What Did — And Didn’t — Go Down In The Iowa Caucuses
It’s hard to believe we have no guidance yet on when we’re going to get more numbers (remember there is no data for 38 percent of precincts). And what’s more, we don’t know why those results are delayed.
Projections by Lenny Bronner, a data scientist at The Washington Post (and my brother!), have Buttigieg’s 95 percent confidence interval in state delegate equivalents as slightly higher than Sanders’s — but there’s a lot of overlap between the two intervals. So while Buttigieg has a lead, some caution is warranted.
Our model completed, I’ve decided to only post the 95% confidence intervals to underscore that these are forecasts.
Biden: (258, 417)
Sanders: (463, 628)
Warren: (323, 489)
Buttigieg: (485, 655)
Klobuchar: (198, 356)— Lenny Bronner (@lbronner) February 4, 2020
One question that didn’t get asked in the (very short) presser with Price was why the Iowa Democratic Party wanted to use an app at all, rather than sticking with the tried-and-true phone method. The only explanation I’ve been able to find is from a January story where Price said it was to “speed up the time it takes to get results to the public” which … uh … didn’t quite work out.