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

To take a step back for a second, the Iowa caucuses remind me how deeply ingrained geographic representation is here in the U.S. Now sure, it makes sense that since caucuses are physical meetings, you’d want caucusgoers to be neighbors. But the Iowa Democratic party then aggregates those precincts up at the county and congressional district levels to produce each candidate’s number of delegates statewide. And while I can see arguments about making sure that political candidates have broad support across states, I’m less clear on why the system should give weight to candidates with broad support across more arbitrary units, like congressional districts.

Consistent with preelection horse race polls, according to preliminary entrance polling, Biden seems to be doing better among older voters and poorly among young voters. Sanders’s support seems to go the other way — he’s doing very well among people under 45.

Preliminary entrance polls suggest that the ideological distribution of caucusgoers looks similar to 2016, with very liberal voters mostly supporting Sanders and Warren and the moderates mostly supporting Biden and Buttigieg. That leaves the ideological battleground as caucusgoers that identify as “somewhat liberal” (a plurality). But one strength of Sanders has been that he does generate some support from moderates, whereas Biden generates very little support from very liberal voters.