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

It’s now the all-important part of any political event — fundraising! Volunteers are passing around boxes for financial contributions. The precinct chair encourages caucusgoers to give $46, “since tonight is all about electing the 46th president of the United States.”

Here’s some more anecdotal data that you shouldn’t draw many conclusions from, but it’s interesting for what it says about its own precinct. Grinnell College is a liberal arts college in eastern Iowa, and it looks like Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Warren are dominating the student vote. It’ll be interesting to see where Buttigieg, Yang and Biden voters realign to, too.

https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/1224505757577744387

How do this year’s caucus-goers compare ideologically to those in previous years? According to preliminary results from the Edison Research entrance poll, they’re similar in ideology to 2016.

So far, caucus-goers seem similarly liberal as in 2016

Breakdown by ideology of Iowa Democratic caucusgoers in 2020 and recent presidential election cycles, according to preliminary entrance poll data

Ideology	2004	2008	2016	2020
Very liberal	17%	18%	28%	25%
Somewhat liberal	39	36	40	42
Moderate	37	40	28	31
Conservative	6	6	4	2

We should stress again that these results are preliminary and can possibly change; since entrance polls collect data in waves, early results can be tilted towards caucus-goers who showed up early — in previous years, these have been older voters. We’ll update these numbers during the course of the evening.