Iowa Caucus Results Thread (pg 148 - full results)

[Sorenroy]

Why is there an in-state satellite caucus? Is it just for local people who won't be able to attend tonight? If so, why does this group seem to almost uniquely have this type of allowance?

[Sorenroy]

Why is there an in-state satellite caucus? Is it just for local people who won't be able to attend tonight? If so, why does this group seem to almost uniquely have this type of allowance?

What, people who work the night shift at meat packing plants should not be able to vote?

These satellite caucuses are an improvement over the previous system and make it a bit fairer (a bit less biased to wealthy old whites who are more likely to be able to caucus on a weekday evening), although IIRC they still give less delegates than the regular caucus.

People working night shift should be able to vote, and they shouldn't have to go through the archaic Iowa caucus system to do it. But everything I've read about this anti-democratic process has led me to believe that such exceptions weren't really an option. Just from a definitional sense, calling an in-state early caucus a satellite caucus is confusing.

Also, not really the point, but it's debatable that this is an improvement over the old system. If these people truly couldn't have participated otherwise (which seems to be the case here) then it does include more people in the process. However, the reason that the virtual caucus was canceled was because people feared it would have pulled attendees away from the actual events and, in the process, weakened their representation when it came to total delegates. Same applies here.

[Sorenroy]

Also, not really the point, but it's debatable that this is an improvement over the old system. If these people truly couldn't have participated otherwise (which seems to be the case here) then it does include more people in the process. However, the reason that the virtual caucus was canceled was because people feared it would have pulled attendees away from the actual events and, in the process, weakened their representation when it came to total delegates. Same applies here.

The main reason the virtual cacuses were scrapped was the Iowa Democratic Party could not prove that they were secure from hacking.

I did not know that. Even so, the fact that the virtual caucus was capped at 10% of the delegates no matter the usage/turnout was frequently brought up as an issue. There was definitely discussion around that flaw in the system, even if it wasn't the ultimate reason for the cancellation of the process.

[Sorenroy]

So after spending the better part of the last few weeks listening to how spending $50 million and almost all candidate event time in Iowa is good actually because the people there really do respect the process, we get a result in which we're lucky to see 30%-35% turnout, have people unable to count and allocate delegates properly, and a party that didn't think to test its own systems before their all important caucus? I sure am glad that we devoted so much time and energy to Iowa and not the myriad of other states that will be lucky to see one candidate pass through on their way to New Hampshire.


It's incredibly disappointing to hear that results won't even be out until midday tomorrow. I know I and a lot of other political junkies are disappointed we didn't get to see our live returns, but it would have been a minor footnote to all the regular people turning on the news on their way to work Tuesday morning. Somehow they screwed this up so badly that it's not even contained to the nerds and wonks who actually care about who's ahead in the first 10% of reports.

[Sorenroy]

https://twitter.com/schwartzbCNBC/status/1224760784221327363

This seems like an incredibly risky play to make. If Biden ends up around 4th/5th in Iowa and then has another tough night in New Hampshire (another 4th/5th is not out of the picture), Nevada is not a done deal. As of now, 538 only has Biden ahead in state polling by 1% and two big losses in the previous states will not do him any favors. I still think Biden is the best chance at a moderate nominee, but it seems like a bad strategy to play up Biden's standings in Nevada vs. his likely crushing dominance in South Carolina and beyond.



Transcribed:

NEW: Joe Biden's campaign tried to reassure donors on a conference call today that he will win Nevada and South Carolina after chaos ensued in Iowa. This comes as Biden is in need of campaign cash going into key states he believes he can win.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/biden-reassures-donors-he-will-win-nevada-south-carolina-after-iowa-caucus.html

[Sorenroy]

From the 538 live thread.

[Sorenroy]

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/04/us/elections/results-iowa-caucus.html

The New York Times results page has the listed precincts reporting out of total for each county. A handful of the smallest counties are fully reporting, but there seems to be a decent spread of where is left to call.

[Sorenroy]

The Needle
(praise be)

First Alignment:
Sanders (87%) - Buttigieg (12%)

Final Alignment:
Sanders (61%) - Buttigieg (38%)

State Delegates:
Buttigieg (74%) - Sanders (27%)

[Sorenroy]

Because of the 15% threshold for viability by CD, is is very possible in almost any Dem primary for one candidate to win the most votes but another candidate to win more delegates.  In this case, which candidate is “declared” the winner?  Why should Iowa be any different?

