That's It, Folks (Well, For A Couple Hours, Anyway)
Okay folks, we’re shutting down the live blog. The Democratic race remains unresolved with 12 precincts yet to be counted. It is unclear when we will get those results. For now, Hillary Clinton maintains a 49.9 percent to 49.6 percent lead over Bernie Sanders in state delegate equivalents. For all intents and purposes, the race is basically a tie. We’ll have more analysis as to what that means, as well as the implications of Ted Cruz’s victory over Donald Trump — and the strong third place finish for Marco Rubio — over the next few days.
Thanks for sticking with us!
Harry Throughout The Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GfcNRyT0Vo
Micah Cohen
We’re now up to 99 percent of precincts reporting on the Democratic side in Iowa, and Clinton still holds a 0.2-percentage-point lead.
Nate Silver
A New Hampshire Forecast Update … Sort Of
We’ve updated our polls-plus forecasts for Democrats and Republicans in New Hampshire, but the adjustment they make for tonight’s Iowa results is very minimal.
Technical details: Before Iowa votes, the model uses projected Iowa results as a component in its forecasts for New Hampshire. Once Iowa votes, we replace it with actual Iowa results. The actual results in Iowa weren’t that far off from our forecasts there, however, since our model correctly had Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio projected to overperform the polls and Donald Trump projected to underperform his, along with a close margin on the Democratic side.
tl;dr: The model mostly takes a wait-and-see approach. Sanders is clearly in very good shape in New Hampshire. Things could be much more volatile on the Republican side, so we’ll eagerly await new polls and endorsements.
Dear readers, we’re still waiting for the final few precincts, but the Democratic race in Iowa seems unlikely to be called tonight. With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton’s up 49.9 percent to 49.6.
Harry Enten
There’s been some talk about coin tosses going against Sanders to settle who would get a delegate in the case of a tie. These ties are not for statewide delegate equivalents. They are for county delegates. Those are different, and not nearly as big a deal.
https://twitter.com/desmoinesdem/status/694394202604503041
Clare Malone
One of the things that the talking heads are trying to figure out is why Clinton decided to declare victory, if in fact, that’s what she did, since her victory speech never actually said she won (which is very lawyerly of her!). It’s looking like this is still going to be a long night counting these votes on the Democratic side — there were a couple of counting errors that needed to be corrected, apparently.
Was Clinton’s declaration of victory (if it happened) strategic, a way to get ahead of the narrative? Was it a screw-up on the inside of the campaign — did the Clinton camp think they were up by more? Chuck Todd said — rather incredulously — “I just don’t understand why the Clinton campaign decided to do what they did. … They have now made it that much worse if they lose or if it’s a tie.”
Another reason why whoever is declared the “winner” of tonight’s Democratic caucuses is as much a matter of spin as anything else: Iowa doesn’t report votes, but instead something called “state delegate equivalents.” It’s possible that more people caucused for Sanders tonight but that Clinton will win more state delegate equivalents because her vote was distributed more evenly. Then again, Clinton did lead in the Iowa entrance polls. Without an actual vote count from Iowa, we’ll never know.
Cruz bragged that his average donation was $67. Sanders says his was $27. Will this — from both sides — be the rhetoric of 2016?
Harry Enten
I want to point out that Clinton continues to hold a 0.4 percentage point lead — and which county has the most votes out? It’s still Polk. Sanders hasn’t led statewide this entire night, and the state delegate equivalent percentage difference between the two really hasn’t shifted in a while.
Farai Chideya
It’s ironic that Obama has been called a socialist so often in casual political discourse but that Sanders — a self-proclaimed socialist — has done well (regardless of whether he wins) in tonight’s caucuses. That does not speak to whether he can win, or will have the opportunity to compete in, a general election. But in a two-party system, Sanders spent years in the Senate as an independent, already breaking format with American politics. Now a Democrat again, Sanders seems prepared to raise enough funds and get enough support to last to the convention at the very least, if he so chooses. And that, too, may lead to platform-issue horse-trading on the floor of the Democratic convention, even if Sanders is not the party’s nominee.
Harry Enten
Here are two tweets from Joe Lenski of Edison Research:
.@ElectProject there was a reporting error in Dallas County – too many state delegates were being reported and that has now been corrected.
So it turns out that there can be recounts of sorts in even Democratic caucuses.
Nate Silver
An interesting strategic consideration for Ted Cruz (inspired by Ed Morrissey’s tweet): How much effort does he want to spend to win New Hampshire? And if he doesn’t expect to win himself, who’s he going to be rooting for? If Marco Rubio surged to victory in the Granite State, that might be pretty bad for Cruz, as the GOP campaign would begin to resemble a fairly conventional nomination race in which Cruz plays the role of a runner-up like Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee. A Trump win, conversely, would leave the “establishment lane” divided but also restore momentum to Trump heading into a set of Southern states that Cruz would hope to win.
