Voters in Missouri will follow a new electoral system when the presidential nominating contest kicks off in 2024.
When Missouri enacted an elections law in late June, much of the reaction focused on the new voter identification requirements and the establishment of early in-person voting. But lawmakers also moved the state away from primary elections in favor of a caucus system for presidential elections.
Missouri joins a short list of states (Iowa, Nevada, North Dakota and Wyoming) and territories (American Samoa, Guam and the Virgin Islands) that use caucuses at a time when states have been abandoning the caucus system.
Though Missouri used presidential caucuses in 1992 and 1996, the state has held open primaries since the 2000 election. But, those elections were nonbinding, meaning that each party could choose whether to respect the results of the vote.
Caucuses represent a different attitude towards elections than primaries, focusing on the most enthusiastic partisans rather than widespread voter participation. The Republican and Democratic parties run the caucuses themselves, convening registered party members to discuss and assign delegates for their candidates, though procedure differs by state and party.
Primaries, on the other hand, are run by the states, with participation dictated by law. The primaries can be designated as either closed, where only voters registered for a specific party may participate, or open to all voters.
According to an analysis by PBS, while the caucus system attracts enthusiastic and knowledgeable voters, the dedication and time that’s necessary to make the system work means many voters will be alienated and excluded.
Caucuses have also been criticized for their tendency to take place for only a few hours in select locations far away from a voter’s usual precinct, meaning the disenfranchisement of voters who cannot attend for financial or logistical reasons.
Some of the states that still maintain their caucus system have tried to make them more inclusive in recent years.
- Nevada Democrats provided caucus materials in three languages — Tagalog, English and Spanish — in 2020 and allowed early voting rather than mandating voters attend in person.
- That same year, North Dakota allowed voters to participate by mail as long as the ballot was postmarked at least one week before the caucus.
- The Wyoming Democratic Party switched to a ranked choice voting system for its 2020 presidential caucus, allowing candidates to rank five candidates on their ballot. The party also allowed early voting.
Voters also tend to turn out at higher rates in primary elections than in caucuses. Between 2016 and 2020, four states — Maine, Minnesota, Colorado and Utah — switched from a caucus to the primary system. In all four states, voter turnout in the Democratic primaries increased dramatically. In Colorado, for instance, the vote count grew from about 122,000 in the 2016 presidential caucus to more than 755,000 in the 2020 primary — six times as many voters.
In 2020, the Iowa presidential caucus was marred by an inability to accurately report the results in a timely manner. The state’s Democratic Party blamed a third-party smartphone app for delaying the release of the caucus and had to enter the results manually.
The app’s developers, Shadow Inc., later apologized for the delay, saying while the app’s data collection worked as planned, its ability to transmit that information did not.
NPR reported there was not enough training or research done on the app’s capabilities before the caucus. The state had also changed reporting guidelines before the caucus, mandating that the parties submit alignment totals as well as delegate allocations, to increase transparency.
Nevada did not use the app for its caucus later that month.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.