On Monday, Iowa Republicans will be the first Americans to vote for a presidential nominee. They’ll be doing it with a caucus, which is a time-consuming, controversial way of voting that went so poorly for Democrats recently they dropped it altogether this year.

Republicans will continue to caucus, despite growing criticism about its downsides. Here’s  why it’s first in the nation for Republicans and the case for and against keeping it that way.

Why Iowa Democrats have ditched their presidential primary caucus

For the first time since the 1970s, Democrats won’t join Republicans in voting in January, or in voting by caucus. In Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary, the process broke down so badly that it never produced a clear winner. Plus, Joe Biden came in fourth there. National Democrats have also had growing concerns about Iowa’s lack of demographic diversity, so they ejected it as the first state to vote for a presidential nominee. And Iowa Democrats scrapped the caucus process altogether. This year they will vote for a nominee by mailing in a ballot and they will announce their results in March. (They’ll still technically hold caucuses on Monday, but only for the purpose of conducting administrative party business.)

Iowans argue a caucus still works to winnow the field

So the caucus is anachronistic, but Iowans give lots of reasons for why it should still exist — and why it should be first in the nation.

The grass-roots nature of a caucus can lift smaller candidates with a passionate following, though Iowa has struggled in recent presidential cycles to pick the winner. But sometimes the caucus gives candidates fire with an unexpected win supported by grass-roots party activists. “This is a state that chose Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton,” Nicole Schlinger, a Republican political strategist in Iowa, said.

The fact Iowa is a smaller state lets voters drive the political conversation, rather than paid media ads in bigger states with more traditional primaries. “You’ve got to start the process somewhere, and if you go to these bigger states, you can’t have these one-on-one conversations with candidates to vet them,” said Steve Scheffler with the conservative Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition.

On caucus night, the campaigns need to be so connected with Iowans that they provide a representative in one of each of the nearly 1,600 precincts to argue for them before voters make their choice.

How to interpret the results of Republicans’ Iowa caucuses

Be patient. This is an event put on by volunteers, and it could take hours or more for results to come in — especially if the race is close.

Donald Trump is expected to win, even though he’ll spend much of this week going back and forth between several different courtrooms for various cases. But even though he’s leading his opponents by nearly 50 percentage points nationally, don’t expect Trump to get 50 percent of the vote in Iowa. That’s because Craig Robinson, the former political director of Iowa’s Republican Party, thinks many of his supporters are exactly the kind of people who don’t make it out to caucus.

In many ways, the race for second place is more exciting. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis needs to come in very close to Trump to have a path forward in the presidential race, many Republicans say. Especially since he has the endorsement of Iowa’ governor.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has less pressure to perform, because everyone is watching how she’ll do compared to Trump in the next state, New Hampshire. So she would get some major momentum if she came in second, and that could effectively end DeSantis’s campaign.

Can the Iowa caucuses survive much longer?

It’s a fair question, given Democrats have basically rejected theirs, and former Republican Party leaders like Robinson are questioning the caucus’s place in modern times.

But even Robinson sees some benefits to having a small state with a weird voting system go first in the presidential primary.

“When do candidates make mistakes?” he asked. “They make a mistake when someone asks them a simple question and they flub it. So I think having regular people interact with these presidential candidates is crucial, and I think the only place you really get that is in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

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