Yeah, that’s gotta be a glitch. Note that that table doesn’t include any actual vote totals for the candidates. Besides, Iowa sends a total of 41 delegates to the convention, so that math would leave 17 unaccounted for.
Although it’s not a completely bright line, you need to finish at or above 15% to earn any delegates at all. Then the delegates are awarded proportionately. So if, for example, the vote totals were:
Yang 40%
Gabbard 20%
Patrick 20%
Biden 10%
Sanders 10%
Biden and Sanders would be SOL, Yang would get half the delegates and Gabbard and Patrick would each get a quarter. If one candidate had 20% and nobody else had more than 14%, the 20% guy would get all the delegates (to a good first approximation…it’s actually more complicated than that).
Missed edit window: The complication is that you can get a few delegates by finishing above 15% in a particular Congressional district, even if you fail to do so in the State as a whole).
So, based on what we’re seeing now, Pete and Bernie will probably end up with about 13-15 delegates each, Warren with 9-10, and Biden and Klobuchar will both get one or two due to the Congressional-district loophole. For perspective, it takes just under 2000 delegates to win the nomination.
Yes, I did - because Rule 2.K.5 of the Democratic Delegate Selection Process says:
“Requiring that the allocation of all national delegates, be locked in at the final expression of preference at the first determining step, as determined by the State’s Plan, subject to recount”
I did notice something else in the Delegate Selection Process; instead of rounding fractional delegates to the nearest number, all rounding is down, with any “unassigned” delegates going to the highest fractions.
It doesn’t work that way. I think what you’re seeing is the AP estimate of how some of the delegates will be awarded, but it is very weird. When I click on the source link it doesn’t go to a page with delegate counts so I’m not sure what is going on.
Zero delegates will be awarded until April, and the final delegate counts won’t be known until June. I don’t know what the AP is doing, but that’s not an actual delegate count.
Basically, you combine, round, and repeat over and over and over again and the rounding ends up dropping out the lower performing candidates.
Every precinct gets a certain number of delegates (some get more than others) to go to the county convention. Then each county gets a certain number of delegates and they go to the state convention - which then chooses the delegates to the national convention.
So, if, for example, all the precincts in a county had a total of 33 delegates for candidate A, 34 for candidate B, 25 for C, and 16 for candidate D. If the county only gets to send 5 delegates to the state level, then A & B each get 2 delegates, C will get 1, and D won’t get any. Something similar will happen when the state delegates get narrowed down to the national delegates.
Remember, though, this hasn’t happened yet - it’s just the projection based on what happened last night and the distribution of the delegate counts.
AFAIK, this year, the national delegates are going to have their pledges based directly on the useless made-up “state delegate equivalent” number, so there will be a fairly direct relationship between the results and the delegates for once. There will still be the whole cycle of county and state conventions to choose the actual delegates, but they’ll be bound based on what happened on Monday rather than on who is better at gaming the remaining process.
Not sure what you mean. The point was that the media presented Jeb as the frontrunner until the voters started voting. They did the same thing with Biden.
Due to the strength of the turnout at the “satellite caucuses,” where the total number of SDEs is proportional to turnout rather than being predetermined, Sanders now trails Buttigieg by only 4 SDEs, and could yet pull ahead since there’s another satellite left to report.
Jeb was not in fact the front runner, and ahead of Iowa he was being accurately described by the media, as a disappointing embarrassment. I’m no Biden fan but he in fact was the front-runner heading into Iowa based on national polling.
From what I recall Bush got a sucker punch in Iowa 1988 because he took them for granted. He won Iowa in 1980 doing lots of campaigning to finish ahead of Reagan and thought that since he was now a two term vice president that he didn’t have to put much effort in Iowa.
Iowa is a lot less important for the Republicans. It doesn’t have much business being first for anyone, but it’s the Republicans who should really be annoyed that they’re stuck going there before any other state. Iowa Democrats at least have a track record of backing the ultimate nominee.
Well technically none of them do, but Biden is projected to have Iowa delegates. Not as many as he was expected to have.