Clinton’s margin is back down to 0.2 percentage points, but still plenty of Polk County still out.
David Wasserman
Remarkably, it looks like Rubio may end up winning five of Iowa’s 10 largest counties, and ZERO of Iowa’s other 89 counties. Yet this urban coalition may be his blueprint for victory nationally.
Nate Silver
The fact that there are three fascinating stories coming out on the Republican side tonight — Cruz winning, Rubio rising and Trump failing — is a little bit of a blessing for Hillary Clinton. Even on MSNBC, with its Democratic-leaning viewership, the Republican race has been the lead story for most of the night, instead of how close Bernie Sanders has kept pace with her.
Clare Malone
Ted Cruz started his victory speech with a loooooong hug for his wife, Heidi, who’s been a tireless surrogate for Cruz and whose employer, Goldman Sachs, gave the couple a controversial campaign loan that caused more than a little bit of a stir these past couple of weeks. “Tonight is a victory for the grassroots,” Cruz said, a nod to the extensive ground operation that I wrote about a few weeks ago. “The next president of the United States will not be chosen by the media, will not be chosen by the Washington establishment, will not be chosen by the lobbyists but will be chosen by the most incredibly powerful force where all of our sovereign power resides … the people.”
David Wasserman
Heads up, New Hampshire residents … you will be receiving your VOTER VIOLATION in the mail shortly.
I’ll defend Ann Selzer here, Clare! Her poll had Trump leading Cruz by 5 points, and it looks like Cruz will win by 3 points instead. That’s an 8-point error. Which sounds really bad, until you consider that polling primaries and caucuses is really tough. The average error in a primary or caucus poll is 8 points, in fact. Plus, it looks like there was some late-breaking movement toward Rubio and Cruz that her poll wasn’t in the field late enough to pick up. It won’t be a poll she brags about, and perhaps it’s an argument for keeping a tracking poll in the field until the very last day of campaigning. But all of this is fairly par for the course.
Harry Enten
Latest: 92 percent of precincts in and Clinton lead has expanded to 0.85 or so percentage points.
Hayley Munguia
Reminder that as the results are so close in the Democratic race tonight, the vote count is preliminary! Everything we’re seeing tonight is being reported from the Microsoft app, but the counts are being recorded on old-fashioned paper forms as well (to account for possible issues like the aforementioned precinct chair’s phone that died), and it’ll be a few days before we get the official results from those.
Aaron Bycoffe
Farai Chideya
Judging from the people commenting on our live blog, Sanders supporters are waiting with bated breath for the final results of this Democratic caucus nail-biter. Clinton supporters are much quieter. That doesn’t speak to vote totals or, certainly, to national support. But Clinton has been running since the start of the race as the person-to-beat. She’s declared victory tonight, victory that has yet to formally materialize with 91 percent of precincts reporting. Regardless of who wins the Democratic caucuses, Clinton will still be the establishment candidate, and the better-funded candidate. But her team did not seem to anticipate such a vigorous challenge. Remember, in April of last year a Bloomberg poll showed that 72 percent of Democrats thought Clinton needed a strong challenger or she would be unprepared for the general election.
Julia Azari
In the likely event that Clinton and Sanders supporters both claim victory, this will have been the most post-modern set of election interpretations I have ever seen. And I’ve spent a lot of time studying how different candidates have spun electoral “mandates.”
Clare Malone
One thing to note here now that the GOP side of things has been called is that The Des Moines Register poll — considered the Gold Standard — was wrong about the Trump win. Cruz has emerged from the night victorious, with 27.7 percent of the vote as of the current count; Trump finished second, with 24.4 percent, again, as of right now; the Register had Trump in first place with 28 percent and Cruz in second with 23 percent.
Harry Enten
Clinton just jumped up (well, a little): Clinton 50.1 percent to 49.3 percent for Sanders
Nate Silver
I’d have to think a lot more about exactly what percentages I’d lay on the Republican nomination candidates right now. But it’s not obvious to me why Donald Trump has better odds than Ted Cruz at the prediction market Betfair after Cruz just won the Iowa caucuses.
David Wasserman
Let’s check in on something that we haven’t touched on in a bit: GOP delegate math. If current results hold up, Cruz will win 8 delegates, Trump and Rubio 7 delegates each. By our estimates, Cruz and Trump needed 12 to be “on track” for the nomination, and Rubio needed 10. Granted, Iowa accounts for just 1.2 percent of all delegates to the GOP convention. However, so far Rubio is 70 percent on track, Cruz is 67 percent on track, and Trump is only 58 percent on track.
