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

Troy Price, chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, says they are about to report 62 percent of precincts, across all 99 counties. He assures us that the data the party is releasing is accurate.

To Laura’s point about half the precinct results being in, I was laudatory about the Iowa Democratic Party’s decision to wait to release results once it was clear that things were totally screwed up. But I’m not sure it’s smart to release roughly half of precincts. Maybe if they had 75 to 80 percent or something, but it sounds like half, which the media is probably going to run with even if things could change!

Before we know anything about the results, keep in mind that a situation like this makes it hard for our model to predict what the post-Iowa bounce will be. We’ll turn it on at some point once results are final-ish. But we may really need to wait for post-Iowa polls for it to stabilize. It could easily overreact, underreact, or mis-react.