(For the record, I don’t support either Bernie or Pete.)

The problem is that Iowa is being treated differently. I can't think of another example in a different state where popular vote isn't the metric by which winning is measured. It's hard to find any examples of vote-delegate splits because they are fairly infrequent, but Clinton's success in Iowa wasn't talked about as a 2 delegate win and her later win in Nevada wasn't seen as the 57%-43% blowout that the delegates showed but rather the much more narrow 5 point victory of the popular vote.

Second, the discussion around Iowa is not one of delegates, but rather delegate equivalents. If the delegates were really the important part of the process, they'd be focusing on the 41 of them that will carry to the convention, not the hundreds that will show up to later select the 41.

And all of this comes on the caveat that Iowa has not yet been called. Sure, Sanders leads the votes and Buttigieg leads the SDEs, but there is still a substantial chance that either of the candidates wins either of those counts. None of the major news outlets have yet called the race for anyone.

[Sorenroy]

I've been incredibly disappointed by the news coverage of the Iowa results that I have heard. Even though I disagree with the way that it's being reported, I can understand the news leading with State Delegate Equivalent numbers. However, it's feels disingenuous to not even mention the popular vote results and to treat the results as final. For example, the New York Times's The Daily podcast just said that Buttigieg was leading and interspersed the ranking of the candidates with Buttigieg's "victory" speech.

[Sorenroy]

Numbers are probably wrong.

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1225168116994445312?s=20

Reports coming in indicate that the driver responsible for delivering the final results is now stuck in the drive thru line at a Wendy's

"Hello, I'd like to report the next 10% of results."

"Sir, this is a Wendy's."

[Sorenroy]

Why does NYT still have Iowa >95% Buttigieg?

These estimates represent a snapshot of our forecast based on the results released by the Iowa Democratic Party as of 9:00 p.m. Eastern.

Also, as Gass3268 posted, the Needle seems to not be factoring in satilite caucuses. They may have paused updates to it to see what's going wrong.

[Sorenroy]

The Needle has left us:

The needle has been suspended to evaluate how it is processing the results of satellite caucuses.

[Sorenroy]

I know the conventional wisdom seems to be that the reporting of the results has been in Buttigieg's favor, but if Sanders ends up winning all three counts it's going to lead to a news cycle dominated by correcting the error. This will both give Sanders a boost closer to New Hampshire and circumvent some of the coverage loss of Impeachment/the State of the Union. Doesn't seem like a wholly bad result.

[Sorenroy]

If we go back to all the pages when Buttigieg was winning, you won't find a single person going "lol suck it Bernie Bros" or anything similar.  I didn't write anything like that.  None of the other anti-Sanders people did either.

85% in.

Pete’s lead expands to 45 delegate equivalents.

Pete won IA.

Lets go!

Suck it Bernie Bros!

I mean, how much more direct can it get?

[Sorenroy]

TBH, at this point it's silly to say that anyone won this thing.  Look back at this thread and the sheer number of inconsistencies and data errors Atlas has found.  This is now so close that any one of those errors could swing the result.

I definitely agree that this (and all close elections) should not be paraded around as wins, especially when they make up only a small part of the total process. No one goes out and celebrates 'cause they won a county 52-48. As has been repeated ad nauseam, Iowa's significance is almost entirely a weirdly overplayed emphasis on who narrowly wins first place, even though it has 1) only 1% of the total number of pledged delegates and 2) is proportional, just like every other Democratic primary/caucus.

Unfortunately, coming from you, it's frustrating to hear. Almost all of your previous posts in this thread have either been complaining about Sanders, complaining about the Sanders campaign, or complaining about Sanders supporters. When it looked like Buttigieg was ahead, it was complimenting his efforts to find supporters in "every nook and cranny" of the state. Now that Sanders looks close, it's complaining about Sanders cheating by focusing on a get out the vote effort for satellite caucuses. When it looked like Buttigieg was ahead, it was insinuating that Sanders supporters couldn't accept a loss even after mocking Hillary for her own. Now that Sanders looks close, it's a call for viewing the results as a tie.

Your calls for unity and a critical view of what went down in Iowa wring hollow when they only show up when the results are in question, even if your ultimate conclusion is something everyone in this thread can agree with.

[Sorenroy]

Wow! Reuters actually decided to call the race.

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1225609106767187969?s=20

Not good!

