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

Sun Feb 9 09:53:38 PST 2020

Iowa, oh, Iowa. Let’s keep some things in mind:

The turnout (caucus participation) was about 10%. That means the turnout was predominately the activist base of the party. The predicted rush of new voters, fostered by the Sanders campaign and echoed by the media, did not develop. There was a slight increase in younger voters, particularly when the caucus was held on a college campus. 

A “winner” with 30% of the votes will have just 3% of the total registration. 

The activist base of the Democratic Party here as elsewhere leans heavily in the direction of candidates who are, in this order, the most “progressive”, of color, LGBT, women. Some combination of these is even better. At the bottom of the list, and totally unacceptable, are white men. 

The big loser may have been Sanders. His percentage was half what it was in 2016. Yes, there were more candidates sharing the voting pool. But half of Sanders’ voters left him for other Democrats. We’ll still hear some of his supporters threatening to sit out November if he isn’t the nominee. But Iowa may have proved they are inconsequential in numbers. 

Larry

From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> On Behalf Of Rob Richie
Sent: Sunday, 9 February 2020 8:36 AM
To: Levitt, Justin <justin.levitt at lls.edu>
Cc: Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: Re: [EL] Finding a "winner" out of the Iowa caucuses

(My apologies, but my keyboard sometimes gets away ahead of me in hitting "send" to email . I'll finish this email below where that happened earlier.... There were a couple annoying missing elements to it!   - Rob)

On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 10:28 AM Rob Richie <rr at fairvote.org <mailto:rr at fairvote.org> > wrote:

Adding to this point, "winning" with well under 30% can more a product of dumb luck of votes happen to be split than realtive performance. Even with Iowa having a horse-and-buggy form of ranked choice voting that makes more votes count for delegates, it doesn't enable a true "instant runoff" where we would have seen who would have won head-to-head in a contest between Buttigieg and Sanders.

The media does tend to treat these as winner take all contests, but of course they're not. This year is going to be fascinating, as the Bloomberg campaign has called the 'bluff"  of the early states being determinative and instead  saying, "Look, nearly all the  actual delegates are allocated in the contests after the first four in February, so that's where we're going to focus." His campaign will have far more money than any other campaign (with the possible exception of Steyer) and is spending heavily on field as well as TV, so we will see what it means, especially if more than two of the current frontrunners keep running after South Carolina.

There's a lot of timely reform conversation going on that I suspect will come with real changes before the 2024 nomination process. Last weekend, I presented on building ranked choice voting into the presidential nomination process at the excellent Shambaugh conference  <https://clas.uiowa.edu/polisci/Shambaugh-2020Caucus> organized by Caroline Tolbert of the University of Iowa. Nearly all the national parties now use RCV to pick their leaders in Canada and the United Kingdom, and the idea is getting more support here. A few associated links:

*  Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America calls for using ranked choice voting in winner-take-all primaries <https://crooked.com/articles/iowa-fix-broken-primary/> 

* This Chicago Tribune oped <https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-iowa-new-hampshire-primaries-fair-20200131-kyrpgilryzdptak53fjyr65e6i-story.html>  of mine as widely picked up on a comprehensive reform of the nomination process

*  I was on Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien <https://matteroffact.tv/is-it-time-to-get-rid-of-the-electoral-college/>  this weekend  on The Young Turks <https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=AZgHo8U_u6M&feature=emb_logo>  on Thursday.

Rob

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 3:43 PM Levitt, Justin <justin.levitt at lls.edu <mailto:justin.levitt at lls.edu> > wrote:

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 <mailto:atkeson at unm.edu> > 
Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2020 12:17 PM
To: Levitt, Justin <justin.levitt at lls.edu <mailto:justin.levitt at lls.edu> >
Cc: Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu <mailto:rhasen at law.uci.edu> >; Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu <mailto: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

 <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=109388> AP Unable to Call Winner in Iowa Democratic Caucus Due to Closeness and “Irregularities”

Posted on  <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=109388> February 6, 2020 3:51 pm by  <https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3> Rick Hasen

 <https://apnews.com/4f9044fe46f551d397d48dd8ca3d58db?utm_medium=AP_Politics&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter> Wow, 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  <https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1> Uncategorized

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rob Richie
President and CEO, FairVote   
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 240
Takoma Park, MD 20912
rr at fairvote.org <mailto:rr at fairvote.org>   (301) 270-4616  http://www.fairvote.org
FairVote Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/FairVoteReform>    FairVote Twitter <https://twitter.com/fairvote>     <https://twitter.com/rob_richie> My Twitter

Thank you for considering a donation <http://www.fairvote.org/donate> . Enjoy our video on ranked choice voting <https://youtu.be/CIz_nzP-W_c> !

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