Consider the Republican caucuses , which historically have combined a nonbinding secret preference vote along with the delegate-selection process. In , state GOP officials first declared Mitt Romney the winner of the preference vote by eight votes, then two weeks later said Rick Santorum had won by 34 votes. Like so much else with the caucuses, that depends on how you look at it.
Since , there have been 10 contested Democratic caucuses ; in six of them, including the four most recent, the declared caucus winner ultimately was nominated. On the Republican side, there have been eight contested caucuses in that span, but in only three cases was the caucus winner ultimately the nominee.
The exceptions were Bill Clinton, who placed fourth in , and John McCain, who came in fourth in Tom Harkin was the overwhelming caucus favorite, so the other Democratic contenders mostly ignored the state.
And McCain was just votes behind third-place finisher Fred Thompson. Not as many as used to. This year, besides Iowa, only two other states Nevada and Wyoming and four U. In , the national Democratic Party adopted a package of changes to its nominating process, including a rule encouraging state parties to use government-run primaries whenever possible. Caucuses have been on the decline for a long time. On the Democratic side in , 33 states and territories used them to pick convention delegates, and, as late as , 32 still did.
By , however, only 14 states and four territories were still using them. As a side note, the Republican and Democratic parties in each state can, and often have, choose different methods to select their convention delegates, with one party holding a primary and the other a caucus.
That changed after the national Democratic Party revamped its nominating process in the wake of its chaotic convention. As a consequence of those changes, the Iowa party moved its precinct caucuses — which typically had been held in late March or early April — to Jan.
In , George McGovern campaigned in Iowa to raise his profile ahead of the New Hampshire primary; even though McGovern came in third in Iowa, he ultimately won the nomination. In , the Republican and Democratic parties agreed to hold their caucuses on the same day, and both attracted substantial attention from candidates and the media.
Since then, the state has zealously defended its first-in-the-nation status. The Democratic Party in Iowa will also hold a number of "satellite" caucuses 60 in state, 24 out of state and three international — in Tbilisi, Georgia; Glasgow, Scotland; and Paris, France for those who are unable to travel to a caucus location. There are 41 pledged delegates up for grabs in the Democratic race, plus an additional eight unpledged superdelegates from Iowa. Whenever we refer to delegates for the Feb.
After county conventions are congressional district and state conventions, at which the real national convention delegates are selected. Democrats move around the caucus site — for example, supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden will gather in one corner and backers of Sens. At most Democratic caucus locations, a candidate must get support from at least 15 percent of attendees to achieve viability. If that threshold isn't met, a candidate's supporters must realign to a different viable candidate or join with other nonviable groups to form a viable preference group.
One of those preference groups could be "uncommitted. So get out your calculators! In a change from past Democratic caucuses, the party will release three sets of results: "the first expression of preference" before the realignment, the "final expression of preference" after realignment and state delegate equivalents the number used to determine the "winner" in past results. The final expression number — rather than the first expression — is used to determine who gets delegates and who doesn't.
Another change: Only members of nonviable groups will be allowed to realign. In the past, candidates who had initially hit 15 percent could lose supporters in the realignment. But for this cycle, the initial 15 percent support gets locked in.
Unlike the Democrats, Republicans select their candidate via a simple secret ballot. Iowa Democrats, though, have argued that a caucus should look and feel different from a primary.
They want public debate and deliberation. They want attendees to have the opportunity to change their minds. Fair enough. Yet Iowa Democrats also want influence over the national nominating process. They want to produce a clear result for the media and political world to make hay over. Again, fair enough. These criticisms came to a head after the close Clinton-Sanders contest in So when reports of miscounted results spread on social media and in the press many from Sanders supporters , there was no paper trail that could prove or disprove their claims.
The first step after some speeches and discussion is for attendees in the room to divide up, moving to sit or stand with others who support the same candidate. This would be the pre-realignment vote total for this precinct, and this result would be recorded and reported on the preference cards.
There is no secret ballot. The number that matters next is the viability threshold — which is 15 percent in most precincts but is higher in some precincts that have three or fewer delegates at stake. So here, those initial Sanders, Biden, Warren, and Buttigieg supporters are all locked in. However, Klobuchar has fallen short, with only 14 out of supporters. So her supporters are now free to switch to support any of the viable candidates or none of them, if they prefer.
The new vote total would be:. This would also be recorded and reported. As you can see, it moved Biden from second place to first. So to get the statewide totals for both the pre-alignment vote and the final vote, you just add up those numbers from each individual caucus site. Now, when delegates come in is when it gets really confusing. It will be familiar to you from previous primaries that the overall vote result in a state contest can differ somewhat from its delegate results.
But the Iowa caucuses complicate things further because there are three different sets of delegates involved. So, backing up: Remember that the key metric on caucus night that Iowa Democrats have tracked in years past is called state delegate equivalents.
In practice, this is a transformation of the precinct caucus night results — how many county convention delegates each candidate gets — to an estimate of how many state convention delegates that corresponds to. How does that translate to delegate results? Well, party officials consult a master delegate apportionment list from Iowa Democrats to calculate.
Those, then, are the state delegate equivalent results for this precinct. So yes, the caucus-goers at this individual site will be fighting for tiny pieces of a fraction of a state delegate. Simple, right? The funny or perhaps maddening aspect to all this is that the Iowa caucus results barely matter to the true way Democrats choose their nominee: national convention delegates.
0コメント