What Did — And Didn’t — Go Down In The Iowa Caucuses

Tonight, as the caucuses begin at thousands of precincts across the state of Iowa, say a little prayer for the organizers who have spent the past few months scheduling event space, corralling volunteers, and conducting trainings. Ed Cranston, a retired Apple employee and the chair of Johnson County Democrats, is hoping nothing goes wrong on caucus night — but he’s prepared for glitches all the same.

A big one organizers could face is running out of materials, like registration forms or the presidential preference cards that will create a paper trail for the caucuses. “I have 15,000 additional presidential preference cards in the trunk of my car, just in case,” Cranston told me, laughing.

There’s also the potential for miscounts. Cranston will be caucusing in a high school auditorium this year, where he says it’s pretty easy to figure out how many people are sitting in a given section. But it’s much harder to count heads in crowded rooms when people are standing. Back in 2016, Cranston said, they had to do a recount at his precinct after realizing that the number of people counted in the Clinton and Sanders groups added up to more than the total number of people in the room. “If you’re in a real tight room, it can get frustrating,” he said. “That’s why the precinct chairs have to remember — if we need to do a recount, we’ve got methods for doing it. The important thing is just to keep a cool head.”

In 2018, Democratic women won primary races all over the country, overperforming male competitors to make up almost half of all Democratic nominees for Congress. For open seats, women’s win rate was much higher than men’s, which many interpreted as a sign that women’s candidacies were resonating with Democratic voters.

And yet, despite that success in 2018, the national conversation has returned to the question of whether a woman can win. As we’ve written at FiveThirtyEight, congressional races are different from presidential races in ways that can make it harder for women to win that race than others. In the abstract, women are viewed by voters as less capable of handling issues like terrorism, national security and the economy — issues strongly associated with the presidency.

Moreover, according to a Gallup poll from November, more than half of 2020 Democratic voters are prioritizing a candidate who can beat Trump over a candidate who aligns with them on the issues, which can hurt the women because of “electability” concerns.

But assuming a woman is less electable in the general election than a man might be a psychological over-correction. A recent experiment found more Democrats said they would prefer to vote for a woman than a man, which suggests a female nominee would generate excitement. And either way, that idea certainly seems to be having an effect on vote choices in the primary. When YouGov Blue — a division of YouGov focused on Democrats — asked respondents who they would make president if they had a magic wand, Warren led the way, even though she’s behind Biden and Sanders in most national polls.

That said, an Iowa win, or even a solid performance, by Warren or Klobuchar might go a long way toward assuaging the notion that they can’t win in November.

Those numbers on late deciders aren’t particularly high for the Iowa caucuses, Laura. Maybe a bit on the low side, if anything.