Deez Interviews: Molly Duffy on covering “the last Iowa caucus ever" and how national outlets should be hyping up local coverage waaay more
Happy Friday, Deezers! Today’s interview is with Molly Duffy, an education reporter for The Cedar Rapids Gazette, which means, yup, she was there covering The Night Of That Caucus last week. We talked about how she prepared for the big day, covering presidential campaigns in tandem with her usual beat, and what national outlets could learn from local newspapers. Enjoy!
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First, what’s an average, non-caucus-related day like for you?
I cover k-12 education, which basically means I try to cover all the public school districts in the Cedar Rapids metro area plus anything happening statewide that’s affecting children, teenagers, teachers or other school employees. I’m also on our Fact Checker team, which assesses how truthful state officials are (until recently we were checking presidential candidates’ statements every week), and I’m working on a podcast with my pregnant editor about having a baby in Iowa (there’s a big resource shortage here when it comes to birthing centers, child care, etc.).
As a normal day example, I spent the Monday after the Iowa caucuses working on a longer term story about how accessible public preschool really is for low-income families, came close to finishing a fact check of something the governor said about community college enrollment and did some prep for a couple interviews with middle school teachers I have scheduled for tomorrow.
I also got lunch at a cafe tucked inside of our public library, and the barista congratulated me on covering “the last Iowa caucus ever.” :(
And what was the day of covering the Iowa caucus like?
The caucuses are weird for so many reasons, but one of them is nothing really starts to happen until 7 p.m. when Iowans actually show up at their precinct locations. I was used to covering actual voting in school board elections, which are much more of an all-day event with turnout numbers and other metrics being announced every few hours.
So in some ways it was a normal day for the first few hours. Honestly, the main thing I remember from the morning is finding it completely hilarious that a story I wrote about the caucuses and The Bachelor fighting for airtime that night made the front page. (A story idea I’m mortified of having, buuuut it also got great web traffic right at 7 p.m. central time!)
My assignment that night was to cover one of the Democrats’ satellite locations — new spots that were added this year to try and make the caucuses more accessible. Most of them were out-of-state, but a few were in Iowa with bonus services. The one I went to was Cedar Rapids’ first multilingual caucus. I ate election night pizza and drove over there around 5:30 p.m.
There were a ton of new Americans who had never caucused or voted before, so it took a little longer than organizers expected to get the 121 people there registered and ready to go. Then translators explained the caucus process in nine languages, and they got started! It ended up being super straight-forward — Bernie was the only viable candidate, so there was none of the back-and-forth, “here’s why you should come to my corner” persuasion going on that I’d expected. Everything was wrapped up before 9 p.m. and I had a 10 p.m. deadline, so it ended up being one of the less panicky election nights I’ve had. Turned out I was lucky to be covering the process and not the results… some of my colleagues were at the office until 2 a.m. waiting to hear anything.
A week out, the site I covered is one of the ones Bernie Sanders’ campaign wants recounted. That’s given the story something of an interesting, extended life — Bernie’s campaign posted it on Facebook (NOT normal for us), and it’s been picked up by some Tea Party groups as well (who have focused on the number of immigrants there).
Was there anything special you did to prepare for such a huge day?
I previewed the multilingual caucus site I ended up covering, so that was a ton of preparation in itself and made the night-of a lot easier for me. (We published my preview story in English, Swahili, French and Kirundi so potential new caucusgoers could read it — something I’m really proud of.)
I also felt like I’d been preparing kind of forever — it’s been 2020 in Iowa since like 2018. In the immediate run-up to caucus, I covered a Bernie/Vampire Weekend rally, Amy Klobuchar like six hours before she got the New York Times’ half-endorsement, and Andrew Yang winning the youth straw poll.
It’s the opposite of special, but just living my normal life in Iowa probably was the best prep. I’ve lived here for a few years (arrived just after the 2016 caucuses), and covering public schools is a great way to get to know all parts of a community.
For the 2020 election, you've also been covering Kamala Harris and Jay Inslee. What about covering presidential campaigns have surprised you the most?
Lol, how totally unpredictable everything is? Everyone in our newsroom was given two candidates to keep an eye on, and I fought for Kamala because I thought she would be a front-runner. And, well, she didn’t go nearly as far as I thought she would. I did cover a few of her campaign events — her plan to raise teacher pay was right in my wheelhouse — and did a one-on-one with her mostly about early education funding/access. I was excited about Jay Inslee too, just because I grew up in Washington state, but he dropped out so early I never got a chance to cover him.
The availability of candidates and openness of voters too was surprising — The Gazette is kind of well-known in Iowa (we’re the second-largest paper in the state), but we’re barely a well-known publication even here. Part of me thought I would be sort of brushed off as a lowly local reporter, but I never really felt that way (and that expectation was probably more my own imposter syndrome than anything).
And Iowans are so, so open about their political opinions, which is amazing when you’re asking all these personal questions that might be taboo in other places.
Finally, if national outlets could learn one thing from the way these campaigns are covered at the local level, what would it be?
I don’t envy national political reporters who have to plop into a new place and start reporting authoritatively about it the next day. Some national coverage of Iowa has been excellent and multidimensional, but it’s really easy to cast Iowa — or really anywhere new to you — as just one thing. Here, we’re all white farmers who love the state fair or something.
Honestly, I wish national outlets would just elevate the local coverage that’s already happening in the states they’ll be popping into throughout 2020.
Here, we already have journalists at places like The Gazette, The Des Moines Register and Iowa Public Radio who understand Iowa — just like local journalists in South Carolina and Wisconsin intimately understand their communities. I think the best debate moderator yet was The Reg’s Brianne Pfannenstiel — one of her questions was about rural child care and I nearly fell off my couch!
I would love to see more journalists like her (figuratively or literally) handed the mic. I would bet the journalists who live and work in the states we’ll all be looking at in the coming months will create nuanced presidential coverage in ways national outlets just can’t.
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