[EL] Finding a "winner" out of the Iowa caucuses

Sat Feb 8 12:43:08 PST 2020

I can see the point when it comes to naming a single occupant of a particular office.  If one person gets the most overall votes and somebody else is given the office, that’s fruit for a discussion about whether the system is operating as we want.

(Though there’s another big caveat: strategies change based on the rules of the contest, and I wouldn’t expect the person who wins the most votes when that’s not the metric for awarding the office to necessarily be the person who wins the most votes when it is.  In Super Bowl 52, the Patriots had 613 total yards while the Eagles had 538.  The Eagles ended up with more points, and won.  If it were clear from the outset that the team with the most yards would have won, I don’t know that either team would have played the same game, and I don’t know that the Patriots would have ended up with more yards.  In Iowa, if the popular vote mattered more than the delegate apportionment, I don’t know that the candidates would have run the same campaigns or used the same organizing strategies.)

But my point is a little different.  It appears that the popular vote and delegate count were both quite close for Buttigieg and Sanders.  And we can have plentiful discussions about whether the system for awarding the delegates makes sense.   But we’re not choosing the nominee based on the Iowa caucuses, and the difference between the delegates awarded to Buttigieg or Sanders in Iowa (or any lingering uncertainty over the exact number awarded to each) is exceedingly unlikely to affect the outcome of the Democratic nomination by the time we get to July.  It seems there are a lot of people exercised about who “won” Iowa – and in particular, I was reacting to the story about the AP’s inability to “call” the race.  And I guess I’m asking whether this problem is an actual problem or a problem of our own making because we need rigid winner/loser narratives and misunderstand what the Iowa caucuses are designed to do.

To return to the football metaphor, I think the rough equivalent may be trying to assess who “won” the first six minutes of the Super Bowl.  I can fully understand the effort put into deciding the accuracy of ruling on every incremental opportunity to accrue points, and even in debating the individual rules deciding when points can be accrued and under what conditions.  But asking who “won” the first six minutes seems like a question that’s entirely beside the point of the Super Bowl itself, and only relevant to a prop bet that might itself be destructive if allowed to become more important in the popular mindset than the actual rules for the contest.

Justin

From: Lonna Atkeson <atkeson at unm.edu>
Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2020 12:17 PM
To: Levitt, Justin <justin.levitt at lls.edu>
Cc: Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu>; Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: Re: [EL] Finding a "winner" out of the Iowa caucuses

This is about small d democracy—if who wins in that scenario is different from who wins the delegates then the system is unfair/rigged.

This isn’t about the rules of the process per se, it’s about the fairness of those rules. This is, in part, why Sanders folks insisted on this info after 2016.

What is the distortion is an interesting and relevant question.   Who got the most votes and whether it is fair seems particularly relevant to Democrats  who are advocating the elimination of the electoral college and pushing for more democracy.
Lonna
On Feb 7, 2020, at 4:55 PM, Levitt, Justin <justin.levitt at lls.edu<mailto:justin.levitt at lls.edu>> wrote:

  UNM-IT Warning: This message was sent from outside of the LoboMail system. Do not click on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. (2.3)
The formula for awarding delegates in the Iowa caucus is unquestionably complex (and I’m no fan, for that and other reasons), but it’s my understanding that that process turns on proportional levels of support precinct by precinct, and later county by county, but not statewide.  If I’m mistaken about that, I’d welcome the correction.  But if it’s true that delegates are awarded based on local results, is there any point to branding a statewide “winner” of the Iowa caucuses beyond the need to fill in the blanks on an artificial narrative?

Put differently: assume that Buttigieg won either 12 or 13 delegates to the national convention, and Sanders won either 12 or 13 delegates to the national convention, and that we eventually know for sure whether the answer for each candidate is 12 or 13.  Real question: why does it matter whether the AP is able to tell us who “won,” beyond widespread public misunderstanding of the significance of what it means to “win” in this context?  Imagine it was a precise tie, and each candidate got the same number of delegates, so that neither “won.”  I understand full well why that matters in the perceptions horserace … but the lack of a “winner” would have zero significance in terms of progress toward picking a nominee.  Is the inability to “call” a winner the problem, or is it our need to have a clearly branded “winner”?

Justin

AP Unable to Call Winner in Iowa Democratic Caucus Due to Closeness and “Irregularities”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=109388>
Posted on February 6, 2020 3:51 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=109388> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Wow<https://apnews.com/4f9044fe46f551d397d48dd8ca3d58db?utm_medium=AP_Politics&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter>, it’s this bad:

“The Associated Press calls a race when there is a clear indication of a winner. Because of a tight margin between former Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders and the irregularities in this year’s caucus process, it is not possible to determine a winner at this point,” said Sally Buzbee, AP’s senior vice president and executive editor.
Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

_______________________________________________
Law-election mailing list
Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu>
https://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20200208/9adbd515/attachment.html>