caucus.”
She hopes this can be one small step toward changing that — and not just for the young people in this room.
“I'll be honest, hopefully, it would be two-fold in that they would go home and teach their parents who may not be involved as well.”
How to caucus
As the boot camp began, students separated into two different lecture halls as the Teal Party and the Purple Party. The first order of business was deciding the issues of their party platform.
The exercise was limited to school topics, so students called out ideas like improving cafeteria lunches, starting classes later in the morning and adding bike racks or gardens. They debated the pros and cons before narrowing the list down to 10 key pillars, which then helped them assess the student candidates who volunteered to run for their party’s nomination in the boot camp’s mock mayoral race.
Matheson watched intently from the second row of the Teal Party hall’s stadium seating. He has followed actual caucuses in national headlines, such as the recent Iowa presidential race, but this was his first time seeing Utah’s version in action.
What brought him here was a chance to learn more about this early stage of the political process before the ballots were set. By the time candidates get whittled down to the general election, he sometimes finds there isn’t anyone left that he wants to support.
“That made me really interested in, ‘How do I get into the process before all the candidates oppose my ideals?’”
After settling on a platform, the Teal Party broke into small groups. These represented local neighborhood caucus meetings, where voters who live within a certain precinct’s boundaries gather at a school, church or other community building. Just like people do at those meetings, each small group voted for delegates to represent the will of that precinct going forward.
This illustrates one of the big differences between Utah’s caucus system and more common ballot elections: Voters don’t elect candidates directly; they vote for local delegates. It’s those delegates who then vote for candidates when the party picks its nominee.
One of the candidates running for the Teal Party’s nomination is Jazmine Ruíz, a senior at Snow Canyon High School. On the floor in front of the first row of seats, she and a few other students on her campaign team decorated poster boards with green and blue markers.
“With the lovely help of my community, we have our slogan,” Ruíz said. “‘Schools will be more jazzy with Jazmine as mayor.’”
Then the real caucus campaign work begins.
Remember, Teal Party precincts have already selected delegates — in this case, just four students — so everyone else moved to the back of the room. In the front two rows, the candidates huddled with the delegates trying to win them over.
After getting delegate feedback, the candidates fine-tuned their platforms and made their final stump speeches. Another candidate vying for the Teal nomination, Dixie High senior Hayden Wilson, said the process reinforced his ideas about the give-and-take of American politics.
“You have to be as broad as you can to appeal to the status quo and maybe choose one issue you're really passionate about and try to push that.”
In the real world, delegates would have weeks to vet candidates between their selection at a precinct meeting and their chance to vote at the party convention, but this boot camp condensed the whole process into one morning.
So shortly thereafter, the candidates listened as student volunteers pulled folded strips of paper from a metal bowl. The final tally: one vote for Ruíz, three for Wilson.
For Ruíz, however, the day still counted as a success.
“I loved the hands-on experience … rather than just learning the classroom way,” she said. “It was very helpful.”
What are the tradeoffs?
If the caucus process seems complicated, that’s because it is — at least compared to dropping a ballot in the mail. But there are reasons some parties prefer it.
Advocates like county GOP Chair Sandberg point to the one-on-one time delegates may get with candidates to have their questions answered — something that could never happen on a large scale with individual voters — and the way neighborhood meetings can facilitate hyperlocal conversations about the issues that matter to a community.
In theory, those interactions could be a potential upside, said Utah Tech University political scientist Geoff Allen, especially in an era with widespread political discord.
The tradeoff for voters is that it requires extra time and effort, Allen said, which generally means fewer people get involved. He’d be surprised if more than 6% of registered voters participate in Utah’s March caucuses.
“Oftentimes, they're multihour events. They're in one central location that's not always necessarily accessible for everybody.”
The voters who do caucus also tend to be older and wealthier than the general electorate, Allen said, because people who can’t take off work or get child care won’t be there. A Salt Lake Tribune analysis of a voter survey study spanning the 2008 to 2020 election years found that Utah caucus participants were more likely to be male and white than primary election voters. They were also less likely to have families with children under 18.
The open-debate dynamic also offers a persuasion element that gives the party a chance to exert some influence over who gets nominated, Allen said. Paired with low turnout, that means caucuses tend to favor candidates who play to the most passionate wings — meaning those further to the right or the left — rather than ones who are more centrist.
“That's the big concern among political scientists is that this might regularly create situations where you get candidates who are great for the base, but not great for the majority of the electorate,” Allen said.
That worries some of the boot camp’s students, too.
Dixie High senior Mateo Peterson plans to follow the 2024 election closely and will be eligible to participate this spring because he’ll turn 18 by the general election. But he’s not sure if he’ll be able to attend the March caucus because of the big time commitment.
With how polarized politics have become, he said, it’s hard to feel optimistic.
“I feel like there's two sides. You're either super Republican or you're super liberal,” Peterson said. “It's just like the spectrum has just gotten so vast.”
Wilson, the Teal Party nominee, understands why some of his peers may not feel like getting involved, even if they have issues they care about.
“They hear ‘politics,’ and they don't want to touch it. It’s a gross term. It means fighting at the Thanksgiving dinner table,” Wilson said. “I think there's a certain value to being critical of the system, but to also seek to learn how the system works.”
For Ruíz, the other Teal candidate, seeing this room filled with her peers buoyed her hope that her generation could be poised to make a difference in ways past generations have not. Training events like this one, she said, could help more of her friends translate their political interests into political action.
After learning the ropes, she’s ready to test out her first real caucus.
“Now that I am more informed and I'm more familiar with this, I'm definitely going to go there and just get out of my comfort zone.”
Registered Republicans can look up their Utah caucus precinct location here. Democrats can find more caucus night information here.