I remember when Florida got called for both Gore and Bush on election night 2000. The media doesn't determine who won.

In a sequential, momentum based race? It absolutely does. This thread hasn't gone on for 150 pages because of a delegate here or there at the eventual Democratic convention. It's irresponsible for Reuters to do this, and would be even if news and momentum didn't play so heavily in this race.

[Sorenroy]

Could you please unsticky this thread now ?

All the "results" are "in" and there's just lame debate about what might have been if things were different etc. etc.

Please don't. All results are not in: there are glaring errors and the results have not been called. If it ends up being the case that no campaign asks for a recanvass and/or it's the day before New Hampshire then lets move on, but it's still the top thing happening in the primary right now.

[Sorenroy]

Pledged Delegates:
Buttigieg — 13
Sanders — 12
Warren — 8
Biden — 6
Klobuchar — 1
Unallocated — 1

[Sorenroy]

Can this abomination please be unsticked now?

Candidates still have about an hour to request a recanvass, which will factor into who wins Iowa's final delegate. There is still a reason to have this up, at least for now.

[Sorenroy]

https://twitter.com/ryanobles/status/1226928467884859394

Does anyone have a timeline for the recanvass and anything else from Iowa?

[Sorenroy]

In yet another frustrating little wrinkle, why is Vox reporting different (and seemingly more up-to-date) vote totals than AP and the other news organizations??

Vox, and the New York Times, and others (I'm sure) are reporting post-correction numbers. Specifically, numbers corrected after the Iowa Democratic Party corrected duplicated precincts and the like. Why they are reporting missing precincts when their numbers match correctly against those saying every single precinct has been counted, I'm not sure.



Also, sad to see sore losers... Sanders and Buttigieg... asking for a recanvass.

[Sorenroy]

Can someone please provide me the results of the final alignment by CD? Can't find a map anywhere.

Since the results aren't final, the map isn't final, but here:

https://twitter.com/SenhorRaposa/status/1225878512919306241

Not immediately obvious from the embedded Tweet, but the numbers for first and final alignment are in the replies.

[Sorenroy]

I've been seeing users in other threads saying that Iowa was a Buttigieg win and I wanted to push back on that idea for three main reasons.

First: The results aren't final. Perhaps the main point is that we don't yet have conclusive numbers out of Iowa. According to the Hill, the party will be recounting 23 precincts starting Tuesday and lasting two days. Until then, we don't know what the actual results are. And this isn't some Nevada-type blowout where we can infer the results without lots of numbers. The current count is 26.19% for Buttigieg and 26.18% for Sanders, a 0.004% lead.

Second: Sanders clearly won the two popular vote measures. While SDEs are still unclear, first and final alignment votes are. I know a lot of people think that SDEs should be the measure because "tradition", but beyond comparing results from one year to another, doesn't it make more sense to measure in terms of the popular vote? If we're trying to compair Iowa results to other states in the current cycle, we're not going to measure votes against SDes and national popular votes don't say that Sanders won 25% of the vote, 25% of Iowa's SDEs, and 45% of Nevadas CCDs, they find a common measure, the popular vote, and do comparisons based on that. Even if you're just looking at results internally to the state, entrance/exit polls were not measuring support by abstracting it to SDEs, they were using what the people had to say, and that will be what is looked at again in November, where SDEs don't exist at all.

Finally: Why should we care about SDEs? Back to the last point, the popular vote seems like a better inter- and intrastate comparison, and SDEs mean nothing past the state's finished caucus. If you don't want to use the popular vote, national pledged delegates seem like the best way to go, but then we run into the problem from the first post, where we don't actually know the final result. Essentially, Sanders won two of the measures, and is basically tied with the final two. At best, if someone is referring to Iowa, they should say that Buttigieg is leading, not that he won. And Sanders certainly did not lose.

[Sorenroy]

https://cbs2iowa.com/news/local/idp-to-hold-state-central-committee-meeting-to-certify-caucus-results

IDP to hold State Central Committee meeting to certify caucus results

DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa Democratic Party will hold a State Central Committee meeting to certify the results of the 2020 Iowa Caucuses.

The meeting will be held Saturday February 29th, 2020 in Altoona. The announcement comes on the day the party said a recount of recanvass results was to be completed.

Not sure if this means we won't get results until the 29th or that results just won't be certified until the 29th, but I've been refreshing Google every hour and this seems to be the only news from "this evening."