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

Again, we’re sticking around for now — hopefully we’ll hear some official word from the Iowa Democratic Party tonight, even if it’s not full results.

Here’s the reaction from another candidate:

Turning back to the entrance polls for a second (I know! Still!), the splits by geography are quite interesting. Biden seems to have done better in suburbs than in cities over 50,000 people. For Warren, it’s the other way around. Buttigieg seems to have done about equally well across geographical categories.

Buttigieg basically claimed victory even though we have very few actual results. What are the other campaigns claiming? Klobuchar’s campaign manager Justin Buoen tweeted that she is “running even or ahead of Vice President Biden.” And Warren’s campaign manager Roger Lau is claiming “it’s close between Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg. I believe the Vice President is a distant fourth.” Of course, this could all be campaign spin. We simply won’t know until we have results from an independent source.

I don’t disagree, Laura! But maybe they’re hedging that we won’t know who the real winner is until after New Hampshire, or that the three different votes will be so muddied that it’ll be easy for multiple campaigns to claim victory at this point. I agree that it’s risky, but you want to energize your supporters at the end of the day.

In the absence of real results, Sarah, it seems … pretty risky to lean so hard into the victory narrative?

I mean, that’s a good point, Nathaniel. But I do feel like he’s creating a lot of buzzy clips, and based on the limited information we have at this point, it helps reinforce the idea that he pulled off an upset victory.

Yeah, Laura, he’s getting a lot more free media than the other candidates did. But also, it’s coming a lot later in the evening, when fewer people are tuning in. I feel like those two things cancel each other out?

CNN is still broadcasting Buttigieg’s speech. I imagine there’s not much else to show right now — and it is 12:30 on the East Coast — but he is still getting a bunch of airtime. (And it’s only 9:30 on the West Coast!) (Thanks for tuning in to “Time Zones with Laura.”)

That’s one way to put it, sure.

Even if Buttigieg has internal results suggesting he won one of the measures of victory, we don’t know which one it is. Maybe he won only the post-realignment vote but not the delegates or pure popular vote. Or maybe he didn’t win at all. There’s a reason not to take his claim at face value. It may not be as good a night for Buttigieg as Buttigieg wants us to believe.

Joshua, all I can say is that Pete leading his supporters in the “High Hopes” dance would entertain me quite a bit at midnight-thirty over here.

Seems to me like “not making journalists angry” should be a priority for Buttigieg right now.

With all the caveats I previously mentioned about entrance polls, I’m finding the gender divide here quite interesting. As Meredith wrote earlier today, Sanders and Warren are the two candidates with the biggest gender gap in pre-caucus Iowa polls. In the entrance poll, both Sanders and Yang do somewhat better among men than women, while Warren and Klobuchar do somewhat better among women. And Buttigieg is actually slightly ahead of the others among women, though these differences are within the poll’s margin of error.

But I don’t think it will help him in the end. People will watch this speech (which, again, is happening after midnight on the East Coast) through the filter of the media. And the media will be incredulous that he claimed victory.

No, Josh. I think you’re right. If I were his campaign manager, I’d probably tell him to do the same. As a journalist it angers me, but I realize we have different priorities.

It’s a strategy, to be sure… It reads to me as very presumptuous, though.

Buttigieg: “By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.” Not sure what he’s basing that on, but is there a downside to claiming victory right now?

In a bizarre line, Buttigieg says, “We don’t know all the results, but we do know that, when all is said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation.” He says he’s confident he will win! Not sure how he can know that.

Y’all, I guess I’m omniscient at this late hour. Butttigieg is hardcore leaning into this idea that he has won this evening, which, readers … we do not know at this point.

Do we think they gave the people behind Buttigieg tiny flags so that they couldn’t do the “High Hopes” dance?

Buttigieg finally taking the stage. Took him awhile to get out there. I’m guessing that he’s going to claim as much of a victory as he can at this point.

Buttigieg is now speaking to his supporters — at 12:21 a.m. Eastern. I feel like he made a mistake waiting so long.

Still looking at the entrance poll as we enter the one millionth hour of waiting for results. I’ve said this before, but one of the issues with the entrance poll is that it only records first preferences (that is, voters’ pre-realignment choices); if a candidate isn’t above the viability threshold at a caucus location (usually 15 percent of attendees), their voters can join a viable group or switch to another nonviable group to try to achieve viability. Quite a few of the candidates are likely to be below the threshold in each precinct, which could change the first-choice results quite a bit.

