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

Nathaniel, it’s interesting that they might get 300,000 participants tonight — that would work out to about 13 percent of the state’s voting-eligible population. This would definitely be a record for one party’s caucuses in Iowa, but that would still be lower turnout as a share of the voting-eligible than the average turnout level for primary states in the 2016 Democratic nomination race (15 percent), per calculations based on data from U.S. Elections Project.

More than two dozen satellite locations have already conducted caucuses, giving us a glimpse into what the rest of the night might look like. The first Iowa Democrats caucused over pizza and Georgian wine in Tbilisi.

We have results from a handful of satellite sites in Iowa, Scotland, Paris and Florida. For the most part, Sanders has done well in these contests, which generally had low turnout, with the notable exception of two Florida sites, Port Charlotte and St. Petersburg, where many more people showed up. In those races, Klobuchar took the lead.

The Paris location ran into a minor hiccup — it was originally slated for 9 p.m. local time, but then was changed to 8 p.m. local time. But since not everyone got the update, they started at 9 p.m. anyway.

The Manhattan satellite site also had a last-minute change. It was at one point supposed to take place at the Jefferson Market Library, but was changed late last week to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center. We’ll have to see if that change affects anyone’s ability to go.

On the topic of turnout, an important question going into tonight was which polling method had a more accurate turnout model: polls that projected turnout based on who said they would caucus vs. polls that modeled turnout based on past elections. Sanders has generally done better in the former, while Biden as done better in the latter.