From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Monday, January 15th.

Welcome to this kind of weird confluence of Martin Luther King Day and the Iowa caucuses, right? The first voting day in this

presidential election year is today. It's a Republican voting day specifically, as you know,

Trump and his various challengers. So I was reading up this weekend, because I was curious on how

this confluence came to be, because my first impulse would be to think, well, wouldn't they avoid King Day out of respect for the national holiday and Dr. King's legacy? The Iowa caucuses are usually on Mondays, not Tuesday, like most other elections, but usually a few Mondays later in January or early February. In 2016,

they were Monday, February 1st. In 2020, they were Monday, February 3rd. So why not keep putting

the caucuses around there and let people do MLK events today? And yes, there are King Day events

scheduled in many places in Iowa. I looked it up.

Don't just write it off as flyover country. And here's what I found as to why in an Associated

Press article from last July, which is when they set today's date. The AP quoted State Party

Chairman Jeff Kaufman saying committee members hadn't considered

the possibility of the contest falling on the federal holiday.

So that's a little vague.

That's the language from the AP story.

The party chairman of the GOP in Iowa said committee members hadn't considered the possibility

of the contest falling on the federal holiday. A little vague, but it makes it sound like the Iowa

Republican committee sort of forgot that there even is a national holiday on a Monday in January, right? If they were scheduling for

February, would President's Day not have occurred to them as a Monday in the month that they

might want to work around? If it was Columbus Day, I don't know if they also call it

...