Agreed it is a whiff. He wasn’t necessarily expected to win, but he was expected to be in the top three at least. In these first races expectations are key. And expectations are for a poor Biden showing in New Hampshire, given it is both Sanders’ and Warren’s backyard and that he spent like nothing there. Anything other than a first place for Sanders there wounds him because … expectations are key. Biden OTOH would do fine there with a second place. Another 4th?? In a primary? That’s more than a gut punch, it’s knocked to the mat. Third is limping along.
You raise an awesome point. After 2000 and 2016 the Dems complain about the Electoral College and say the popular vote winner should be the winner but then they have a system magnitudes times more complicated than the EC. Why not just use an apportionment system based on the percentage of votes? If you are not a “viable” candidate then you wont get a high enough percentage to even get one delegate. An even if some populist does scrape together enough statewide votes to get 1 or 2 delegates, what difference would it make at the DNC?
Obviously for all practical purposes, ‘winning Iowa’ is whatever the media borg says it is. And they say it’s defined by how many delegates each candidate gets.
But given how few delegates Iowa actually has, the importance of Iowa has nearly zero to do with winning delegates. Its importance is that it’s the first time we have actual votes, rather than mere polls. So ISTM that the number of votes each candidate got in Iowa is a more sensible metric for how they did.
Not that this is likely to matter now or in the future: it’s hard for me to believe that the 2024 campaign season will both (a) start off with Iowa, and (b) that Iowa will be a caucus. And this year’s already a done deal.
Surprise! “According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.”
That’s surprising because even at the precinct level you always have at least one know it all of every political persuasion who knows the rules verbatim and would protest results that were improper.
I agree that it is unfair that Iowa and New Hampshire get this appointment every single election cycle. But it does allow for a presidential campaign that at least starts out with “traditional” politicking: shaking hands, meeting with the guys early morning in the diner, going to a pancake supper, awarding a little girl the trophy for her third grade spelling bee win, etc. It keeps at least one old fashioned caucus in play. And as was mentioned, the delegate award is so vanishingly small as to be meaningless. The states should be rotated so that there is more diversity and fairness, but I like the small state kick offs.
The calculation errors are troubling. You think you could find the smartest six graders in the area to do them right on paper. The problem (at least in my area) is that the precinct captains are usually little old ladies who have been doing it since Calvin Coolidge ran for office and are good at handing out the ballot and giving you an “I voted” sticker, but anything more complicated than that is too taxing. Rethink who we give this responsibility to.
I noticed a few of these myself. Here are the ones I have found so far:
Mount Ayr 2 precinct, Ringgold county
The final alignment was:
Biden, 22
Buttigieg, 10
Warren, 9
Sanders, 7
The viability number = 48 x 15% = 7.2, rounded up to 8 (all viability numbers round up, as rounding fractions less than 0.5 down would make the number needed less than 15%), so Sanders should not have received any of its 13 county convention delegates, which should be:
Biden, 11
Buttigieg, 5
Warren, 5
However, they are listed as:
Biden, 10
Buttigieg, 4
Warren, 4
Sanders, 3
Fort Dodge 09 precinct, Webster county, the final alignment was:
Buttigieg, 16
Sanders, 13
Warren, 13
Biden, 9
Its 13 county delegates (and their corresponding SDEs) “should be” distributed as follows:
Buttigieg, 4
The winner of a Sanders/Warren coin toss, 4
The loser of the coin toss, 3
Biden, 2
However, they are listed as:
Buttigieg, 5
Sanders, 4
Biden, 3
Warren, 1
There are three precincts where, if you believe the counts, more than 30 people showed up, but all of them went home after the first alignment (and some of the first alignment groups were under 15%, so it’s not a case of that precinct skipping the second alignmemt because nobody could change); in one of them, nobody is listed as gaining any SDEs, either. On the other hand, one precinct did give out SDEs even though the counts say that nobody showed up.
However, when all is said and done, what matters is the DNC delegates, and with 97% of the precincts reporting, those pretty much appear to be set in stone:
Buttigieg, 11
Sanders, 11
Warren, 7
Biden, 6
Klobuchar, 6
This is fucking awesome. No matter how the final delegate count shakes out, the story is now that Pete claimed victory two days before he had any right to do so, and wound up looking like an arrogant fool.
