If Nate Silver is correct and Joe Biden wins the Iowa caucuses, what will it mean? According to his prognostications, Biden is most likely to be awarded 13 out of a possible 41 delegates, or less than one-third. I’ve written before that the Iowa caucuses are a fraud and should be doomed, and that’s primarily because the “winner” is not assured of getting any delegates at all. The selection of delegates takes place later in the process and is not really even loosely connected to the outcome of the caucus night results. Here’s a reminder of the outcome of the 2012 Republican caucuses in Iowa:
Thus, you can justifiably say that Santorum won Iowa because he had the most votes in the certified count, or that Romney won because he [was the announced winner and] benefited the most from the result, or that Ron Paul won because he actually got almost all the delegates, or that no one won because the party refused to declare a winner.
As I said at the time, the Iowa caucuses are utterly unimportant in themselves, but very important “through how they affect voting in other states.” That’s because the announced winner in Iowa usually gets a big boost in the contests that come immediately thereafter. But it’s all media hype and perception with no math to support it.
Even in Silver’s predictions, Biden actually only has a 34 percent chance of winning the most votes on caucus night. That’s better than the numbers for Sanders (27 percent), Buttigieg or Warren, however. In the projection, Biden averages only 27 percent of the vote, although that’s good enough for a plurality. Yet winning a little more than a quarter of the vote gets him a little less than a third of delegates, and (as I’ve said) none of the those delegates are remotely locked in stone.
In any case, even if they delegates from Iowa were locked in stone, winning a third of them really doesn’t signify any significant mathematical advantage. The nominee needs an absolute majority to win on the first ballot at the convention, and it’s not much help to win a tiny plurality in a relatively small state. For the presumed frontrunner, it’s actually the opposite of progress towards their goal.
It’s valid to criticize the process for giving Iowa too much influence when it isn’t demographically representative of the party or the country, but it’s even more egregious to treat its results as if they matter. They only matter because people falsely believe they matter, which sums up nicely why our whole system is dysfunctional.
What’s significant about Iowa is that it’s the first time voters actually get to weigh in on what’s already been a year long campaign. Which means Iowa voters get to send a signal to voters in the rest of the country. If Illinois (or California, or Alabama, or Montana) went first, then voters in the other 49 states would be reacting to whatever signal (however muddled) that state’s voters sent out.
Arguably the most important signal sent by Iowa Democratic caucus-goers in 2008 was that White people would vote for the Black guy. That, in turn, meant it was safe for Black voters in other states to vote for Obama. At least among the pool of African-American voters I knew, that had a huge impact, with all sorts of Clinton-leaning folks switching to Obama by the time our state voted.
As things are lined up right now, it looks like Biden will “win” Iowa thereby cementing him as the front-runner and making him extremely difficult to defeat. (As Jonathan Bernstein has been saying, a slightly stronger version of Mondale in 1984.)
What I wonder is if Warren “won” Iowa, there’d be an effect similar to Obama in 2008 where a critical mass of voters in later states would “read” that signal from Iowa as “it’s okay to vote for the woman”. (I doubt it, but it’s a possibility.)
Sanders and Buttigieg look stronger in Iowa at the moment than Warren. And I don’t really buy that Biden is the favorite there. Even with Silver, he’s the favorite only in a plurality sense. He gives him a 34% chance of winning there.
Yeah, it’s just that I don’t see key constituency flipping if Sanders or Buttigieg “wins” Iowa and Biden “loses”.
Best case for Sanders is he gets most of Warren’s supporters…which still leaves him with too small a base within the party. And Buttigieg v. Biden leaves Biden with a firewall of African-American supporters all across the South and into the mid-Atlantic states.
P. S. Lots of talk about Biden as the “establishment” candidate, and reasonably so. But I think an underdiscussed factor is that he’s the “Obama” candidate, having served as a loyal and enthusiastic VP to the most popular politician in the Democratic party in this generation.
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