I was talking about the web site and its totally botched rollout, and incredibly inept management of it.
Of the only other two states using caucuses this year, Nevada is also doing it this way, and I think Wyoming is as well; it’s hard to tell with Wyoming as the system isn’t specified clearly, but it is a “ranked choice” system (everybody lists up to five candidates in preference order), so if your first choice is viable, it’s not going to change.
The rules say to round to the nearest integer, and even if this causes an overcount or undercount of delegates, use the amount by which each one was rounded up/down to determine who loses/gains a delegate. A coin flip should be used only if the fractions of a delegate are the same.
The Obama Iowa bump has grown into a bit of a myth. He had already overtaken Hillary in South Carolina polls by December 2007. I guess the idea that farmland country Iowa giving its consent to a black guy with the middle name Hussein gave the narrative that it was Iowans who catapulted Obama. Reality was he was a once in a generation campaigner who excited the electorate.
Before him who else got a bump winning Iowa? John Kerry perhaps. Before that … Jimmy Carter. He actually came behind Uncommitted but as the first placed among the candidates he got media attention that was not given to him before.
Yes, because surely, nearly ten years later, we should be judging the effects of the ACA primarily on whether the website worked well on rollout or not.
It’s great that you had so much faith and confidence in Yang’s campaign and supporters that you expected his success.
But many people, particularly those in MSM or who watched MSM, were at least surprised when Yang first made the debate stage, then when he repeatedly made the debate stage, then when he raised $10M in Q3, then when he raised $16.5M in Q4, then when he raised $6.7M in January 2020. And many people are surprised that he has outlasted a bunch of seasoned politicians and continues to keep going.
I hope you continue to have the faith in Yang’s continued rise that some other people may not expect.
Actually, I think a lot of us small dollar donors were waiting on the results. If Pete had finished 4th and it wasn’t a 4 way tie, I’d have reservations about donating more money as that’s just not good for a campaign that threw everything into IA. I’m sure the Amy people and maybe the Warren people thought the same.
Yes, I know what you were talking about, and having struggled mightily with the site back in 2014 I acknowledge it was a mess. But when you support a party and a president who promised vast improvements over that system and have delivered exactly nothing, maybe you shouldn’t throw stones. (pun unintended)
But this is a complete tangent so I’ll drop it before it becomes a hijack.
Thanks, that’s how I thought it should work. Whoever gets rounded down the most should earn the delegate. But I think lots of precinct captains are screwing this up. Coin flips should be extremely rare.
OK, he’s exceeded expectations, that’s certainly true. But the expectations were pretty low to start with. If you had told me that an unqualified candidate with an offbeat platform would get 4% in the national polls and prove capable of raising as much money in a quarter as Bernie Sanders raises in a week, I would have been at most mildly surprised, not “shocked”. And hearing that such a candidate stayed in the race after all the serious career politicians who were polling in the low single digits folded, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.
This kind of thing is pretty much what I suspect, that there is no (even approaching) conclusive evidence of a bump happening on a regular basis. It strikes me as one of those things pundits like to talk about to gin up an interesting narrative, because they can’t just sit around talking about percentages, although Steve Kornacki and others even tried to make that interesting last night.
You mean the Iowa caucus did NOT work that way? I thought that was the whole point of caucuses, to chat with fellow Iowans about the choices. (If not, why not just a primary with ranking-order ballots and be done with it?)
Here’s the really crazy thing, immediate results were never even on the menu. The Iowa Caucuses are a multi-step process that won’t be complete until June 13, 2020.
Last night (2/3) people in 1,678 precincts elected 11,402 county delegates to represent them at the county conventions on March 3, 2020.
At those county conventions they will select 2,107 state and district convention delegates that will go to the district conventions on April, 25 2020 and the state convention on June 6, 2020.
The district conventions will select 27 delegates to send to the Democratic National Convention, and the state convention will select 14 more.
Only at the end of this process will we know which candidate is sending the most delegates to the national convention and thus who won Iowa.
They usually also calculate a number of ‘State Delegate Equivalents’ for all the candidates that sums to the 2,107 state delegates that will be chosen in March. This is an estimate, and things are probably going to change significantly before then. For example, a candidate who is awarded State Delegate Equivalents today may not even be in the race at the end of March.
If Yang gets as high as 8% of the first alignment Iowa votes, I’ll be mildly shocked, as that would be significantly overachieving relative to his polling numbers. But even then, he’d be only halfway to where he needs to be to actually win delegates, and almost certainly in no better than sixth place.
In the case you noted, Sanders’s 4.8 should have been rounded up to 5, and Buttigieg’s 3.2 rounded down to 3.
The “farthest away” rule is only needed where three (or more) candidates are rounded up, resulting in the total being one more than allowed. For example, if there are 9 delegates available, and three candidates get 3.65, 2.75, and 2.6, they would all round up, making it 4, 3, 3, but that is one delegate too many; they were rounded up by 0.35, 0.25, and 0.4 respectively, so the last one would lose a delegate, and the final count would be 4, 3, 2.
The only exception to the rule is, you can’t lose your only delegate this way, so if it would have been 3 delegates and 1.75, 0.65, and 0.6, rounded up to 2, 1, 1, the first one would lose a delegate, making it 1 each, even though that candidate rounded up the least.
Good one! Sounds like Nadler to the house minorities about the day of hearings they were allowed.
Nevada also has a caucus and was planning on using the same ap. They just decided to ditch it.
Bloomberg is now in 2nd place to win the Democratic nomination in the prediction market Predictit- just behind Sanders and in front of Biden.
Bloomberg has a strong offense. We need to see how good his defense is. That hasn’t been tested yet since he’s been left alone to focus on Super Tuesday while everyone else has been in Iowa. It will come though. Things like Stop & Frisk and his endorsement for Bush at the GOP Convention 2004 will be brought up. If he gets through that, does well on Super Tuesday then hard to see how he gets stopped.
Just a brief, somewhat humorous note about something Chris Christie* said on the Stephanopolous show on ABC this past Sunday about Bloomberg. He was talking about how no one would vote for somebody like him, who would just willy-nilly switch parties just to get elected. Why, who can trust somebody like that?! Of course, Christie forgot to mention that Bloomberg won the mayorship in New York City after doing just that, when he famously switched parties to run as a Republican.
But I agree that the issues you raise are very valid, and that’s what Christie should have focused on. In fact, he might have done that too, can’t remember.
*A guy I actually find fairly likable, now that he’s not the governor of New Jersey, a state I had the pleasure of living in back then.
There’s some chatter going on that the Buttigieg campaign heavily financed the failed app. :dubious:
I didn’t go to mine because I wasn’t feeling well (still aren’t) and now I’m kind of glad I didn’t attend.