Julia Azari
Dave, I have no idea what the ultimate takeaway will be, but I am not ready to put Trump hysteria behind me. Nearly a third of the caucus votes went to a candidate who came out of nowhere, talked about building a wall on the Mexican border (on a more sedate day), and derailed most of the debates. He beat a lot of more qualified candidates. I don’t think the second place finish makes this go away.
Harry Enten
Clinton is holding on barely here … 90 percent of precincts in and Clinton up 49.9 percent to 49.5 percent.
Harry Enten
I think the polls did fairly well on the Democratic side, but on the Republican side there are questions to be answered. I will say that the final polls that came out from Emerson College and Opinion Savvy had Cruz right on Trump’s tail and Rubio rising. I’d also note the polls were no worse this year than in the 2012 campaign for the Iowa caucuses on the Republican side.
David Wasserman
What if the ultimate takeaway from the 2016 GOP primaries isn’t the spread of Trump hysteria but the unexciting decline of traditional polling?
Micah Cohen
From our colleague Ryan Struyk of ABC News:
Counties with 100k+ registered Democrats:
Polk County – 85 percent reporting – Clinton 54, Sanders 46 so far.
50-100k registered Democrats:
Linn County – 86 percent reporting – Sanders 53, Clinton 48 so far.
25-50k registered Democrats:
Scott County – 88 percent reporting – Sanders 51, Clinton 49 so far.
Blackhawk Country – 85 percent reporting – Sanders 53, Clinton 47 so far.
Dubuque County – 80 percent reporting – Clinton 53, Sanders 46 so far.
Woodbury County – 81 percent reporting – Sanders 53, Clinton 46 so far.
Marshall County – 89 percent reporting – Sanders 52, Clinton 48 so far.
Story County – 86 percent reporting – Sanders 58, Clinton 42 so far.
Warren County – 83 percent reporting – Clinton 56, Sanders 44 so far.
Clare Malone
Well, Trump was … surprisingly gracious in his concession speech. Said thanks to Iowa, gave a shout-out to his family and new friend Mike Huckabee, and said it was now on to New Hampshire. I’m sure that the fire and brimstone will be back tomorrow, but it was a pretty sedate scene over there, and as Brian Williams noted on MSNBC, his shortest probably ever. Trump’s sayonara to Iowa? He told them he might buy a farm there. Likely a yuge one. (Sorry, guys — had to.)
Two of the three top GOP candidates in the Iowa caucuses are Latinos, a landmark that stands out even more considering some of Trump’s rhetoric on Mexico. In 2012, Latino voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney 71 percent to 27 percent. There is definitely room for the GOP to expand its messaging to the Latino communities — plural, as there are many of different ethnicities and political persuasions. Cuban-Americans like Marco Rubio have been one of the more GOP-leaning Latino demographics.
David Wasserman
Reality check: A tie in Iowa is actually a win for Clinton. According to our targets at the Cook Political Report, Bernie Sanders would have needed to win twice as many delegates as Clinton in Iowa to be “on track” for the nomination. He’s nowhere near that tonight.
Harry Enten
I’m reminded of 2004 in Ohio. It was huge turnout that was supposed to help John Kerry, but there was big turnout and George W. Bush won. Tonight, big turnout was supposed to help Trump, but it was Cruz who won.
Aaron Bycoffe
Nate Silver
One thing we’ll be thinking about over the next several days is how much Donald Trump’s inferior ground game harmed him tonight in Iowa.
An argument against the ground game having been the sole cause of his defeat: Republican turnout tonight now projects to be around 180,000, well ahead of 2012’s total of around 120,000 voters and somewhat ahead of where most political watchers expected it to be. Given how poorly Trump performed among the late-deciders in tonight’s entrance poll, it’s possible he had a different problem: trouble expanding his coalition beyond his intense but relatively narrow base of support.
David Wasserman
If Rubio has any chance of overtaking Trump for second place in the remaining 15 percent of precincts, he’s going to have to clean up in Linn (Cedar Rapids) and Dubuque. However, I think it’s probable Trump will hold onto second at this point. He’s still got some of Pottawattamie County (Council Bluffs) left, where he leads Rubio 34 percent to 18 percent so far.
David Wasserman
To my eye, the outstanding precincts on the Democratic side slightly favor Hillary Clinton. Statewide, only 13 percent of precincts are left outstanding. But 21 percent of precincts are outstanding in Clinton’s best large county, Polk, and 23 percent of precincts remain to be counted in Dubuque, her other best large county. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has 23 percent of Story County (Ames), but that’s smaller. All but 7 percent of Johnson County (Iowa City) is in.