At this point, we don’t know whether we’re even going to get more results tonight. We’ll be hanging around on the live blog a bit longer just in case.

For those of you tuning in late, “inconsistencies” (reportedly having to do with the technological failure of an app used by the Iowa Democratic Party) have delayed the reporting of the Iowa caucus results. Only 34 out of Iowa’s 1,765 precincts have reported results, and those results are basically worthless because we don’t know where those precincts are (and whether they’re representative of the rest of the state).

Warren’s audience was chanting “CFPB” during her speech for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Wonks, all.

An idea that I wish Iowa Democrats could actually consider:

Well, we have some results … of polls of New Hampshire. An Emerson College poll shows Sanders in a healthy lead with 32 percent, Warren and Biden with 13 and Klobuchar and Buttigieg with 12 percent. A Suffolk University poll says Sanders is at 24 percent, Biden is at 18 percent, Warren is at 13 percent, Buttigieg is at 11 percent and Klobuchar is at 6 percent.

There was also a separate, non-app-related issue that delayed the caucus wrapping up, according to the precinct chair here. Because the Yang and Buttigieg supporters didn’t hit the viability threshold, there was an extra delegate allocated to the precinct that wasn’t accounted for, and the precinct organizers didn’t know what to do. Ultimately they figured it out — the Sanders camp got six delegates and the Warren camp got four delegates — but it took time to work out.

Biden’s general counsel has released a letter tonight to the leaders of the Iowa Democratic Party asking for an explanation of tonight’s mishaps BEFORE the party puts out the official results. Aggressive move.

I just had a longish conversation with the chair of Precinct 21 here in Iowa City, Dave Tingwald. They have not yet reported their results yet because the app did not work for them at all. I asked him what the issues with the app were and he paused, sighed, and said, “Downloading … accessibility … we could not problem-solve getting the app onto one of our devices.” They’ll be phoning the results in shortly, he said.

Andrew Yang is speaking to his supporters now, although the networks aren’t carrying it.

I am … still looking at the same entrance poll results. What just stood out to me: Among respondents who describe themselves as “liberal” — 68 percent of caucusgoers — Sanders does best, but after that, Warren and Buttigieg are tied. I didn’t expect Buttigieg to do well among those respondents, to be honest. (When you break it down further, he does better among those who say they’re “somewhat liberal,” while Warren and especially Sanders do better among the “very liberal” — 25 percent of caucusgoers describe their ideology that way.)

I think that’s smart of them, Clare. Trying to fill the media vacuum.

So, Buttigieg’s Iowa communications director is at this point just tweeting out photos of precinct results from places Trump won in 2016. Like so:

The reporting of three types of results was partially a response to Sanders’s complaints about 2016 (when he may have done better with first preferences). If he wins but does not get the expected bounce due to delays, it is possible that the increased complexity could hurt him. We may also get to tests the effects of other changes, like reducing the number of caucuses and superdelegates.

Sanders is literally just giving his stump speech now. The only difference is his family is with him.

In this weird situation, is it good for Buttigieg to speak last? The traditional “victory” spot will be his, but with no results, it might be too late to be relevant.

At this rate, Galen, that might be like 5 a.m.?

Micah, consider this a formal pitch:

Yeah, Geoffrey, the thing is, I actually think it’s better to report election results the British way: all at once, when a jurisdiction is totally done counting. So I’d be fine waiting for the results in Iowa — if they had planned it that way in advance!

That’s a really good question, Nate. It seems as if the problem might be more systemic than we realize at this point. Or, considering Iowa’s track record and the new vote tallies being released, maybe they’re just being extra cautious.

Nathaniel, I’m assuming I can do something similar with my lecture for class tomorrow about the implications of the results of the Iowa caucuses.

I wonder if Iowa Democrats are now worried that if they report just 35 percent or whatever that the result in those precincts will be what the media runs with, desperate for results. So now they might wait to have a majority or something.

It’s quite clear that these candidates just dusted off their planned victory speeches and made a few edits at the top.

Sanders says, “Today marks the beginning of the end for Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in American history.”

In some ways, this has the feeling of a crazy political science experiment, in which we test the independent influence of media narratives about caucus results … by not actually reporting the caucus results.