The date was Monday, January 19, 2004, and the Iowa caucuses had just closed. It was just after 7:30 in the evening on the west coast—early for me, even as the New York-based media mavens were getting ready for bed, and I had C-SPAN on as Vermont governor and insurgent presidential candidate Howard Dean prepared to deliver his concession speech.
I was never a “Deaniac,” but Dean was my candidate, for ruthlessly pragmatic reasons—having built up a huge lead over all the other candidates through the fall of 2003, he seemed to me to be in the best position to take on George W. Bush the following year. As Iowa approached, though, Dean’s star began to fall as Kerry’s and Edwards’s rose, and the three men were locked in a tight battle going into the caucuses. In the end, it wasn’t even close. Kerry won easily, Edwards was second, and Dean a disappointing, devastating third.
I watched the live, uncensored C-SPAN feed as Dean stepped before the mike at his Iowa headquarters and began to speak, his voice rapidly shredding as he strained to make himself heard over the increasingly raucous crowd.
Well, you guys—you have already got the picture here. I was about to say, you know, I'm sure there are some disappointed people here. You know what? You know something? You know something? If you had told us one year ago we were going to come in third in Iowa, we would have given anything for that. And you know something? You know something? Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina, and Oklahoma, and Arizona, and North Dakota, and New Mexico! And we're going to California! And Texas, and New York! And we're going to South Dakota, and Oregon, and Washington, and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! Yeaaahh!!
I remember thinking that it was kind of a fun moment. Painful though the loss had been, Dean wasn’t dwelling on it. He was optimistic, ebullient even, and ready to take on the task that lay ahead. Dean kept speaking for another 15 minutes, his voice shredded almost beyond recognition, as he thanked the people who had contributed to his campaign and promised to keep up the fight. And then C-SPAN went to something else, or I changed the channel, or stopped watching; I don’t remember. Eventually I went to bed without giving any of it a second thought.
And when I woke up the next morning, the world had gone mad.
Howard Dean, pundit after pundit assured me, went bugfuck crazy last night! He screamed like a maniac! Did you see the scream!? This guy could be a serial killer for all we know! On and on it went. Dean is toast, the pundits assured us. Nobody could get up there and scream at the voters like that and expect to be elected president.
Dean’s slide in the polls continued, and a month later, he was out of the race. It was the scream, the pundits solemnly informed us, that did him in in the end. The Democrats sure dodged a bullet there. America dodged a bullet.
And while all this was going on, I remember thinking: What!? How is this possible? Did these people watch the same speech I did? How do you not see that he was only screaming because the room was so loud? Did I just imagine what I saw?
What the hell just happened here!?
Twelve years on, FiveThirtyEight tackles exactly that question in the aptly-titled “The Dean Scream: What Really Happened,” a superb ten-minute video produced in association with ESPN Films. The video revisits the night of the caucus with Governor Dean and several prominent people from his campaign, along with analysis from FiveThirtyEight writers about what effect it actually had on the outcome of the primary season (spoiler alert: very little, if any.) It’s a fascinating watch, slickly produced, and is well worth your time. And listen to the companion podcast (you do subscribe to the FiveThirtyEight elections podcast, don’t you?) for some compelling acoustics analysis of just what happened in the ballroom that night.
Postscript: Contrary to the conventional wisdom that has taken hold since 2004, the Scream didn’t finish Dean off; he was toast before a single vote was ever cast in Iowa, and would have been out of the race by the spring regardless. But the race this year is still very much on, and it’s hard to watch “The Dean Scream: What Really Happened” without being haunted by the possibility that an inaccurate but devastating narrative might take hold against our eventual nominee—whoever that might be—that ends up fatally hobbling them in November. Whomever you support right now, let’s all agree not to reinforce stupid mass media narratives or right-wing talking points against either candidate. The future of our country may depend on it.