PACE Pushes for a Large Turnout at Iowa Caucuses

Political activists pursue a bipartisan awareness strategy at the 2000 campaign's first event.

While candidates struggled to rally voter support for the Jan. 24 caucuses in Iowa, the NASW chapter there was engaging in some political mobilization of its own.

At press time, results of the first electoral event in the 2000 presidential campaign were still unknown, and Frederica Zuerner, the Iowa caucus project organizer for NASW's Political Action for Candidate Election (PACE), was working to turn out social workers and students for the event.

Zuerner, a social worker, recruited volunteers for phone banks in an attempt to bring more than 1,200 NASW members to the caucuses. "Hopefully, we'll bring in a lot," she said.

Zuerner said she hopes the message sent by her work will carry on long after this fall's election: that social workers need to be politically involved in order to keep issues important to them at the legislative forefront.

"It's helping them become more aware," she said of the regional, bipartisan forums she had organized. By bringing together social work students from various colleges, their professors, neighboring NASW members and presidential candidates' representatives, the forums served a number of purposes, said Zuerner.

"A lot of people don't go to the caucuses because they don't know what to expect," she said. The forums helped demystify the caucuses and how they work. They also provided participants with a sample resolution on child health care to take to the Democratic and Republican platform caucuses.

In addition, the parties' representatives got to hear firsthand what issues were important to social workers.

"The profession lends itself perfectly to getting involved in the caucuses, because we have the communication skills, the networking skills. We're working out there in the trenches," Zuerner said.

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Copyright NASW Press, 1998