Bragging rights are officially up for grabs, people. Bring it.
This contest will require our participants to predict the outcome of the top three in the Democratic Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire primary.
It’s time to set aside your own opinions and see how well you can read the future. It’s 31 days until Iowa and 39 until New Hampshire. Do you stick with your heart or do you call up Nate Silver and crunch some numbers? It’s up to you.
Scoring:
Each player will be required to list the Top Three in each place like this:
Iowa:
Yang (34%)
Willliamson
Gabbard
New Hampshire
Steyer (30%)
Bloomberg
Yang
Players will also be required to state the percentage of votes/caucus the winner of each vote receives rounded to the nearest percent.
Scoring:
Each player will receive one point per correct call - candidate and place - for a maximum of 6 points. In event more than one player receives the most points we will proceed to the tiebreaker.
Example:
In the above example, a player who guesses Yang/Williamson/Gabbard and Steyer/Bloomberg/Yang would receive six points while someone who guesses Yang/Williamson/Gabbard and Steyer/Yang/Bloomberg would receive four points.
Tiebreaker:
Ties will be broken using the percentage prediction for the top candidate in both contests. Players closest to the actual percentage will win. Players will lose one point in for every point their guess varies from the actual outcome. So if I player guesses Yang will win with 57% of the vote and he finishes with 5% that player will be debited -52 points.
In the unlikely event that we still have a tie following the tiebreaker the first person to make that guess will be our winner.
Entries will be accepted until the day before the Iowa Caucuses. Players may update their guesses as often as they’d like but for purposes of the tiebreaker their most recent guess is the one that controls.
Incomplete entries - those that omit the percentages, for example, or fail to select three candidates from each content - will be considered invalid.
The prize? Bragging rights. The right to know that you bested your peers. Bask in your glory. Bask.
How about extra points for early predictions that the poster sticks with? Otherwise, it’s to my advantage to wait until the last minute, to take into account polling and any withdrawals.
As for “too much like work”, the %s would only matter for relatively deep tiebreakers – the order is really what matters. So it shouldn’t be additional work unless there’s a need for a deep tiebreaker.
That is still not as clear as you might hope. In previous years Iowa reported state delegate equivalents. That is the estimate share of delegates to the state level convention based on feeding the precinct level delegates actually selected through their estimation of the intervening conventions. The media would report that and sometimes call it the vote;CNN did in 2016. That is just an estimate of the delegates to the state convention that will be selected by the intervening conventions. The media typically tacks on a further estimate of how many delegates for the national convention will be selected by the state convention. That can differ some between media sources due to rounding. As long as we specify CNN and it being the “vote” (actually state delegate equivalents) instead of the national delegates we would have been fine …in 2016.
Unfortunately it is not 2016. Iowa changed things.
Iowa will now be reporting three separate numbers for the Democratic caucuses. There will be where caucus goers initially align, where they align after they see who doesn’t have enough to break threshold in that first alignment, and the state delegate equivalents. We should probably pick which one of those we want to use.
And on top of that, there’s a good chance that none of those will reflect the final delegate count, as about 2/3 (28 out of 41) of Iowa’s delegates will be selected at its four district conventions.
Note that there appear to be a rules change for 2020, at least for Iowa; I thought there was a third alignment, where voters who supported candidates that did not reach the 15% threshhold after the second alignment could then go to candidates that did, but now, anyone aligned with an eliminated candidate has their vote ignored.
I will likely update this, as there is almost certainly going to be enough movement in the polls to make a difference. But in case I forget to post a prediction, here goes my **Iowa **prediction:
Biden 20%
Sanders 19%
Buttigieg 18%
Warren 17%
Any ‘movement’ will probably be only a percent or two but because these candidates are so close together and could all conceivably win delegates, any poll movement will be significant. My gut feeling is that Sanders and Warren’s spat will lead to some shifting between the two of them, which might benefit both Buttigieg and Biden.
As for New Hampshire, I think Bernie will prevail again in a state where he thumped Clinton a few years ago. It’ll be closer though:
Sanders 19.5%
Biden 19%
Warren 17%
Buttigieg 13%
I also think New Hampshire will probably be the beginning of the end for Buttigieg. Warren will be badly wounded too if she can’t place any higher than 3rd in the first two races.
