Did Hillary Clinton actually win more votes than Bernie Sanders in Iowa? It’s an interesting question, because in the last 40 years only one candidate has won the Democratic nomination for president without carrying either Iowa or New Hampshire. The rule-proving exception was Bill Clinton in 1992, when he and other Democrats didn’t compete with Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin in the latter’s home-state caucuses. And in New Hampshire, Clinton claimed a sort of victory by proclaiming himself “the comeback kid” for finishing second to Paul Tsongas, the diffident senator from Lowell, Mass., just a few miles south of the New Hampshire line, who didn’t make much of a victory speech.
This year may be another exception. As this is written, everyone expects Sanders to win in New Hampshire (Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com) and everyone believes that Clinton won the Iowa caucuses. But we don’t know if she actually got more votes there than Sanders. Iowa Democrats score their caucuses by state convention delegate equivalents and on that basis, Clinton won with 49.83 percent to Sanders’s 49.63 percent.
But it’s entirely possible, indeed likely, that many more Sanders supporters showed up in university-dominated counties than Clinton supporters showed up in blue-collar counties. Sanders carried 59.50 percent of the state convention delegate equivalents in Johnson County (Iowa City, University of Iowa), the most pro-Obama county in the state in November 2008 and 2012, and 59.51 percent in Story County (Ames, Iowa State University).
But these counties may well have had more voters per state convention delegate equivalents than blue-collar counties like Jasper County (Newton, old Maytag factory), which Clinton carried with 51.50 percent, or Dubuque County (Dubuque, heavy German-Catholic population), which she carried with 52.19 percent. So if you counted actual people voting, the likelihood given the tiny Clinton plurality in state convention delegate equivalents is that Sanders brought out more voters than Clinton.
The state Democratic party, whose chairman is a strong Clinton backer, won’t say. It has said that total turnout for the caucuses was 171,000 (down 22 percent from the last contested caucuses in 2008), and so presumably it knows how many voted for each candidate. But it won’t say.
Almost everyone figures Clinton will be the Democratic nominee this year. If so, she may join her husband as the only Democratic nominee over the last 40 years who didn’t win Iowa or New Hampshire—if the Iowa Democratic party decides to tell the truth. It’s something to keep in mind as the New Hampshire results come in tonight.
