A couple of people have casually asked me about my predictions for Iowa tonight and I’ve come to firm and unwavering conclusion: I’m not making any predictions.
I can reasonably make a case for any of the top four winning, the polls from the last two weeks are all over the place, and the process is dependent on a variety of unpredictable variables. (If you want to read a bunch of educated guesses, Daily Kos has a post up for predictions where you, too, can play along.)
For what it’s worth, the latest polls, as of this morning…
Kerry — 25%
Dean — 22%
Edwards — 21%
Gephardt — 18%
The Iowa Poll says (from yesterday’s Des Moines Register):
Kerry — 26%
Edwards — 23%
Dean — 20%
Gephardt — 18%
If you’re online tonight and can’t stand the anticipation, rumor has it that Caucus2004.org will have the most comprehensive, up-to-date data available, including real-time results as they’re released.
Putting aside the obvious anticipation in knowing who’s won the caucuses, there was a fantastic report in Slate late last week explaining how the complicated Iowa caucuses actually work. It’s the kind of story that makes you think Howard Dean may have been right the first time when he criticized the system in 2000 (before changing his mind two weeks ago).
Slate’s William Saletan and Matt Schiller compared Iowa’s caucus system to the Florida recount debacle and the Electoral College, concluding that Iowa is slightly more convoluted than either.
You meet in a room with all the other registered Democrats in your precinct who decide to show up. It can take hours. First you have to choose local party officers and sit through a lot of talk about party activities. Then the caucus chair asks everybody to express their preferences among the presidential candidates. She tells the Howard Dean people to stand in this corner, the Dick Gephardt people in that corner, the John Kerry people in the other corner, etc. There’s also a corner for “uncommitted.” You go to your corner. The chair counts how many people are in each group. That’s the raw vote.
If you’re in the Gephardt corner, you can probably stay there. But if you’re in the Dennis Kucinich corner, look out. The party has a “viability” rule: If your group doesn’t add up to a sufficient percentage of the total vote in the room — at least 15 percent, but it can go higher, depending on various factors — the chair will declare your group nonviable. Now you have to choose which of the viable candidates you prefer as a second choice. You go stand in that corner. Other Kucinich supporters (and Wes Clark supporters, and supporters of any other nonviable candidate) go to other corners, depending on whom they prefer. The chair counts again. That’s the realigned vote.
Next the chair translates this vote count into a delegate count. Every viable group gets at least one delegate. The bigger your group, the more delegates you can earn. But there are two catches. First, the number of delegates to be distributed in the room depends on how many Democrats voted in your precinct in the most recent gubernatorial and presidential elections. If you’re new in town, and the turnout in your precinct was lousy four years ago, your vote effectively counts less than it would have if you’d moved to a high-turnout precinct. Second, if your group is bigger than another group in the room, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll get more delegates. Let’s say the chair has six delegates to distribute, and there are four viable groups. That leaves two extra delegates, which will probably go to the two biggest groups. If you’re in the third-biggest group, and you’ve got more people than the fourth group does, tough luck. You each get a delegate, and that’s that.
The precinct chair phones the county Democratic Party and reports how many county delegates have been awarded to each candidate or to “uncommitted” in your precinct. The chair also calculates how many state delegates (the über-delegates who will be chosen by the county delegates) each candidate would probably get based on his number of county delegates. That’s the delegate count.
On caucus night, the Iowa Democratic Party will release the delegate count. Here’s when the party will release the raw vote count and the realigned vote count: Never. The party won’t compile or even record them, except as a temporary step in most precincts so that the caucus chair can determine how many delegates each candidate gets. The party doesn’t want raw votes compiled and released, because it wants the caucuses to be a collaborative activity, not a tally of individual preferences. That’s all well and good, if you like the party’s communitarian version of democracy. But if you want to know how many voters stood up for John Edwards, you’re out of luck.
Confused yet? If so, you probably understand the Iowa caucus system perfectly.