I recently read Dave Price’s book, “Caucus Chaos,” about Iowa’s 2012 Republican presidential caucuses and was struck by a couple things. 

One is how truly meaningless the Republican caucuses are. The other was how slow presidential campaigns are to catch on to the way the caucuses really work or, as was the case in 2012, do not work. 

Price is WHO TV’s chief political reporter. His 272-page book, published last summer, chronicles the ups and downs of candidates who competed in Iowa’s 2012 Republican presidential caucuses. 

It’s a good account of the day-to-day maneuvering among the eight or so Republican candidates and their Iowa supporters during the nearly year-long process that began in early 2011 and ended pretty much in shambles in January 2012 with the failure of the Iowa Republican Party to decisively declare a winner.  

You may recall that Mitt Romney was declared the winner sometime after midnight on Jan. 4 only to have party chairman Matt Strawn later admit there were problems with the data that gave Romney an eight-vote lead. In fact, there were problems with the vote counts of roughly 6 percent of the state’s 1,774 precincts. 

The official certified totals released more than two weeks after the caucuses showed Romney with 210 fewer preferential votes than originally reported and Rick Santorum with 168 fewer, making Santorum the winner by 34.

There was never any real explanation of what happened to the 378 votes that disappeared or why eight precincts never turned in any results. 

All of which makes it remarkable that nearly a dozen Republicans, including Santorum, are already lining up to participate in the 2016 Iowa Republican caucuses.

Here’s a tip that Santorum presumably learned the hard way: Don’t waste too much time in Iowa. There is no real prize for winning, so if you finish among the top three, declare victory. More important have a plan to move on quickly, like Ronald Reagan did in 1980 when he finished second in another caucus contest where there was never a final tally of ballots.   

Most important, If you don’t expect to be among the top three, don’t spent a lot of time in Iowa, like Santorum did in 2012. Just say that  the Iowa caucuses are meaningless and ignore them, like John McCain did in 2008.

McCain was right. The Iowa Republican caucuses are the equivalent of voting for Miss Congeniality. The candidate who wins gets nothing. There are no convention delegates at stake, like there are, ultimately, at the Iowa Democratic Party caucuses. 

Both parties use the caucuses as the starting point for their selection of national convention delegates. The difference is that the Democrats’ process is at least tied to delegate selection, even if it is two steps removed from the actual selection of delegates. 

The voting that occurs at Republican caucuses is purely a straw poll that is not connected to delegate selection. 

It’s similar to the straw poll that the Iowa Republican Party holds every summer to raise money. The only thing at stake in the summer straw poll is bragging rights, which went to Michelle Bachman four years ago and which were absolutely worthless by caucus night when she finished dead last.

The truth is student council elections are more meaningful than the Iowa Republican caucuses.  

People like to talk about how the Iowa economy benefits from spending during caucus years, and that’s true to a certain extent.

But do you know who the biggest beneficiary is?

It’s the local news media. Newspapers, TV and radio stations all collect fat profits from the millions of dollars that campaigns spend on advertising leading up to the caucuses.  

And that is why you will see very few negative comments about the caucuses in the Des Moines Register or in local TV coverage.