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

Sarah, Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status is an accident of history. It starting going first in 1972, before the order of the states really mattered. The power of going first became clear in 1976, once Jimmy Carter proved that a candidate could gain momentum and eventually win a nomination by performing well in Iowa. Since then, leaders of both parties in Iowa have fought to maintain the state’s status.

There are various ways this could change going forward, but it could require coordination and agreement between the national party, state parties and state legislatures. One obvious change might be for Iowa to just hold a primary instead of a caucus. But that would create tension with New Hampshire, which has written into state law that it should be the first state in the country to hold a primary.

The national party could try to change the order of states altogether, but the date of a primary or caucus is ultimately up to the state legislature or state party (depending on which entity runs it in a given state). The national party can create incentives or disincentives to try to get the states to change their dates, but that’s not guaranteed to work.

We have yet to find out the true scale of the current shitshow, but there’s a possibility that — especially if Democrats lose in the fall — Iowa could be shamed into changing its ways and working with the national party to do so. As with the results themselves, a lot is yet to be determined.

Galen, you’ve done some in-depth reporting around this for the The Primaries Project. Why does Iowa go first? And do you think that might change? For instance, we’ve already seen some caucuses fall by the wayside this year when it was discovered in 2016 that there was no way to hold a recount in the Iowa caucuses, as the DNC moved to change its rules to make nomination contests more inclusive. This is a bit speculative at this point, but do you think Iowa could be in trouble?

Well, ummmmmm …. we still don’t officially have any votes counted in Iowa. But a variety of evidence — partial results released by the AP, crowdsourced data, vote tallies released by the campaigns and entrance polls — suggests that some outcomes are more likely than others. In particular, there’s more reason to feel optimistic about the showings of Sanders and Buttigieg — and Warren, to a slightly lesser extent — and less reason for optimism about Biden or Klobuchar. One other thing we can probably say is that whoever wins Iowa — and remember that Iowa has three different ways to count its vote — it’s liable to be a fairly narrow victory, perhaps with split winners across the various metrics. Even the Sanders and Buttigieg campaigns themselves aren’t claiming to have won by overwhelming margins. So out of the 89 scenarios we outlined yesterday — none of which was the royal disaster that Iowa has turned into! — let’s focus on those that are most relevant. Specifically, let’s look at those that involve:

• Either Sanders or Buttigieg winning narrowly
• And either Sanders, Buttigieg or Warren in second place.

Obviously, there’s a fair range of difference between these outcomes: Sanders finishing first (even a narrow first) would be much better for him than, say, tied for second with Warren behind Buttigieg. Still — if you ignore for the moment that Iowa might not produce the typical bounces because of the botched vote count — averaging out these different outcomes might give us some idea of what we’re dealing with. So here you go:

Generally speaking, these are a complicated set of scenarios, with multiple winners possible. For instance, a narrow Buttigieg win over Sanders would create a scenario in which no candidate has more than a 28 percent chance at winning a delegate majority, and the odds of no majority also substantially increases. On average between these four scenarios, though, the model would have Sanders winning a majority 36 percent of the time, Joe Biden 25 percent of the time, Buttigieg 9 percent of the time, and Warren 6 percent of the time … and no majority 25 percent of the time. That’s quite the mess.