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

If you ever wondered how the caucus organizers count all of the people in the candidate groups, here’s your answer. The people sitting in chairs are a piece of cake, since there are a finite number of chairs in each section. People sitting or standing were organized into groups of 10 by the volunteers, and now everyone is standing in place, waiting for the action to begin.

About a third of caucusgoers live in a city of over 50,000 people; in contrast, 28 percent live in suburbs and 41 percent live in small cities or rural areas. While the urban/rural divide has become an increasingly important political fault line, preliminary results don’t appear to show extreme differences between these types of voters — except for Sanders, who appears to be doing better among voters in larger cities and suburbs than among small cities and rural areas.

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.