The winner of the Iowa caucuses is set to become more subjective through new counting procedures, offering a lifeline to candidates who would ordinarily be forced to withdraw from the first Democratic contest after a mediocre showing.
The Iowa Democratic Party will, for the first time, report the raw vote counts each candidate receives during the first and final rounds of voting in the Feb. 3 first-in-the-nation caucuses. That’s in addition to the state delegate equivalent, which determines how many of Iowa’s 41 pledged national delegates are awarded to a candidate, and the national delegate totals. The person with the most state delegate equivalents wins the Iowa caucuses because they end up with the most national delegates.
In the Democratic primary system, candidates must meet a 15% vote threshold to earn pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, who decide the Democratic presidential nominee. For the Iowa caucuses, that means candidates who do not receive 15% support on the first round of voter preferences are eliminated, and voting moves to another round, where those who supported candidates with less than 15% move to support one of the other candidates.
The additional counting method gives candidates close to or not quite at the delegate threshold, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts and Sen. Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota, who are at 16% and 7%, respectively, in the RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls, fuel to argue that they have momentum to continue in primary contests in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and beyond even if they do not meet the 15% delegate allocation threshold.
The new data points could also reveal that the candidate who wins the most Iowa delegates may not be the same as the candidates who win the most raw votes, due to a complicated state delegate allocation process akin to the national Electoral College system.
That could make the ultimate “winner” of the Iowa caucuses up for debate.
With former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in a close race at the top, polling at 20.7%, 20.3%, and 18.7%, respectively, in the RealClearPolitics average, respectively, it is possible that one candidate wins more delegates allocated in a district-by-district basis, but another earns more raw votes statewide.
A similar situation happened in the 2008 Nevada Democratic caucuses. Hillary Clinton won 50.8% of county delegates, but then-Sen. Barack Obama won 13 DNC delegates to Clinton’s 12, causing debate over who won the state.
In the past, the Democratic party only reported the total state delegate equivalents and national delegate totals rather than vote counts expressed by each individual who attended the caucuses, muddling insight into preferences of individuals in the state overall.
In 2016, for instance, Clinton won 701 Iowa state delegate equivalents: 49.9% of the total. Sanders won 697, amounting to 49.6%, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley won 8, or 0.6%. Clinton ended up with 23 pledged Iowa delegates to the DNC convention, Sanders had 21, and O’Malley had 0. Some delegate allocations in 2016 were decided by a coin flip after ties between Clinton and Sanders, enraging some of Sanders’s base.
Clinton’s razor-thin win in 2016 enraged Sanders supporters, who argued that the process was not sufficiently transparent, sparking the new rule to reveal raw vote totals.
The new reporting rules also serve to downplay the importance of the Iowa caucuses if raw vote totals muddle the apparent winner.
Concerns that the state’s overwhelmingly white voter base does not reflect the party’s demographic diversity nationwide caused presidential-drop-out-turned-Warren-supporter Julian Castro and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to support ending Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status.
Bloomberg, who is not competing in Iowa, and Biden have also turned their focus to winning in Mar. 3 “Super Tuesday” states and beyond, an indication that Iowa may not be the kingmaker it was in the past.
[Opinion: Nobody knows what will happen in Iowa. Not even the polls]
