Iowa Caucus 2016 Precinct Captain Too Young to Vote

DES MOINES, IA – Zoey Wagner, a captain in one of Des Moines’ largest precincts, has been working tirelessly for months to seal a win for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses.

But Wagner, a fellow for the Clinton campaign, won’t be standing with Clinton’s preference group when Democrats in the fashionable Des Moines neighborhood of Beaverdale gather to cast the first votes in the presidential nominating process at 7 p.m. Monday.

At 17, Wagner is too young to caucus. She won’t turn 18 until 20 days after the Nov. 8 general election.

That hasn’t stemmed the Des Moines high school junior’s enthusiasm for Clinton, who Wagner thinks is too often portrayed in too tight of a box by the media as a strong, powerful woman, but lacking in compassion and warmth and the ability to connect with voters.

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Wagner, whose peers seem to gravitate toward Clinton’s chief rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, says Clinton is a powerful, commanding leader, but also a “genuinely kind person” who wants to improve life for “pre-elementary children and bring lower income households on par with high-income people.”

“That’s the kind of person she is, and the kind of world she wants,” Wagner said. “But that’s not the way people portray her, and people find her intimidating. That works to her disadvantage.”

Wagner and other Clinton campaign workers and volunteers are spending the final hours before Iowans caucus trying to widen the gap. Wagner has planted yard signs, made phone calls, knocked on doors, handed out caucus commitment cards and, occasionally, completed more mundane tasks like fetching coffee and entering data.

“Red Rover, Red Rover”

On Monday, the young precinct captain will lead caucus-goers through the complex process Iowa Democrats use to select a winner, the first step in the selection of delegates to district, state and national conventions.

If Iowans find the process unwieldy, Americans looking in on the tiny state at the epicenter of the U.S. presidential election this week find the method downright convoluted.

Here’s how the Democrats’ sometimes hours-long process works: Democrats gather at approximately 2,000 precinct locations across the state and hear pitches from candidates’ surrogates, then cluster into preference groups.

(Here’s some Iowa Caucus trivia: Undecided voters also join a preference group, and in 1972 and 1976 — the latter the year Jimmy Carter revolutionized the Iowa Caucuses and buoyed them to national prominence — “uncommitted” actually won the Democratic caucuses in Iowa.)

It’s in the counting of preference groups that the process gets complicated.

If a candidate doesn’t have the support of 15 percent of the participants in a specific preference group, they’re not considered viable. Various pundits and even late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert have described the viables’ scramble for the support of non-viable groups as a political version of the children’s playground game of “Red Rover, Red Rover.”

“I’ve seen good Democrats get so fed up with the whole thing that they’ve walked out — which can require another count,” retired Iowa State University journalism professor Dick Haws wrote in a recent Des Moines Register op-ed explaining his “caucus fatigue.”

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Republicans use a far simpler, one-person, one vote straw poll. It still requires voters to show up at a specific time, rather than have a day-long window to cast votes, as they do in primary states.

Wants to Be President

But for a young political activist like Wagner, whose goal is to someday occupy the Oval Office herself, working on the Clinton ground campaign in Iowa has been “eye-opening and wild.”

“I have a desire to make the world a better place, especially for those who might not have a voice right now — for those low income people who aren’t getting the best education, for the LGBT community, for women.

“I probably have a better chance at winning the lottery,” Wagner said somewhat dismissively of her future chances at the presidency, earning a disapproving look from her mother, Des Moines attorney CeCe Ibson.

Wagner and her brother, 14-year-old Kiernan, have grown up in a household that is more likely to keep the television tuned to CNN than to MTV, and where it’s routine to discuss the latest Supreme Court decision over dinner.

She also has been exposed to both ends of the political spectrum — Ibson on the left and, in the Christian conservative camp, her grandparents, Peter and Connie Wagner, who run one of the nation’s best weekly newspapers, the N’West Iowa Review.

“I’ve always tried to separate from my family’s successes,” Wagner said. “I want to have my own journey.”

Added Ibson: “I’m not going to tell my kids what to think. I’ve tried to expose them to many viewpoints. It’s the same with their faith life. I told them they would take the sacraments until confirmation (in the Roman Catholic Church), then they could make their own choice.”

Ibson and the children’s father, award-winning journalist Jay P. Wagner, who died in 2009, took the plucky teenager to her first caucus events when she was a toddler. She tugged at newsman Sam Donaldson’s hair, a bit to her mother’s horror.

With the seeds of political activism planted early, Wagner said she staged her “own little political revolution” and smuggled LGBT rights stickers into her private Catholic middle school and distributed them to classmates, then found herself defending her First Amendment free speech rights to a priest when she got a detention slip.

Another student had an anti-abortion sticker on his notebook, she recalls arguing. What was the difference between his activism and hers, she asked. The answer lay in the difference between public schools and private ones, but it was a bitter pill for then 12-year-old Wagner.

“Why am I not allowed to help those who don’t have a voice if I cannot do that?” she asked her mother.

Pivotal Moment for Young Organizer

Soon, a call came from Dave Reynolds, who was in Des Moines with President Obama’s Organizing for America campaign at the time. Wagner calls Reynolds, along with fellow OFA worker Ruth Fortune, now Reynolds’ wife, “the biggest political influences of my life.”

Reynolds heard she’d had a bit of trouble at school. Would she like to have lunch?

They did, and Wagner had no sooner unfolded her napkin in her lap before she signed on as a volunteer for Obama’s re-election campaign.

“It was a pivotal moment,” Wagner said. “If I hadn’t gotten detention in school, I probably wouldn’t be where I am now.”

After working on an Iowa congressional campaign in 2014, this is her third political campaign. As perhaps the youngest paid political worker in Iowa, she’s been the subject of TV interviews, including one last week with CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes, and the source of speculation by the adults around her about the direction her life will take.

In the short-term, Wagner will return to her atypical life as an Iowa teenager when the campaigns pack up Tuesday morning and exit Iowa.

She still has plenty to do. She will devote the 15 paid campaign hours — and as many more dedicated out of passion rather than a paycheck — to activities at Des Moines’ Roosevelt High School, where she’s maintained A’s and B’s throughout the hectic months since signed on with Clinton in May. At her high school, she’s involved in show choir, drama and the Young Feminists Club, which she started.

Undoubtedly, there will be more campaigns in her future. By the time the next Iowa Caucus rolls around, she’ll be a college junior. Maybe she’ll take a gap year and dive full-time into the hectic business of sending a candidate to the Oval Office, she said.

“I live in her gorgeous, blond shadow,” Ibson said of her daughter. “There is nothing about her that is anything other than Zoey Wagner. She has always chosen her own path.”

» Photo of Zoey Wagner on CBS News and others courtesy of CeCe Ibson

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